Counter-Strike in Poland was already big in the 1.6 days, but Virtus.pro’s 2014 Major win in Katowice changed everything. We look at the Golden Five, IEM Katowice and why the Spodek crowd is still the loudest on the calendar.
Katowice is an odd place to have become the centre of European Counter-Strike. It’s a former coal and steel city in Silesia with just under 300,000 people. It’s not where most people would go for a city break. Still, if you asked CS fans to pick one event to attend in person, a lot of them would say IEM Katowice.
A big reason is the crowd, which grew out of one roster in particular. That story starts in 2014, although Counter-Strike in Poland was already doing well before then.
Wiktor “TaZ” Wojtas turned pro in 2004 and played for Pentagram G-Shock and Frag eXecutors during the 1.6 years. His longtime teammate Filip “NEO” Kubski was one of the most respected players in the world at the time. Ask older fans and a lot of them will still put NEO at the top of their 1.6 list.
So when CS:GO came out, Poland already had established players and a fanbase that knew them well. They needed an organisation that could pay them properly and keep the group together.
That changed on January 25, 2014, when Virtus.pro picked up the AGAiN lineup: TaZ, NEO, Jarosław “pashaBiceps” Jarząbkowski, Janusz “Snax” Pogorzelski and Paweł “byali” Bieliński. Seven weeks later, ESL held EMS One Katowice. It was only the second CS:GO Major ever, and the first one in Poland.
Looking back, the timing is a bit ridiculous. They were a brand-new roster under a new tag, and they were playing a Major at home less than two months after signing. The event ran from March 13 to 16 with a $250,000 prize pool. VP made it all the way to the final against Ninjas in Pyjamas, the team that had dominated 2013.
VP won 2-0, 16-9 on Mirage and 16-10 on Inferno, and pashaBiceps took the MVP award. The Twitch stream peaked at around 250,000 concurrent viewers, which was a big number for CS back then. If you want to go through the groups and the bracket, the full EMS One Katowice 2014 bracket on Liquipedia has all of it, plus links to a lot of the original HLTV coverage.
Before that final, Counter-Strike in Poland mostly lived in LAN cafés and on forums. After it, people who had never watched esports knew who pashaBiceps was. I’d bet a lot of Polish teenagers installed the game that year because of VP. Polish streamers got bigger audiences, and sponsors started paying more attention to the scene.
It helped that VP kept winning. They reached the semi-finals at ESL One Katowice 2015 and ESL One Cologne 2015, and they played the final of the ELEAGUE Atlanta Major in 2017, where they finished second. Fans started calling them the Golden Five, and the nickname stuck long after the roster split up in 2018. By then, plenty of people in Poland had grown up following the team, and most of them kept watching CS after the split.
ESL had first brought Intel Extreme Masters to Katowice in 2013, and the event has returned every year since. The city hosted two more Majors after 2014 (ESL One Katowice 2015 and IEM Katowice 2019), and today IEM Katowice is one of the biggest titles a team can win outside of a Major. Personally, I’d rank it above a few of the Majors.
The venue is also a big part of it. The playoffs take place in the Spodek, a round, saucer-shaped arena that opened in the early 1970s. The International Congress Centre next door holds the expo, the merch stands and the side stages, so most fans end up splitting the day between the two buildings. People travel in from Germany, Czechia, Scandinavia and the Baltics, and hotels near the arena usually fill up weeks ahead. For quite a few of them, it’s their first LAN.
When players talk about Katowice, the noise almost always comes up first. The crowd is loud for everyone, but it has a habit of adopting whichever team is the underdog. Take a map off a big favourite and you can have ten thousand people on your side for the rest of the series.
The 2019 Major is a good example. ENCE, a Finnish team that few people expected to go deep, made the final against Astralis, and the Spodek more or less treated them like the home side. Astralis still won the trophy, but I’m fairly sure ENCE left Katowice with a lot of new fans.
There are Polish chants too, obviously, and you’ll hear them even when no Polish team is on stage. Visiting players have said it gets hard to hear comms in the big rounds.
A good share of the people watching also keep an eye on the odds. Esports betting grew up alongside Counter-Strike in Poland. Plenty of Polish fans check the lines for a CS match the same way they would for an Ekstraklasa game. The rules in Poland are strict, though. Bookmakers need a licence from the Ministry of Finance, and online casino games are a state monopoly run by Totalizator Sportowy. For a Polish-language overview of how licensed operators, bonuses and payments work under that system, you can find guides on PolskieKasyno.
It’s worth knowing if you plan to bet on IEM Katowice from Poland. Unlicensed sites still advertise to Polish fans, and the authorities block a lot of their domains.
Poland hasn’t had a team at the very top of the rankings for a while now. Polish players are spread across international rosters instead. Kamil “siuhy” Szkaradek captained MOUZ, for example, and Polish names turn up regularly in European tier-one and tier-two teams. The domestic leagues and LANs keep producing talent, even if the next VP-style roster hasn’t shown up yet.
Virtus.pro is a completely different team these days. The organisation fields a CIS-based lineup, and it won the IEM Rio Major in 2022 with players who had nothing to do with the Polish era. You can follow the current side’s results and upcoming matches on our Virtus.pro team page.
The crowds haven’t gone anywhere. The Spodek fills up again every year, and a lot of the people chanting weren’t born when TaZ played his first pro match. If ESL ever moved the event somewhere else, I think a lot of them would be genuinely annoyed.
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