CBLOL 2026 Stage 1: eight teams, Fearless best-of-threes, one MSI spot

Ten weeks separate the first series of CBLOL Stage 1 from its Grand Final. Riot Games published the complete guide to the stage on Wednesday, March 18, on the Portuguese-language pages of its League of Legends esports site: the Brazilian league resumes on Saturday, March 28, at 1 pm Brasília time, and crowns its champion on Saturday, June 6.

Eight teams are entered: LOUD, RED Canids Kalunga, FURIA, LOS, paiN Gaming, Vivo Keyd Stars, Fluxo W7M and LEVIATÁN. Six of them will reach the playoffs, and one will leave with the trophy and a trip to South Korea for the Mid-Season Invitational, the international tournament of the middle of the season, usually shortened to MSI.

Riot Games, guide to CBLOL 2026 Stage 1, March 18, 2026; the count of series is the sum of the published schedule.

A single round robin of best-of-threes

The regular season is a single round robin: each team plays the seven others once. Every meeting is a best-of-three, a series that ends when one team has won two games. Eight teams meeting once give 28 series, and the schedule in Riot's guide lists exactly that number, two per match day over fourteen match days.

All of it is played with the Fearless Draft. The draft is the phase before each game in which the two teams take turns banning and choosing champions, the characters they will play. Under Fearless rules, as Riot described them in its guide to the 2025 First Stand tournament, a champion used in an earlier game of a series is no longer available to either team in the games that follow, whichever team played it. Each game keeps its ten standard bans, and the ten champions played in every earlier game of the series are locked on top of them. A team that reaches a third game therefore drafts without the champions already played in the first two.

At the end of the six weeks, the guide is direct about the stakes: of the eight teams, only the top six go on to the playoffs. The last two are eliminated.

The format is not a surprise. Riot's overview of the 2026 CBLOL season, published on November 5, 2025, had announced that the stages following the opening Copa CBLOL would be single round robins of best-of-threes with Fearless Draft, followed by playoffs for six teams played entirely in best-of-fives. That overview presented the season as built on the lessons of 2025, when Brazil's teams played in the League of the Americas, and it noted one removal: the Cross-Conference stage is gone.

Six weeks, and four match days in a row in April

The regular season runs from March 28 to May 3. Matches are played on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 pm, with two series a day. The exception is the third week, which Riot calls a Super Week: after the weekend of April 11 and 12, the teams play again on Monday, April 13, and Tuesday, April 14, with a start at 6 pm on both evenings. Every team plays two series that week instead of one.

LOUD open the stage against RED Canids Kalunga, six days after the end of First Stand, the international tournament played in São Paulo from March 16 to 22. Riot's guide to that event, published on March 2, lists LOUD as the CBLOL's team there. The second series of the opening Saturday sets FURIA against LOS.

A playoff where first place chooses its opponent

The playoffs are a double-elimination bracket: a team is out after its second lost series. Every series is a best-of-five, won with three games, and one series is played per day.

The seeding rewards the top of the table twice. The teams that finish first and second skip the opening round and start in the second round of the upper bracket. And the team that finishes first chooses its opponent among the two winners of the opening round, the guide says. The teams placed third to sixth play that opening round on May 9 and 10.

That makes ten series in all: five in the upper bracket, four in the lower bracket, where one team goes out each time, and the Grand Final. The weekend of May 23 is the busiest of the playoffs, with series on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, May 25.

The title, MSI and a training camp in Korea

The champion of Stage 1 takes the title and the CBLOL's place at MSI, which is held this year in South Korea. Riot announced on January 8 that the tournament would be played in Daejeon. The league has one place there: when Riot announced the return of the CBLOL and the LCS as separate leagues, on September 29, 2025, it gave Brazil's league one team at MSI and North America's two.

The stage sends more than one team across the Pacific, though. Riot pays for a training camp in South Korea during MSI, a bootcamp in the vocabulary of the scene. The publisher set out the program on February 18, in its guide to the Americas Cup: two weeks, fully funded, for four teams of the Americas.

The Americas Cup was the five-day tournament played in São Paulo from March 4 to 8 between the second- and third-placed teams of the LCS and of the CBLOL. Its champion earned one of the four places at the camp, and the Stage 1 guide confirms that the champion was FURIA. The three other places go to the third-placed team of the LCS Spring Split and to the second- and third-placed teams of this CBLOL stage. The February text had already planned for the case of a team qualifying twice: the spare place returns to its league, which is why, by Riot's count, as many as three CBLOL teams could take part in the camp.

Tickets from March 24

Tickets go on sale on Tuesday, March 24, at 1 pm, on the Eventim platform. This first sale covers the six weeks of the regular season. The sale for the playoffs and the Grand Final will be announced later, the guide says.

A ticket costs R$120 at full price and R$60 at half price. Purchases are limited to four tickets per CPF, the Brazilian taxpayer number, for each day of the event.

The prices are those of the start of the year. For the Copa CBLOL, Riot's guide of December 18, 2025 gave the same R$120 and R$60 and the same limit of four tickets, with the same split between a first sale for the regular phase and a later one for the playoffs.

How this stage differs from the Copa CBLOL

Stage 1 is the second competition of the CBLOL's year. The first, the Copa CBLOL, began on January 17 and ended with a Grand Final on March 1, with the same eight teams. Its place in the calendar was different: its champion represented the region at First Stand.

Its format was different as well. The Copa's regular phase was a single round robin of best-of-ones, single games, according to the December guide. Only the top four went straight to the playoffs, and the four other teams played an entry phase for the last two places.

Stage 1 is longer and simpler. Each meeting is now a series of two or three games rather than a single game, there is no entry phase, and six teams qualify directly from the table. The playoffs keep one feature of the Copa: the advantage given to the top seed, who chose its position in the bracket in the Copa and chooses its opponent here.

The LCS plays for two places

The North American league runs its own Spring Split over the same weeks, and the comparison shows what a single place means. According to Riot's guide to the LCS Spring Split, published on March 8, the LCS also plays a round robin of best-of-threes and a six-team double-elimination playoff. It starts a week later, on April 4, and ends with finals on June 13 and 14. Its top two teams qualify for MSI.

In the CBLOL only the Grand Final of June 6 opens that door. The runner-up's consolation is the two weeks of practice in Korea.

The next date is Tuesday, March 24, when the ticket sale opens. The first game follows four days later.

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