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Valorant Champions Tour to feature global competition in 2021

The Valorant Champions Tour is an official event series from Riot Games set to feature multi-tiered, multi-region competition next year.

TJ Denzer

November 24, 2020 9:04 AM

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As Valorant has continued to grow its player base and competitive scene, so too has Riot slowly began to roll out the grounds for a competitive circuit. We’ve seen Riot put together a tournament series once already, but the developer just announced big plans for competitive Valorant in 2021. A global Valorant Champions Tour has been announced, featuring multi-tiered competition in regions around the world.

Riot Games announced the Valorant Champions Tour and all of its details in a blog post and video on the new Valorant Champion’s Tour YouTube channel on November 24, 2020. The new tour is set to kick off in 2021, and will feature competition in regions across the world, currently including North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Though there will be events specifically for organized and established teams, there will also be open invitationals to allow less established groups to challenge their way into the overall Champions Tour throughout 2021. It will all culminate in a 16-team Champions event in which the best performing teams in the world will battle it out to become Valorant Champions Tour world champs. The format is further explained in the video below.

The types of events in the 2021 Valorant Champions Tour have been laid out as such.

• Regional Challenger events - teams play to advance to three, internationational Masters events
• Masters events - teams accumulate points to qualify for the Champions event
• Champions event - slated for the end of the year, the world’s top sixteen teams compete to be crowned global champion

In addition, Riot Games has released a tentative calendar of events for the Valorant Champions Tour timeline, which will have the first Challenger events kicking off as Online Open Qualifiers in February 2021. A Last Chance Qualifier will take place in October, and the final Champions Event is scheduled to take place in December 2021.

With Riot Games having kicked off its inaugural arrangement of Valorant tournaments back in October with the 128-team Valorant: First Strike event, it will be interesting to see how a year’s worth of ongoing competition plays out for the game. Stay tuned to 2021 as we await further details on the Valorant Champions Tour, such as standings and where to watch.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.