BLAST Open London to begin online

20-6-2025 13:30

The 16-team tournament will not kick off at the BLAST Studios in Copenhagen as originally announced.

The group stage of BLAST Open Season 2 will be held in an online setting, BLAST has announced. The tournament will culminate in a LAN stage at the OVO Arena Wembley in London featuring the top three teams from both groups.

The transition to an online group stage was mentioned as a footnote in BLAST's announcement of a multi-year partnership with GamingMalta. As part of the deal, the finals stage of BLAST Bounty Season 2 will be held in Malta.

BLAST to hold Bounty S2 in Malta following multi-year GamingMalta partnership

It remains unclear why BLAST opted to move away from a LAN setting for the group stage of Open London. In the first Open event of the year, the group stage was held at the BLAST Studios in Copenhagen before the top six teams were flown out to Lisbon for the playoffs.

As Complexity General Manager Graham "⁠messioso⁠" Pitt pointed out on X, the change to an online setting is expected to have significant VRS ramifications as the group stage is now essentially an online closed qualifier.

This means that Rivals will be the only BLAST event during the second half of the season that will be entirely held on LAN. The event will be held between November 12-16 in Hong Kong.

The online portion of BLAST Open London will kick off on August 27. Twelve of the 16 teams will be determined by the VRS, while the remaining four sides will come from the BLAST Rising tournaments in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia.

Representatives for BLAST were not immediately available to comment.

>online i sleep

2025-06-20 13:31

Nice, another tournament to not care about

2025-06-20 13:33

>6-team playoffs why do BLAST and ESL love them so much

5 replies

because it's easier to make a schedule when you have 2+2+1 games per day with 4 quarterfinals you'd need to either cram 4 matches into a day (PGL approach) or 2 per day (Major approach) both of which have obvious flaws ESL can get away with it because they consistently host 16+ team events but BLAST has for the most part done 8 team events where 6 teams make playoffs, literal nonsense

2025-06-20 13:36

1 reply

pgl the goat once again, showing theyre the only ones who actually care

2025-06-20 20:44

It really sucks

2025-06-20 13:46

2 replies

What's wrong with them ? Good thing teams that go straight 3-0 get reward for that, while others needs to prove more

2025-06-20 14:16

It's not horrible, but it's used more than it should be in my opinion and as #10 says, sometimes the amount of teams that make playoffs with that format is silly.

2025-06-20 14:42

please leave the scene blast

2025-06-20 13:34

That would be up to Valve.

2025-06-20 13:44

Atleast a bo5 final and No b01

2025-06-20 13:38

Fuck ass scene

2025-06-20 13:43

Shame. Knew that the new overhaul was too good to be true

Another Blast event, another L.

BLAST Open Lisbon was on e of the best events of the season, the had to go and ruin the event, this event is useless now, hope teams start skipping BLAST because it wont give a lot of VRS points now (becuase no LANW)

2025-06-20 13:52

I hope they play pgl and maybe starladder instead in the future if blast keeps making weird tournaments with online stage or moving arena playoffs to kopenhagen studios. But I guess it won't halpen because there are still some sort of partner deals going on even though partner leagues have been dissolved by valve..

2025-06-20 15:15

Common blast L

The VRS impact of this decision is huge. Effectively every top team should skip this event and focus on ones that actually feed into the rest of the circuit. If they don't, they only have themselves to blame.

2025-06-20 13:56

What's next? Blast Rivals will be held entirely online? And i thought blast bounty online stage was gonna be LAN because of the Malta deal, guess not. Boooriiing. Waiting for superior chinese TOs to show how it's done.

2025-06-20 13:58

pgl - changed 2 tournament location to studio bucharest blast - messed up aurora and col logos on trophy, moved 1 tournament to studio denmark and this what a year to be blast and pgl

2025-06-20 14:11

3 replies

Esl shenanigans is next year dont worry

2025-06-20 16:18

I know about PGL changing Belgrade to Bucharest but which other location did they change?

2025-06-20 18:04

buenos aires

2025-06-20 18:24

as i expected heavy scale down from Blast, no partner league no party

2025-06-20 14:17

Holy so first it was more studio events and now we're going to more online events. It just gets worse and worse. This is actually depressing

2025-06-20 14:20

what the fuck

2025-06-20 14:24

Usual blast Mickey mouse event L

2025-06-20 14:34

Well fuck that, I hope all the good teams skip it then

2025-06-20 14:38

Valve should consider removing the Ranked status for the event entirely, they need to set a precedent to TOs that shit like that doesn't fly

2025-06-20 14:39

cct 2.0 let's go!

2025-06-20 14:56

Tier 3

2025-06-20 14:58

this blast bounty shit this year is literally worse than the 6 team group stage events they started off with and top 2 go into final. At least those events had full sold out crowd and a different take on showmatch with 5 1v1's.

2025-06-20 15:00

Well, its still one combined event on HLTV Events, so no VRS penalty for the Online stage yet, but if group stage becomes its own event on HLTV with prize pool as "LAN Spots" then it drops to minimum Event weight in VRS and is basically lowest of lowest VRS impact.

2025-06-20 15:17