Everything you need to know heading into DreamHack Anaheim for HCS

The first LAN event of 2022 for Halo Infinite and the Halo Championship Series starts on Feb. 11 at 2:30 p.m. ET in Anaheim, California.  The HCS North American Regional Finals, a three day event, kicks off at DreamHack Anaheim without a crowd, as invited teams face off against the eight open qualifier teams in a group stage followed by a double-elimination bracket.

HCS teams at DreamHack

The invited teams pre-qualified for the event through the Kickoff Major Raleigh and include Cloud9, eUnited, FaZe Clan, Sentinels, Spacestation Gaming, G2 Esports, OpTic Gaming and KC Pioneers. The teams that have qualified through the open bracket include Gamers First, Complexity Gaming, XSET, Oxygen Esports, Fnatic, Incognito, Pushin P and We Love Anime.

Tournament format

The teams that qualified for the event will split into four different groups of four and compete in a single round-robin with best-of-five matches. The top team from each group will get a bye to the second round of the bracket while the second and third place squads seed into the first round. The fourth-placed group stage teams will seed directly into the lower bracket. The championship bracket is double elimination and teams will continue to play best-of-five matches until the grand final, which will be a best-of-seven.

Points toward the world championship are distributed as following:

• 1st: 15,000
• 2nd: 9,000
• 3rd: 6,600
• 4th: 5,400
• 5th-6th: 4,800
• 7th-8th: 4,200
• 9th-12th: 3,300
• 13th-16th: 2,700

The prize pool for the event is $125,000 with the top team taking home $45,000 and the rest of the squads making a minimum of $1,750 for qualifying.

The next chance fans will have at seeing an HCS tournament in person will be the HCS Major Kansas City in late April. Fans can watch the action across four different streams on Twitch and YouTube for the event.