Thorin on the 2027 tournaments: “Things are going to get even tougher from here on out—we’re in for a war between BLAST and PGL”

Pimp: I’m not opposed to the idea, as long as clear guidelines are established. We can’t allow a situation where a random, hastily put-together team receives an invite. A team must be competitive—at a minimum, it should be ranked in the top 50 or top 60 of the VRS rankings. I always try to protect the interests of tournament organizers: if you’re hosting an event in Portugal, it makes perfect sense to invite a local team or Portuguese players to boost audience interest and sell tickets. The same applies to Brazil. This won’t undermine the competitive aspect, but four invites out of 16 participants is too many—it’s better to limit it to two. That would be the ideal compromise. A rule could be introduced: a tournament operator receives two invites for a 16-team championship, one if there are only eight participants, and four for a 32-team bracket. The main thing is that the organization must be listed in the VRS rankings and have played at least five matches, thereby confirming its status as a full-fledged team. If the system is set up this way, everything will run smoothly, without a flood of random mix-and-match teams appearing out of nowhere. Without this, watching the scene will eventually become too monotonous if every single tournament is formed strictly based on raw ranking points.

Mauisnake: Wildcard invites used to exist in the system, but they weren’t as open as the author of this idea wants them to be. BLAST used them in past championships, but I haven’t seen that recently—perhaps the rule was simply scrapped. A couple of seasons ago, a new team could receive an invite if its core consisted of three players ranked in the top 8 of the VRS standings over the past few months. Or if the team finished in the top 2 at a Tier 2 tournament like DraculaN. There were many competitive criteria, so it wasn’t possible to simply hold an event in Australia and hand out an invite to the fourth-ranked local team.

But I’ll be blunt: I’m not opposed to the entertainment aspect or the return of the “local heroes” rule, as ESL once called it. Back then, organizers could easily invite Evil Geniuses or Virtus.pro simply because they wanted to. The current VRS system has robbed us of that—now the same group of 16–20 of the world’s best teams travels to every championship. Yes, some teams make it through tough qualifiers, like ShindeN did for the ESL Pro League. But I’d like to see one or two teams that simply generate media buzz and are interesting to watch.

We also need to consider the revenue of tournament organizers, for whom viewership is crucial. Yes, this would be unfair to others, since BC.Game Esports, for example, has no sporting justification for being at such events. But I don’t care—I want to see BC.Game Esports as the sixteenth team in the tournament, not ShindeN. I’d rather watch s1mple play than some random Fraggedy from ShindeN, whom no one in the history of Counter-Strike will even remember. His nicknames were different on the ESL stream and on HLTV, which made it impossible to find his stats. If even the tournament operator didn’t know his name, why should I? Just invite BC.Game Esports—at least I’ll remember Senzu.

Thorin: The current invite system isn’t working nearly as well as everyone thought it would, because Valve showed extreme naivety when creating it. The developers effectively stripped tournament operators of their right to choose, forcing them to send invitations strictly based on the VRS ranking. If anyone has come across scandals surrounding smaller championships on X, they arose precisely because the invite went not to the team that finished second in the qualifiers, but to any other available team. As Mischief always points out, this is technically prohibited. In theory, Valve should intervene and put a stop to such violations, since the rules are clearly laid out.

Valve’s main mistake was assuming that if they required organizers to invite the top-ranked teams on the VRS, all those teams would agree to participate in every event. The company hoped to create something like Formula 1, where the same teams compete time and time again. But reality turned out to be different: all the power shifted into the hands of the clubs. Top teams are absolutely ruthless when it comes to deciding whether to skip a particular tournament. This season, we’ve constantly been discussing situations where championships are missing not just Team Vitality at full strength, but the entire top four of the world rankings. Because of this, many events look downright lackluster.

The situation is only going to get tougher—get ready for next year, as a war between BLAST and PGL is now on the horizon. If you’ve seen the 2027 schedule, these tournament organizers are now going head-to-head. Their tournaments directly overlap in terms of dates. And it’s the teams’ choices that will determine which of these tournament organizers survives and succeeds. If the top clubs overwhelmingly choose one event and ignore the other, the neglected tournament will be doomed to failure.

That’s exactly why the proposal put forward by Pimp seems the most reasonable. Four invites out of 16 participants is clearly excessive—after all, that’s a quarter of the entire bracket. But settling for two invites is absolutely fair. Let’s face it: if, instead of BC.Game Esports, a hypothetical team like ShindeN were to join the tournament, the scene wouldn’t gain anything. It has no cultural influence, doesn’t attract viewers, and its matches aren’t interesting to watch. If, however, the last or second-to-last spot in the bracket is given to BC.Game Esports, the tournament will see a huge surge in viewer interest. And if they pull off a couple of upsets, we’ll get the kind of exciting storylines that the scene is so sorely lacking right now. Two invites is a fair compromise.