Hannover, Germany (GotFrag) -- Ten of the World's best Counter-Strike teams head to CeBIT 2008 in Hannover, Germany this weekend where they will be battling it out for $122,500 in prizes. Eight European teams qualified for the tournament during the Extreme Masters online qualifier. They will be joined by the two non-European teams, e-STRO and Made in Brazil, who qualified at the Extreme Masters LA Global Challenge back in October.

The defending Extreme Masters champions, Meet Your Makers (former PGS), are noticeably absent from this tournament after failing to make it out of their group. They opened their round robin stage with three straight losses to Fnatic, Virtus.pro and Spirit of Amiga before winning their final two matches against mTw and aAa, but it was too late. So this time around we will be guaranteed a new champion, the question is who?

Fnatic would be the most obvious pick after winning NGL ONE two weeks ago, but they had some troubles in the Finals against Roccat. After such a strong performance, it will be interesting to see if Roccat can follow up their NGL ONE performance and take that next step to win a major international tournament. You can't ignore Made in Brazil or SK Gaming either so this will definitely be a fantastic weekend of great matches.

This tournament will feature two stages of matches, round robin elimination followed by a double elimination single map playoff. The ten teams have been split into two groups of five. After the round robin stage is complete, the top team from each will automatically advance into the playoffs. The second place team from each group will then play the third place team of the opposing group to see which two will join the previously qualified group winners. From there the four will play a regular double elimination bracket where the winner will take home $50,000.

Also to note, throughout the course of the tournament, each team will be allowed to choose two maps to eliminate from the map rotation. With four being eliminated between the two teams, the fifth and final map remaining is the one that will be played.

GotFrag will be live on-site in Hannover to provide up to the minute match scores and updates along with HLTV, demos, Gamesense match statistics, interviews, photo galleries and much more!

Group B

Alternate
e-STRO
Excello
SK Gaming
Virtus.pro

Read on for our in-depth team preview for this tournament.