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The Valorant Champions Tour is the next big step in Valorant esports for 2021.
After an extremely successful set of First Strike events worldwide, Riot Games is moving into 2021 with an even bigger global esports initiative. Valorant is going to grow into a powerhouse esports title.
2021 will see a total of eight Valorant Champions Tour events for each region. The festivities kick-off at the end of January and will have teams from each region battle it out for a place in the Valorant Champions event in December. It's going to be a long road to the finish line.
Valorant 2021 Champions Tour structure and timeline
Timeline
The first round of the Valorant Champions Tour action has officially been announced by Riot. It will take place the weekend of January 29th, 2021, and will be called Valorant Challengers and is an open online qualifier.
The remaining dates are yet to be announced by Riot, but these Valorant events have a tentative month in place. January all the way to December appears to have some sort of Valorant esports hosted by Riot on the table.
Structure
The structure of the Valorant Champions Tour is where the meat of the information comes in. The different types of events are essentially three levels of competition, per Riot. It starts with the Challengers events.
Valorant Challengers will be hosted throughout the year as regional competitions. These events will be how players qualify for the Masters events. Challengers will take place over six weeks, culminating in a final tournament with the teams who earned their spots through the open qualifiers.
Masters will take the best Challengers teams and put them up against one another. This will then determine which teams qualify for the Champions event at the end of the year.
Twelve teams will qualify for Champions due to their placements in the Masters events. Four more teams, to total 16, will make it to Masters via Last Chance Qualifiers.
At this point, Riot hopes that some of these Valorant events will transition to LAN competitions. If that is the case, the Masters events may very well become international global esports tournaments.
This would be massive and only grow Valorant further. The point distribution and prizes for these events will be announced by Riot at a later date.
