Valve's Major rulebook takeaways and what they mean for PGL Antwerp

Here are some points to remember going into the upcoming Major cycle.

On Wednesday, the Spring Major of 2022 was announced to be PGL Antwerp, with the Romanian tournament organizer revealing that the tournament would take place in the Belgian port city on May 9-22.

Valve made their own announcement shortly after, which contained a supplemental rulebook containing a set of rules and stipulations that must be followed at all Valve-sponsored events, enforced on top of any given tournament organizer's own ruleset.

While this rulebook officially codified many existing but not publicly stated rules from Valve, there were many changes compared to previous Major cycles. Here are some of the most important notes to remember.

An unforgiving qualification system

- No more points. Only one RMR tournament per region will decide all Major teams

- RMRs have been consolidated into three regions: Europe, America, Asia

The first part that will stand out to fans is that rather than running multiple Regional Major Ranking events and awarding points to teams at each, there will be a single RMR event in each region, awarding direct qualification to the Major.

Furthermore, the previous six regions used during the online era (and the four used during the Minor era) are being compressed down to three: Europe, Americas, and Asia-Pacific. This means that Europe and CIS will play in one mega-region in a bid to qualify for the Major.

Invites to the RMR tournaments will be awarded to teams who placed in the Legends stage of the previous Major (the top 16). The rest of the spots at each event will be filled through qualifiers, the format of which is currently decided by the tournament organizer.

No more inconsistencies in RMR formats

- 1-2 Major spots: 4-team GSL

- 3-4 spots: 8-team double elimination

- 5-8 spots: 16-team Swiss

- 9 or more spots: Split into multiple groups

Following up on streamlining of the qualification through the Regional Major Ranking events, Valve also standardized the formats of the RMR events for each region according to the number of spots that region has at the Major.

This addresses one of the biggest criticisms of the past two RMR cycles, which saw radically different formats used between both regions and tournament organizers, resulting in inconsistencies in how easy or hard it was for certain teams to qualify.

While each region will use a format corresponding to the number of spots that region has at the Major (as shown above), particularly large regions will split up their RMR teams into multiple groups to make the qualification process more manageable. Each of the groups will essentially function as its own event and will both award qualification to the Major.

Regional slot distribution is flexible

- Number of teams representing a region can change from Major to Major

- Only Contenders will remain fixed

Following the much-criticized regional slot distribution of PGL Stockholm, which was based on the results of StarLadder Berlin, Valve made slight alterations to the system of determining regional slot distribution, allowing for changes in the future.

While the slot distribution for the Legend and Challenger teams is strictly determined by the previous Major's results, with the top eight earning Legends spots for their region and the 9th-16th teams earning Challengers spots, the distribution for the Contenders will always be the same, with Europe and Americas having 3 spots, while Asia-Pacific has 2.

What does this mean for PGL Major Antwerp?

For the upcoming PGL Major in Belgium, this will be the regional slot distribution, as based on the results of PGL Stockholm:

- Legends: 7 Europe, 1 Americas
- Challengers: 6 Europe, 2 Americas
- Contenders: 3 Europe, 3 Americas, 2 Asia-Pacific

These are the teams who are currently set to receive invites to their respective RMR event, and which slots that event will award at the Major:

Asia-Pacific (GSL)
Qualifier x4

It's important to note that, due to losing their core from PGL Major Stockholm, Liquid and Evil Geniuses will not receive an invite to the Americas RMR tournament. Based on the rulebook, it is possible that their invites will be handed out to the next two teams in line, which should be paiN and GODSENT.

Find out more about the PGL Major Antwerp 2022 on our special Coverage Hub.