The North American closed qualifier for DreamHack Masters Malmö will be played out today, as we'll get to see 16 teams battling it out for three spots at the Swedish event.

Initially eight teams have been invited for the closed qualifier, arguably eight of the best playing in the North American region, including Cloud9, Liquid, CLG, Renegades and more.

Those will be joined by eight coming from the open qualifier, which saw teams such as TSM, Echo Fox and NRG advance. Interestingly, neither of compLexity and Winterfox registered for the qualifier, the latter seemingly due a conflict in their schedule.

gob b's NRG have a tall mountain to climb

The fully-best-of-three closed qualifier is scheduled to be played out today, with the schedule and initial matchups following:

19:00	Cloud9	vs. Random Five
19:00	Splyce	vs. NRG
19:00	Tempo Storm	vs. Echo Fox
19:00	OpTic	vs. Torment
19:00	Liquid	vs. ex-Astral Authority
19:00	Renegades	vs. TSM
19:00	Enemy	vs. AGG
19:00	CLG	vs. Just Make It Fast
22:00	Quarter-finals
01:00	Semi-finals
04:00	Third place decider

You can see the whole bracket here.

Keep in mind that three spots for the $250,000 DreamHack Masters Malmö tournament, whose date has been set to April 12-17, are up for grabs in this qualifier.

The top three teams will be joining eight invited teams, four from the European qualifier and one from the Asian qualifier.