2025 VALORANT Pro Season Explained
2024 VALORANT Champions Winners EDward Gaming | Image Credit: Colin Young-Wolff/Riot Games
After a successful and hype-filled 2024 season, VALORANT announced some changes to the timeline of their 2025 tournament circuit. The 5-year anniversary of the game will be celebrated in 2025. To celebrate such a huge milestone, the VALORANT Champions tour is implementing a few changes to make the sport even more exciting to watch.
The first notable change is the addition of two months to the professional season, with matches now scheduled through the first week of October. Goals of the extended tournament circuit are to shorten the off-season, align professional matches better with in-game patches and to allow players to have more time for rest and practice.
While the season is extended this year, the general structure of teams competing in multiple events to earn points to qualify for the final event remains. Let me walk you through what has already happened this year and what you can expect.
January is coming to a close shortly and China has already wrapped up their kickoff event for the 2025 VALORANT Champions Tour (VCT). The two teams representing China in the first Masters event for the year are the 2024 VCT winners, EDward Gaming, as well as Trace Esports. The EMEA, Americas, and Pacific region kickoff events will all wrap up by February 10th.
Masters Bangkok is set to begin on February 19th and will feature two winning teams from each region. Eight qualifying teams will compete in a Swiss-style bracket; each series will be a best-of-three (Bo3) match up.
Teams reaching two losses will be eliminated. Four teams will advance to the double-elimination, Bo3 playoff matches. The winners of the playoffs will advance to the grand final where one winning team will get to bring home the coveted Masters trophy.
The stages in between Masters tournaments are structured a bit differently. Instead of a straight, double elimination bracket, the twelve teams in each region are split into two pools based off their final placements in their kickoff event. Teams are then randomly drawn, one from each pool, to create a round-robin single elimination bracket.
The top three teams from each league will qualify for Masters Toronto.
The east coast of North America welcomes VCT to Toronto
For the second Masters event of 2025, you can expect a structure similar to Masters Bangkok with the addition of one more team from each region for a grand total of twelve teams competing for the Masters Toronto trophy.
More champions points to fight for in Stage 2
You guessed it! Stage 2 of the VCT will be similar to Stage 1. However unlike last year, team records from stage 1 will not carry into stage 2. A fresh slate, a chance for different match ups we may have not seen earlier in the season.
VCT comes to the City of Lights!
You want to play? Let’s play. Your favorite, sharp dressed sentinel, Chamber said it best. The final event of the 2025 VCT season, with a prize pool of $2,250,000 USD is coming to Paris, France. These matches will surely excite fans all around the world and have plenty of iconic between the best teams of the 2025 pro season.
I’ll always have a blast watching VCT matches, and I hope you all have fun watching your favorite players face-off this year.