ESL announces a return for ESL One Hamburg in October

ESL is bringing ESL One Hamburg, Europe’s biggest Dota 2 event, back for a second year.

ESL One Hamburg will be running from October 26th – 28th, After last year’s inaugural event, this iteration will be growing substantially to a six day event, doubling the amount of participating teams from eight to 16.

The event will be returning to the 16,000 seater Barclaycard Arena, which will feature a host of activities alongside the tournament, including signing sessions, a cosplay contest and several other diversions which ESL are hoping will turn the event into more of a festival atmosphere.

“We are looking forward to bringing ESL One back to Hamburg after such a successful debut of our flagship event series last year,” said Ulrich Schulze, SVP of product at ESL in a statement. “This year ESL One Hamburg is going to be even bigger and better, as we are expanding both: tournament days being held in the arena and the number of participating teams.”

Moving from Frankfurt to Hamburg for the Dota 2 event seems to have paid off: Over 10,000 fans attended each of the two main event days, Over the course of the four tournament days, over 38.5m social media impressions were generated by 8m users. How this is measured isn’t clear in the press release, but the core part is that this is a 50 per cent increase over 2016’s ESL One event in Frankfurt. Similarly, ESL One Hamburg had a 250% growth in unique viewers over ESL One Frankfurt.

Ticket sales for the event open on Monday, May 7.