The groups for the next major, ESL One Cologne 2016, were drawn live on the official stream shortly after the last match between G2 and Cloud9 was over. Over the last four days sixteen teams fought in the newly-introduced Swiss system for eight spots at the next $1,000,000 major, ESL One Cologne. Sixteeen major participants have been distributed into four seeding pools according to their placing at the previous major and at the offline qualifier, as usual. G2 put into the group of death Due to the Swiss system, this time a specific tie-breaking system had to be in use in order to determine which four teams receive the higher spot, the first of which being the win-loss ratio, and the second being the Buchholz score system (the sum of wins of the team’s opponent). That resulted into the following four seeding pools:

First	Second	Third	Fourth
Luminosity	CLG	mousesports	dignitas
Natus Vincere	NiP	FaZe	FlipSid3
Liquid	Virtus.pro	Gambit	EnVyUs
Astralis	fnatic	OpTic	G2

After Cloud9 and G2 finished the last match of the qualifier, ESL drew the Cologne groups, each featuring one team from each seeding pool. The ESL One Cologne groups are following:

Group 1	Group 2	Group 3	Group 4
Liquid	Luminosity	Astralis	Natus Vincere
Virtus.pro	fnatic	CLG	NiP
mousesports	FaZe	Gambit	OpTic
EnVyUs	G2	dignitas	FlipSid3