After a hugely successful first event in Frankfurt, Germany, we’re incredibly happy to announce that the next instalment of ESL’s ESL One Dota 2 tournament will be being held at The Theater at Madison Square Garden from October the 9th to October the 10th 2014.

As part of ReedPOP's inaugural New York Super Week and the largest eSports event ever held in New York and the East Coast, ESL, Twitch and ReedPOP will play host to eight of the world’s top Dota 2 teams as they fight it out for a massive $100,000 prize pool.

James Lampkin, product manager for ESL One, said of the announcement:

"By staging this event at the iconic Madison Square Garden, we're going to see history in the making. ReedPOP, Twitch and ESL are coming together to create something special that New York City has never seen before."

ESL One at New York Super Week

ESL One will be a cornerstone of ReedPOP’s New York Super Week, an epic ten-day-long festival featuring over 60 awesome nerdy pop culture events across all five boroughs of New York City, a fitting to leadup this year’s New York Comic Con.

Lance Fensterman, global senior vice president of ReedPOP, said:

"ESL and Twitch are helping to make the first ever New York Super Week the ultimate celebration of pop culture in New York City and bring the fan experience to the next level. This is a keystone event in a week filled with amazing programming and will set the bar for future events."

The future of the eSports industry starts here!

As Kevin Lin, COO at Twitch, says: "eSports are not only rivaling traditional sporting events, they're eclipsing them, especially when it comes to the live online viewership numbers...“

Since Twitch began working with ESL in 2011, gaming fans from over 180 countries have tuned in to watch ESL’s content on the platform - and quite a lot of them. Earlier in the year, ESL One Frankfurt set the bar high with ESL’s first ever World Cup Stadium Dota 2 event, which had over 500,000 concurrent viewers and 12,500 attendees on each of its two days.

In closing, Kevin Lin also said of New York’s upcoming ESL One event:

“...we're bringing to the US more of what the audience wants - big events at historical venues. This ESL One milestone-setting Madison Square Garden event is testament to the future of the eSports industry."

To find out more about ESL One, be sure to visit the official website and follow @ESL on Twitter. More details about invitees, qualification and more will be released in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Also don’t worry if you don’t think you’ll be able to be there in person - you can still watch eSports history being made from the comfort of your own home on ESL’s Twitch channel.