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Championship Gaming Series Announces $5 Million Player Payroll

The Championship Gaming Series (CGS), the first global professional gaming league, recently announced that worldwide salaries and bonuses for the 2007 season will exceed $5 million, a new benchmark for professional gaming.

CGS has also announced the official games and schedule in its North American region for 2007. Qualifying for North American league play will begin April 28 and the first draft in history will take place on June 12 at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

“This is the moment the gaming world has been waiting for,” said CGS Commissioner Andy Reif. “We will be paying salaries and bonuses to our players in excess of $5 million dollars during the 2007 season. The time has come for a new era of professional gaming as sports entertainment. Your chance to be a part of history starts on April 28.”

Valve’s Counter-Strike: Source and EA’s FIFA 2007 will be official PC games for 2007. For the Xbox 360, CGS will feature Tecmo’s Dead or Alive 4 (DOA4) and Project Gotham Racing 3 (PGR3) from Microsoft Game Studios.

The official CGS 2007 event schedule will feature online and live qualifiers where players will battle to reach the Regional Combine, scheduled to take place at the legendary Fox Studios in Los Angeles from June 8-10.

Players from the Regional Combine will then be drafted onto one of six city-based teams at the 2007 CGS Draft on June 12 at the Playboy Mansion. CGS online qualifiers for the North American region begin on April 28, 2007 with the first live qualifier to be held at The Bridge Cinema de Lux in Los Angeles on May 11-12.

Each CGS team will feature a total of ten athletes per team, each of whom is a specialist in one of the official league games. Five of the ten players will comprise a Counter-Strike: Source squad who will compete in five-on-five matches. The soccer title FIFA 07 will be played one-on-one. Each team will have a mixed-double team of two DOA4 players, one man and one woman, who will play against other teams in one-on-one matches on Xbox 360. The racing game PGR3 will be represented by two players on each team and matches will be played in a two-versus-two format.

Soon-to-be announced dates for the full global slate of 2007 CGS events in the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America, and the Middle East will yield regional representatives for the CGS Grand Slam and World Championships, to be held in Los Angeles this October.

CGS events will be broadcast in North America on DIRECTV’s The 101. For more information, please go to www.thecgs.com.