BLAST adjust plans for 2025 circuit*

3-11-2024 22:30

BLAST will run regional open and closed qualifiers for their Open events dubbed 'The Rising.'

The Danish tournament operator also detailed the distribution of $4m in participation fees

Update November 5, 11:25 : This article has been adjusted after Valve released an update to their rules for ranked events that changes which version of the Regional Standings tournaments use to invite teams.

Previously, it was the "1st of the month preceding the Invite Date," meaning The Bounty's December 16 invite date would use the November 1 VRS. Now, BLAST can use the "most recent version of the Invitation VRS," which is updated monthly at the moment.

BLAST have announced "tweaks" to their 2025 circuit to stay in line with Valve's updated regulations.

The Danish tournament organizer's original plans, announced in June at Spring Final, are largely unchanged.

Adjustments have been made, however, to utilize Valve's new rules around wildcard invites including regional representation at the eight-team Rivals event.

BLAST announces 2025 circuit details

It will be a busy year for BLAST, who will host six tier-one LAN events in addition to the 32-team Austin Major and eight regional qualifiers dubbed 'The Risings' as they adapt to a post-partner agreement ecosystem.

$4,000,000 will be handed out in participation fees at the non-Major BLAST tournaments, while $2,000,000 is set aside for the credit-based 'Frequent Flyers Programme.' The total prize pool for the year is $2,500,000, though the exact distribution is yet to be announced.

BLAST participation fees distribution by seeding

The Bounty
1st-8th: $40,000
9-16th: $26,250
17th-32nd: $7,500
Total: $650,000

The Rivals
1st-8th: $81,250
Total: $650,000

The Rising
1st-4th (in each region): $10,000
Total: $160,000

The Open
1st-12th: $45,000
Total: $540,000

BLAST will run two iterations of each event to bring the pool to $4,000,000

'The Bounty,' the season opener, will be a 32-team BO3 single-elimination event, initially online, with the top-eight teams heading to Copenhagen's BLAST studio. 28 teams come from the Valve Regional Standings (VRS), alongside four (rather than the originally announced figure of two) wildcard teams.

Wildcard teams, under Valve's definition, have to feature at least three players who were a member of a top-eight roster on the VRS in the past 12 months or have won a Tier 1 event in the past 12 months. How BLAST will decide these invites will be announced soon, they say.

An example of how the bounty seeding would work using the current rankings with a $500,000 prize pool. Graphic: BLAST

'The Open' is about stadium events, with 16 teams competing in groups before six enter the MEO Arena in Lisbon in the Spring and Wembley Arena in London in the Fall. 12 teams will be invited from the VRS and four will compete in regional qualifiers, dubbed 'The Risings.'

The group stage of the tournament will still be conducted in Copenhagen, with playoff teams flying to the U.K. and Portugal later, BLAST has confirmed.

'The Rising' provides teams outside of the top ranking spots a chance to attend 'The Open' via open and closed qualifier slots, a bit of a rarity in the compacted 2025 schedule as TOs jostle for space.

VOD: 2025 rules, circuit, and concerns explained on HLTV Confirmed

Four teams from open qualifiers will join 12 VRS-invited teams for the closed qualifier, with four of those 16 teams making it to the final round — an eight-team online event alongside the four highest-ranked regional competitors, who will all receive $10,000 participation fees. This process will happen in all four regions.

'The Rivals' — which functions as a 'Wildcard event' so it can bypass Valve rules that restrict eight-team events — is the most affected.

Because BLAST only hosts two global non-wildcard tier-one events, they cannot hand out eight invites based on the VRS as intended. Instead, they must feature four wildcard invites, one for each region.

Invite dates

Season 1
Bounty: December 16, 2024
Rising: February 3, 2025
Open: February 3, 2025
Rivals: April 1, 2025

Season 2
Bounty: July 14, 2025
Rising: July 14, 2025
Open: July 14, 2025
Rivals: October 6, 2025

Invites for the events will come a little over a month before they kick off, with BLAST aiming for a December 16 deadline for the first iteration of 'The Bounty.'

After Valve updated its rulebook on November 5, BLAST will be able to use the Valve Regional Standings closest to that December 16 date for their invites.

woah those bounties SAW = FaZe and Sangal = VP lol

2024-11-03 22:33

8 replies

yeah this ranking is so bad xd

2024-11-03 22:37

2 replies

it's an example my friend, it's not how it will be

2024-11-04 02:54

1 reply

No I'm pretty sure that is literally what the rankings were at the time they wrote this article. Mongolz are even number 5 now on the Valve rankings.

2024-11-04 15:11

Sandal = VP is borderline believable

2024-11-04 02:41

I also love sandals

2024-11-04 03:05

with socks

2024-11-04 12:30

blame valve ranking, not blast

2024-11-04 03:10

sangal>vp vp so trash

2024-11-04 08:16

interesting

2024-11-03 22:34

Blast trying to recover their reputation after all the Astralis stuff

2024-11-03 23:40

Can someone explain how the rising will work? I didnt quite understand from this article, and also, what are the 4 regions?

2024-11-03 22:35

12 replies

One team qualifies from EU, AS, NA and SA each

2024-11-03 22:38

prolly EU, NA, SA and APAC

from BLAST's website: "There will be four [Rising events] each season in the four main regions of Counter-Strike - NA, SA, Europe and Asia - with four teams invited directly to the final stage of The Risings. These will be the four highest teams in each region that do NOT automatically qualify to the Open. The other four will come from a 16 team Closed Qualifier, with 5-16 from the regional rankings and 4 teams from Open Qualifiers competing. These will be played online, at least in 2025."

2024-11-03 22:40

6 replies

Thanks a lot, makes it more clear. Didnt know you could do NA and SA specific events since Valve just has Americas rankings

2024-11-04 00:32

5 replies

Valve literally did separate RMR closed qualifiers for these regions

2024-11-04 08:25

Yes but for their tournaments it was always only those 3 regions qualifying, sub categories dont get you invited before. I also thought PGL had americas invites for their buenos aires tournament but I see now they use SA. Is there a way to see the sub category rankings or the rules for who counts as what? Didnt see it on the github, but maybe its just not there and its for TOs to interpret who counts as what when inviting subcategories

2024-11-04 10:55

lol valve just removed the ability for T1 to do SA and NA invites

2024-11-05 10:21

I believe you can even do country-specific events (so there could be just a Brazil event, for example), IIRC the Valve rules say the filter can be any way you like based on stuff like location, gender, etc. as long as it isn't obviously disruptive

2024-11-04 14:25

Yeah but it just felt like that was when it was more specific like a tourney in aus having an aus qualifier but yeah makes sense now

2024-11-04 15:20

"'The Rising' provides teams outside of the top ranking spots a chance to attend 'The Open' via open and closed qualifier slots, a bit of a rarity in the compacted 2025 schedule as TOs jostle for space. Four teams from open qualifiers will join 12 VRS-invited teams for the closed qualifier, with four of those 16 teams making it to the final round — an eight-team online event alongside the four highest-ranked regional competitors, who will all receive $10,000 participation fees. This process will happen in all four regions." TLDR; that's OQ for T2/T3 teams, that gives spot in bigger "The Open", and it goes like this 4 teams from OQ + 12 teams from Valve Ranking (16 in plus) that fight for 4 spots in The Open, where they fight with top4 teams from Valve Regional Standing.

2024-11-03 22:43

Thanks for the TLDR, much clearer, ok so that's basically OQ and CQ to attend blast... Stupid names...

2024-11-04 19:20

2024-11-04 19:38

So basically Blast becoming a inclusive tier 2-3 TO instead of T1 partner based TO

another cct pog

2024-11-03 22:39

That's every TO next year

2024-11-04 04:42

BLAST always W production

BLAST Open should have a regional qualifier for the host country aswell. Like the Polish qualifier for Katowice or the German qualifier for Cologne.

Good idea, that makes tournaments more interesting for locals.

2024-11-04 03:08

My head feels like full of shit trying to understand. Can the teams just play?

they will play, it just means more different tournaments with "weaker" teams

So more competition and cool storylines essentially

2024-11-04 08:26

Valve rankings need to change somehow, they depend a lot on current form

3 replies

The issue is for now we dont have as many big events with huge prize pools. Thats why Mongolz winning a 500k prize shoots them up the rankings. With how full and maxed out the calendar is next year I think it should even out more as every event is going to want/have a big prize pool so teams attend.

2024-11-03 22:44

As they should. They should also subtract points for bad placements in tournaments (e.g. if you don't make it to playoffs as a top10 team).

The issue will fix itself when all tournaments start to use Valve ranking for invites. Then we won't have these 500k tournaments where the best teams are the level of Mongolz and Heroic.

2024-11-03 22:54

Too complicated, i wait

2024-11-03 22:41

This looks nice excited to see it play out

2024-11-03 22:56

damn valve made their job

2024-11-03 23:26

they changed partnership money into participant fees and frequent flyers programme Pog.

2024-11-03 23:48

Pretty cool.

2024-11-04 00:23

I didn't understand anything 😭🤡🤡🤡....can someone explain in a simpler way....plzzz...

2024-11-04 01:00

Bounty (Online/LAN) - 32 Team Single Elim - (28 by Ranking, 4 by Invite) (Teams Pick Opponents) Open (LAN) - 16 Team GSL > Single Elim (Same as IEM Dallas/Rio format) - (12 by Ranking, 4 by Regional Qualifiers) Rivals (LAN) - 8 Team Double Elim - (4 By Ranking, 4 by Regional Invite)

2024-11-04 01:35

thanks. Thats very helpful

2024-11-04 13:05

rip G2

2024-11-04 01:02

Tf does this mean lol

2024-11-04 01:21

2024-11-04 02:52

Very cool and fresh, new systems are always a great idea, at least worth trying.

2024-11-04 03:17

how can i get the money

2024-11-04 07:38

Rob blast ez

2024-11-04 10:34

Which meant that BLAST Rivals has been relagated to the level of ESL Challenger? (Don't know whether ESL Challenger would continue to be held next year but it seemed to be good chance for tier2 squads or teams from remote areas)

2024-11-04 10:17

Not at all! What makes you think that?

2024-11-07 15:09

Ill take the 17-32 bounty /PM with details Thanks

2024-11-04 10:33

i need a graphical interpretation of what was said here to understand it better xD

2024-11-04 10:48

same

2024-11-04 12:33

just bring back open qualifiers

2024-11-04 15:34

NER0 needs a raise for getting his head around this maze of rules and details and putting all into a clear article (even though i lost track about 2/3 of the way through because of how crazy it all is)

2024-11-04 21:40

are they gonna change it again?

2024-11-05 11:57

I'm probably too late here for discussion, but nonetheless: There are still a few things I can't reconcile with Valves rulebook: 1. Bounty: How can Blast feature four instead of two Wildcard Invites when there are still "only" eight teams to compete in the main event? (actually 16 teams would be needed ) 2. Open: How can Blast let only six teams enter the main event in Lisbon or London? (Shouldn't it be at least 8?) 3. Rivals: Why they have to feature four regional Wildcard Invites? Two global tier 1 events ("Bounty" and "Open") plus up to four regional tier one events ("Risings") should be a different distribution...

2024-11-07 19:32