Valorant Champions Tour - TheSportsDB.com

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Name
Valorant Champions Tour

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Poster

Established
2020 (4 years old)

First Recorded Event

Current Season
2024

Sport
Sport Icon

ESports

Location
Worldwide

Gender
Mixed

TV Rights

Logo

Upcoming

None Found...

Results

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Description
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The Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) is a global competitive esports tournament series for the video game Valorant organised by Riot Games, the game's developers. The series runs multiple events throughout each season, culminating in Valorant Champions, the top-level event of the tour. The VCT was announced in 2020, with its inaugural season taking place in 2021.

History
2021–2022: Open-qualifiers era
In November 2020, Riot Games announced the first Valorant Champions Tour, a tournament series divided into three tiers: Challengers, Masters, and Champions. Challengers would act as the lowest tier, split into seven regions: North America, Brazil, Latin America (Hispanic America), EMEA, Southeast Asia (later included South Asia and Oceania, become to Asia-Pacific), Korea, Japan. Teams that advance past Challengers would move on to Masters, where teams would not be divided by regions anymore, and the top 16 teams from Masters would move on to Champions, the final tournament of VCT. In February 2021, they announced the VCT Game Changers, a supplementary tournament initiative for women and marginalized genders.

Riot hired esports infrastructure company Nerd Street Gamers as operators and producers for all North American Challengers and Masters events. They also hired several third-party companies to broadcast their events, such as Liga de Videojuegos Profesional (LVP) for their Spanish-language broadcasts and LetsPlay.Live for their Oceania broadcasts. The 2021 Champions tournament took place on December 1–12 at the Verti Music Hall in Berlin, Germany, concluding with team Acend defeating Gambit Esports in the grand finals by a score of 3–2.

Over 10,000 teams competed in the VCT in 2021. Outside of Champions, VCT saw its highest viewership at the Reykjavik Masters tournament in May, with a peak viewership of 1,085,850. The Champions grand finals match in December reached a peak viewership of 1,089,068, making it the VCT's highest peak viewership.

Riot made several changes to the format of VCT for its second iteration. While the overall structure of Challengers, Masters, and Champions remained unchanged, it reduced the number of stages of Challengers and Masters events from three to two. VCT Challengers began on February 11, 2022. The 2022 Champions Tournament took place from September 1 to 18 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Seasons