ESL has announced the Intel Extreme Masters American Championship will feature $59,600 in prize money. The event will be taking place in New York City in early October.

Counter-Strike leads the three games with $36,800. StarCraft 2 warps into the scene with $12,400 and QuakeLive rounds out the tournament’s $59,600 with $10,400 of their own. Each game will have eight teams or single players. The only way to attend is to qualify. There will be sixteen teams and players who will advance to the group stage. From the group stage we will get the final eight. There will be additional prize money in the group stage to help teams get to NYC for the finals.

The top finishers will then advance to the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship, which will have a $400,000 prize purse.

UPDATE: For the StarCraft2 specific stuff, there’s $10,000 available for the eight finalists at the LAN Finals plus $2,400 for online qualification. After the current Cup qualification, there will be four groups of four with every map win worth $25 and Group Winners earning $75. The winner of each group earns a spot at the American Championships while 2nd place and 3rd place must face for relegation matches between groups for a spot in the American Championships.

Current Qualified Players are Silver (Cup #1 Winner), Huk, qxc and Thisisjimmy. There are three remaining cups that will each qualify four players each.

Monday, August 23, 2010 djWheat will be hosting a special episode of “Weapon of Choice” which includes broadcasts of last qualifying cup’s Finals match along with a selection show. DJWheat will be publicly drawing the groups to allowing all players to see who they will face in the Group Stage Live On-Air. Group Stage Matches will take place August 29th-30th.

 

For more information, visit the Official ESL Website