Riot’s competitive shooter Valorant released on Tuesday after a popular closed beta. The game is poised to grow a budding esports scene, and organizations like T1, TSM and Gen.G are invested. The first after-launch Valorant tournament featuring pros is upon us with the Twitch Rivals: VALORANT Launch Showdown.
There are tournaments scheduled for Latin America, Brazil, Korea, Japan, Europe and North America. A total of $200,000 will be given out across the regions as tournaments rage on from June 5-7.
What is most intriguing currently is the North American tournament. Complete professional rosters are not competing. The Twitch Rivals tournaments have a different kind of format. Twitch invites individual streamers who make their own teams. Four groups will compete for $42,000.
Notable NA Valorant Pros
TSM Myth is playing with Done, reltuC, Wardell and Subroza; four of the five members of TSM’s official team. Former CSGO pro Hiko, although not signed to an official team, will play with PLAYER1, MkaeL, gMd, and Effys; four of the five members of Gen.G.
Team Brax is T1’s roster of Brax, Skadoodle, Crashies, Food, and AZK. Tenz, dizzy, Kephrii, Jakenbake, aceu, StPeach, fl0m, CDNThe3rd, sh0ts, Mendo, austincreed, bnans and Jordan Fisher are the other captains in NA.
Group A and B of NA contain the majority of the notable, professional names. This came under a little bit of fire from players, like Sinatraa, a Sentinels signee who is playing under Team dizzy in Group A.
these groups w t f pic.twitter.com/wTuzZlKHoD
— Jay Won (@sinatraa) June 3, 2020
This will be an interesting tournament to watch due to the fresh scene, where players have been picked up and salaried but remain unproven in real competitive play. With an initial laissez-faire approach to the scene, Riot has left it in the hands of third-party organizers to create tournaments.
Ultimately, the tournament is a show match to promote the game at launch, but there will be some great and promising players on display. Who doesn’t want to see who’s ahead of who?
The four groups will all play a round-robin with best of 1 matches before the top team from each group advances to play in bracket play.
This isn’t to downplay the non-NA events though. Although NA has a lot of flashy names, Europe has some considerable Valorant talent in the two events, with former CSGO players Mixwell and Scream teaming up.
In Europe, there are two separate tournaments, each garnering $49,000 of the total prize pool. Each tournament sees 16 teams, broken down into the same format as the NA tournament.
Latin America, Japan and Korea all have one group with a best of 1 round-robin before the top two teams from the group advance. Then, the round-robin winner will begin a best of three series with a 1-0 lead.
Also on the agenda: Brazil sees two groups with four teams in each in a round-robin best-of-one format. From there, the top two teams from each group will advance and there will be a best-of-three playoff bracket.
Dates
EU 1 and 2 begin on Friday, June 5 with NA, Brazil, Korea and Latin America starting on Saturday. As Japan will be Sunday only. Of course, there will be plenty of competitive Valorant content to indulge in this weekend.
Full groups and participants can be seen here.
