Road to MLG Columbus 2016 overview

With MLG releasing most of the important information on the entire qualifying process for the next major, here's an overview of the road to MLG Columbus 2016.

We have already seen bits of the information released by individual parties who will be organizing the Minor Championships, which will play a big part in the qualifying process for MLG Columbus 2016.

There will be four Minor Championships, one for each of Europe, CIS, Asia and the Americas, all of which will be available only to players and teams that didn't take part in the last major, DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca.

While Minors for the Americas, CIS and Europe will only hand out a single spot at the LAN qualifier, the Asian Minor at IEM Taipei will actually have two spots up for grabs.

Cloud9 have already secured a place at the LAN qualifier 

MLG have also released information on the remainder of the spots for the 16-team LAN qualifier, as there are three left (with eight going to previous Challengers and five for Minors teams), which will be decided via Last Chance Qualifiers.

There will be one Last Chance Qualifier for the Americas and one for CIS and Europe combined, with one spot going to the former and two to the latter.

Both Last Chance Qualifiers will feature 2nd-4th placed teams from the respective regions' Minor Championships. Teams that weren't eligible to play in the Minors due to the rules will also get a chance to take part, and are to submit their rosters to jnye@mlg.tv by January 11 (for Americas) or January 18 (for Europe/CIS).

These teams have already secured a place at the LAN qualifier, taking place in the MLG Arena in Columbus, Ohio on February 26-28, by placing in the bottom eight at DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca:

Cloud9	CLG	FlipSid3	mousesports
dignitas	Liquid	Titan	Vexed

To clarify, the remaining eight spots will be distributed as follows:

Americas Minor winner	Asia Minor winner
Asia Minor runner-up	Null element CIS Minor winner
Europe Minor winner	Americas Last Chance winner
CIS/EU Last Chance winner	CIS/EU Last Chance runner-up

And of course, the eight teams who will come out on top of the LAN qualifier will join eight Legends at the major, that are:

EnVyUs	Null element Na`Vi	G2	NiP
?	Luminosity	fnatic	Virtus.pro

Here's a timeline of the whole qualifying process, except for parts of the Asian and CIS qualifiers, as we're waiting for more information on those:

For even more details on the process, such as tournament formats for each of the stages, head over to MLG's announcement.