The Romanian tournament organizer has been criticized after the decision to deprive the opportunity to attend PGL Bucharest of four teams.

PGL has just announced the update list of teams participating in the European, North American and South American qualifying rounds for PGL Bucharest, which confirmed that the invitation to attend the European closed qualifying round of ESC, Fire Flux, FAVBET and Chimera was abandoned.

This decision was made after the Romanian tournament admitted and apologized for a "mistake" in the invitation process and announced it would adjust to "better comply with Valve's tournament operation requirements". This led to the delay in qualifying in Europe and South America for a week.

Within the initial invitation, in early February, the Organizing Committee of the tournament (To) identified the sets into the closed qualifying round and conducted the open qualifying round before all 12 spaces of the main event were filled, between PGL negotiated with a number of team organizations on the issue of bonus allocation.

This is contrary to Valve's invitation principles. The decision of the qualifying capacity before determining the main event can lead to the problem when the main event has too little or too many teams to attend depending on the number of teams agree to participate.

After postponing the qualifying round, PGL restarted the entire invitation process, creating opportunities for the teams who have rejected the previous invitation to change the decision.

Within the new invitation, Heroic, Nexus, Nemiga and BC.Game accepted to attend the European closed qualifying round after refusing at the first time, causing ESC, Fire Flux, Favbet and Chimera to be removed from the invitation list.

Due to ignoring the open qualifying round when accepting the invitation to the initial closed qualifying round, the four eliminated teams no longer have the opportunity to attend the tournament, causing great disappointment to the affected teams.

"We were invited to participate in the closed qualifying round of PGL Bucharest before the opening qualifying round started, and now we received the notice that due to the change schedule, we were no longer invited because the teams ranked above in the ranking of the ranking.

"PGL is great, you receive an invitation to the closed qualifying round -> they delay the starting time -> they eliminated you for reorganizing the invitation -> you do not play the open qualifying round and the result is not to attend," the ESC player, Bartek "Masked" Trybuła, shared on X.

PGL issued a statement to HLTV, in which they admitted "serious errors" leading to the need to restart the process and commit to draw experience from this mistake.

"The original deadline for sending the invitation directly to the 12 teams attending PGL Bucharest lasted abnormally, up to more than a month. However, due to a big mistake from us, the qualifying schedule was arranged too close to the deadline for direct invitation (only one day away).

"Unfortunately, we realized that this mistake was too late and determined that the only way to overcome the problem was to restart the invitation process with much shorter time. In the second time, some teams rejected the initial invitation decided to accept and change the list of teams participating in closed qualifying.

"We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this can cause. We have learned experience and commitment to improve in the future."

The closed qualifying round of North America started on Wednesday, March 5, while the South American and European qualifiers will take place on March 7, with a capacity to attend PGL Bucharest for 32 teams in each region.