The ultimate guide to the Rainbow Six: Siege Pro League

As Season 11 is in full swing despite the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Siege’s Pro League scene is receiving higher viewership than ever before.

During these times with many new viewers tuning in, it is a better time than ever to help everyone brush up on the rules and practices within Pro League so to help out anyone struggling we have put together a guide to all things Rainbow Six Siege Pro League!

Rainbow Six Siege Pro League Guide

The Basics

The first things to learn are the pre-match decisions that the teams must make before playing. These include Map Bans/Vetoes, and which team will veto a map first. After that, the matches begin.

For standard matches, teams will usually only play one map. At larger LANs however, they will do “Best of Three” or “Best of Five” games to determine a winner. 

Map Vetoes 

Just before the matches begin, the two teams will determine which maps they do or do not want to play on.

Each team will be provided with the map pool, and each will ban maps going back and forth between them until the teams have created a small map pool for them to play for the day.

• Read more: Everything you need to know about the Mafia event for Siege

For days they only play one match, there is one map chosen, and the number of maps remaining after bans increase if the teams are playing Best of Three or Five. 

Regions 

The regions within Siege are as follows: “EU” which covers the entirety of Europe, “NA” which covers all of North America, “LATAM” which covers all of Latin America, “APAC” which stands for Asian-Pacific and covers southeast Asia and all of Australia and New Zealand. Currently, teams from South America are included in “LATAM”, and “APAC” includes all teams stretching from Australia up to Japan. 

Points Awarded 

For any won game in Pro League, the winning team is awarded three points towards their standing against all other teams within their region. In a tied game, each team is awarded one point. 

Winning Conditions 

As of Season 11 in Pro League, the first team to win seven rounds wins the match. There is a maximum of 12 rounds that can be played, so there are two outcomes possible for the teams playing in any standard match.

Either one team wins the match with seven rounds won and receives three points, or the teams tie 6-6 and each receive one point. 

“Six Pick” and Round Swap

In Pro League, teams stay on their respective sides (Attack and Defence) for six rounds before swapping sides. This allows for teams to play on a variety of objectives, giving more variance to viewers. 

• Read more: Rainbow Six: Siege caster Milosh on 20-second meta: "There's too much for attackers to do right now"

“Six Pick” is a part of Pro League’s operator selection phase where after all players have chosen their operators, their selections will be revealed to the other team. After both teams know which operators they are going against, one person on each team can choose to secretly change which operator they are without the other team knowing. This allows for teams to change up their strategy if the opponent has brought something they didn’t account for. 

Rehosting/Pausing Matches

Sometimes you may have noticed that a match is paused, perhaps even in the middle of a round, and a player calls for a “rehost”. This is usually because a player has encountered a bug or glitch that would make an unfair playing environment for both teams, and so the match is rehosted in a new lobby to combat this. 

Workshop: Rainbow Six Seige

Banned Cosmetics in Pro League

To round things off, there are some special cosmetics that are banned in Pro League due to their ability to compromise the players’ ability to see the opponent.

A good majority of these banned cosmetics will never impact the watchability of a game to a viewer, but Valkyrie and Twitch’s elite skins are among the banned cosmetics. 

• Read more: Rainbow Six Siege: Around the World Battle Pass - Everything you need to know

Rainbow Six’s Pro League scene is in a better place than it ever has before. Its viewership is higher than ever seen before, with more new people finding themselves tuning in every day.

If you would like to read all the rules and guidelines for Siege’s pro scene, the ESL has a document explaining it all in great detail.