Our founding fathers - Valve - have blessed us with a new ruleset for tournament organisers that would make even the biggest law nerd weep. Yes, we know we’re supposed to be the ones who “understand” and “explain” it to you while keeping it fun. Well, we’re telling you: this one is hard.

We won’t bore you too long and give you the rundown right now: Valve’s basically made their Valve Regional Standings (VRS) an integral part of the competitive scene in an effort to combat franchising. There are a few special tournament types now, which we will go through in the least amount of excruciating detail (but it’ll probably still be excruciating).

Unranked Events

Let’s start with the easiest one, unranked events. These are events that fall outside of the rules Valve has set and that won’t use VRS for invites. Basically, your Tier 3 and below. The **only important rule here is the total prize pool cannot be more than $100K and a TO can’t have so many unranked events that their prize pools add up to more than $250K in a season. EZ PZ, for now.

Tier 1 and 2 Events

Okay, here we go.

Tier 1 means you have to invite from VRS, starting at #1 in those rankings. You also have to have at least 8 teams in your “Main Event” (read: playoff stage) and 16 teams in total. You can have more through open qualifiers, but you don’t have to. But you can.

Tier 2 means you can invite from VRS starting at #9 and below. Once again, you can use open qualifiers as well, with no requirements on the amount of teams.

Both of these need to invite at least 1.5 times the number of teams that will feature in their main event from the VRS. Read that sentence three times over, and then maybe you’ll get it.

Wildcard (A lot less wild than you think)

There are two wild things (three if you count your mother): Wildcard Invites and Wildcard Events. Wildcard Invites means TOs get to invite two “random” teams for every eight invites to their Tier 1 or 2 event. We say random because they still have to feature at least three players that were in a top-eight roster VRS-wise in the last 12 months.

Wildcard Events are a perk TOs unlock after organising three Tier 1 events. At these events, they can use as many Wildcard Invites as they want. Go crazy, go stupid.

All these rules make franchise tournaments very hard to organise already, but Valve felt it necessary to mention it again in their new rules as well. They also casually dropped an “oh and you have to announce your tournaments waaaaaayyy in advance now, starting 1st of January 2025”.

What’s way in advance? Two years. That’s right, two whole years.

Okay you can wake up now, snoozefest’s over.