Half a million viewers averaged on TBS during ELEAGUE primetime last Friday

Whether you follow Esports news or just interested in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game you’ve most probably heard about ELEAGUE. The first major tournament to be broadcast on a big national US TV. It seemed like a bet at first, but now it’s looking like it was a good one.

First season of ELEAGUE organized by Turner Entertainment and WME | IMG saw a great start last week. The 10-weeks competition where 24 of the best CS: GO teams go head to head for their share of the $1.2 million prize pool saw a viewership average of 509 million views on Friday, when the main Group A final between Luminosity Gaming and Cloud9 was broadcasted.

To broaden ELEAGUE’s reach, partners Turner and talent management agencies WME | IMG struck a two-year deal with streaming platform Twitch to broadcast the games from Tuesday through Thursday, with the observer feed on Twitch on Friday night during the main event and the full broadcast being shown exclusively on TBS.

Altogether, ELEAGUE videos were streamed on Twitch 4.3 million times from its debut on Tuesday through Friday night—the numbers were calculated from the Twitch dashboard at 10.30am today. The peak concurrent viewership was over 92,000. On top of the viewership numbers, ELEAGUE was also widely discussed on Twitter on Friday night, with 360 million impressions for the keywords ELEAGUE, @EL, TBS, Luminosity, and Cloud9. The total Twitter impressions for the week was 710 million.

ELEAGUE continues on Tuesday with Group B, featuring G2 Esports, Ninjas in Pyjamas, OpTic Gaming, and Selfless—which replaced Chinese team TyLoo after they had trouble obtaining visas.