How the Apex Legends Global Series works in Year 6

The Apex Legends Global Series, the official competitive circuit that Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment run for their battle royale, starts its regular season on April 4. For a team, the year that follows decides everything: whether it plays in a top-tier league, whether it travels to the international events, and whether it ends the season on stage in Japan. For a fan, the calendar can look crowded, with online qualifiers, regional leagues, a second tier, two playoff events, a last-chance qualifier and a world championship.

This guide sets out how Year 6 of the series fits together, as Electronic Arts announced it in January and as Dot Esports and Esports Insider reported it: how teams enter, how the Pro League is played, what Championship Points are and how they count, what happens at each of the three in-person events, and which roster and game rules teams carry through the season. It also shows where Year 6 departs from the year before.

Year 6 calendar announced by Electronic Arts, as reported by Dot Esports on January 18, 2026 and Esports Insider on January 19, 2026.

The circuit in one season

Apex Legends is a battle royale: many squads of three drop into the same match and are eliminated one by one until a single squad is left. A competitive day is therefore not a series of duels between two teams, as in most esports, but a set of matches in which a whole lobby of teams plays at once and collects points.

The series is organized in four regions: the Americas, EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), APAC North and APAC South. That map is recent. At the Year 4 Championship, played in January 2025, teams had qualified from six regions, Esports Insider noted at the time: North America, EMEA, APAC North, APAC South, South Asia and China. For Year 5, Esports Insider reported in February 2025, North and South America were merged into a single Americas region, leaving the four regions that Year 6 keeps.

A Year 6 season moves through five stages. The Online Open, a set of open online qualifiers, ran from late February to late March. The Pro League, the top-tier regional league, is played in two splits, meaning two halves of the season, each closed by an international playoff event. The season ends with the ALGS Championship, which gathers 40 teams in Sapporo in January 2027. Alongside the Pro League, the Challenger Circuit gives teams outside it a route in.

Electronic Arts put US$7 million in prize money on the season, Dot Esports reported. Three international LAN events, played in person on stage rather than online, carry US$2 million each.

How the Online Open fills the Pro League

The Online Open is the new name of what the series used to call the Preseason Qualifiers, Esports Insider explained in February. It is open: any team that registers in its region can enter, and registration was handled on the series website, according to Dot Esports.

It was played over four weekends: February 28 to March 2, March 7 to 9, March 14 to 16 and March 21 to 23. Each match is scored on two things, Esports Insider reported: where a team finishes, and how many eliminations it scores. The last squad standing can earn 12 points, and every elimination adds one point. A team can therefore climb the standings by surviving long, by fighting well, or by doing both.

Qualification works on two tracks. The winning team of each Open in a region earns a direct place in Split 1 of the Pro League. Points from every weekend also go into an overall tally, and the next four teams of each region in that tally qualify too. Dot Esports describes those four places as earned on consistent results rather than on one strong weekend. Together, the two tracks fill eight places per region.

Those eight places are what is open to everyone in Year 6. The rest of each Pro League is filled by invitation, on earlier results.

How a Pro League split is played

Each regional Pro League holds 30 teams, Dot Esports reported: 22 invited on the strength of their previous results and eight from the Online Open. Across four regions, that is 120 teams, the same total Esports Insider gave for the Pro League of Year 5.

Split 1 starts on April 4 and 5. The format is the same for both splits, in Dot Esports' words: "Each split follows a triple-round-robin format followed by Match-Point format Regional Finals." A round-robin is a schedule in which every team of a region meets every other; a triple round-robin runs that cycle three times before the standings are settled.

The regular season leads into the Regional Finals, played in the match point format that the series uses for its biggest finals. In that format, explained in full below, reaching a points threshold is not enough: a team must then win a match to take the title.

Results across both splits do two jobs, according to Dot Esports. They decide which teams qualify for each split's international playoff event, and they feed the season-long race for Championship Points. Esports Insider describes the Pro League as the first place in the season where those points can be earned.

One region changes its broadcast rhythm in Year 6. The APAC South Pro League moves to a 10-day broadcast schedule per split, Dot Esports reported, which removes doubleheader match days, the days on which two sets of matches were broadcast back to back.

The Challenger Circuit and the Pro League Qualifier

Teams that did not make the Pro League are not shut out for the year. The Challenger Circuit returns in Year 6 as a path into the top tier, Esports Insider reported, and Dot Esports adds that it runs alongside the Pro League, with four open qualifier weekends in each split.

The route from one tier to the other goes through the Pro League Qualifier, played between the two splits. Winners of the online Split 1 Challenger events earn a direct spot in that qualifier, according to Esports Insider. Once Split 1 of the Pro League is over, the best Challenger teams meet the bottom eight sides of the Pro League in the qualifier, with places in Split 2 at stake.

A team that finishes in the bottom eight of its region after Split 1 therefore plays the qualifier to keep its place for Split 2, and a team from the Challenger Circuit can rise into the Pro League in the middle of the season.

The Challenger Circuit also leads to the season's last qualifier. The Last Chance Qualifier, held in November 2026, is open to Challenger Circuit teams as well as Pro League teams, Esports Insider reported.

Championship Points and the 12-match rule

Championship Points are the ranking points that decide most of the places at the season's final event. They took that name in Year 5: until then they were called Playoff Points, Esports Insider reported in February 2025, and in the same change they became the property of the player rather than of the team. A player who scores points with one roster carries them as an individual.

Thirty-two of the 40 places at the Year 6 Championship are awarded on Championship Points earned through the Pro League and the two Playoffs events, according to Dot Esports. The Split 1 Playoffs at the Esports World Cup are played for prize money and for those points, which then decide which teams earn a place at the Championship, Esports Insider noted.

Because points belong to players, Year 6 adds a condition on how they reach a team's total. Players must compete in at least 12 Pro League matches with their team for their Championship Points to count toward that team's total, Dot Esports reported, and the same 12-match requirement applies at LAN events.

The three LAN events of Year 6

The season has three international LAN events, each with 40 teams and US$2 million in prize money, Dot Esports reported. Each uses a different combination of stages.

The Split 1 Playoffs take the series to the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Dot Esports describes five days of competition, in a format that is a slightly adjusted version of the previous year's Midseason Playoffs. One place is already settled: VK Gaming, champions of the Year 5 Midseason Playoffs, receive an automatic invitation. The event has a second effect beyond its own result. According to Dot Esports, performance at the Split 1 Playoffs directly affects how many places each region receives for the Split 2 Playoffs, rewarding strong international results.

The Split 2 Playoffs at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, run over four days. Dot Esports calls them the final event before the Championship. Besides the US$2 million, teams play there for POI draft positioning ahead of the Last Chance Qualifier and the Championship. A POI, short for point of interest, is a named area of the map, and a POI draft is the order in which teams claim the area where they land at the start of each match.

How the Championship is decided

The ALGS Championship returns to Sapporo, Japan, for a third year in a row, at the Daiwa House Premist Dome, from January 28 to 31, 2027. Dot Esports adds that the Year 5 Championship in Sapporo, which it calls record-breaking, sold more than 38,000 tickets.

The 40-team field is built in two parts. Thirty-two places go on Championship Points. The last eight come from the Last Chance Qualifier in November 2026, where the top two teams of each region qualify. That route can lead all the way: Dot Esports notes that Oblivion, the Year 5 champions, were an unsigned team, playing without an organization behind them, that came through the Last Chance Qualifier.

At the event itself, Dot Esports reported three stages for Year 6.

Match point is a format that Electronic Arts and Respawn have trademarked, Esports Insider explained before the Year 4 Championship. At that event, a team reached match point once it passed a threshold of 50 points through wins and placements. From then on, it had to win a match to take the title, however many points it held beyond the threshold. There is no fixed number of matches. Esports Insider recalled the 2023 final, where OpTic Gaming led the standings without winning the match it needed, and TSM took the title by winning a match after reaching the threshold a few matches later.

Rosters and transfer windows

Year 6 sets fixed moments for roster changes. Official transfer windows open during the Pro League, after Match Day 6 of each split, Dot Esports reported, and Esports Insider adds that there is one window per split. The series gave its aim, as quoted by Esports Insider: to promote greater roster stability and give fans clearer, more consistent team identities.

The window works together with the 12-match rule. A team that signs a player in the window after Match Day 6 still needs that player to reach 12 Pro League matches with the team before the player's Championship Points count for it.

Legend Bans, now in the second tier

Apex Legends is played with Legends, characters that each have their own abilities. Since Year 5, top-level ALGS play has used Legend Bans, a rule that removes characters from the pool as a series goes on.

Esports Insider described the system when it was introduced in February 2025. The Legend picked by the most teams is removed from the Legend pool after each match, for the rest of the series. A series therefore starts with the full roster of characters, and the pool shrinks match after match. If an entire class of Legends is removed, the Legend banned longest becomes available again. In Year 5, the rule applied in the Pro League, the Pro League Qualifier, the Last Chance Qualifier and every LAN event.

In Year 6, Legend Bans expand into the Challenger Circuit, Dot Esports reported. Dot Esports writes that the system favors adaptable teams with wide pools of Legends over players who rely on a single character. With the expansion, teams that rise from the Challenger Circuit into the Pro League arrive having already played under the same rule.

What changes from Year 5

Year 6 keeps the frame of Year 5: four regions, 30 teams per Pro League region, two splits and a Championship in Sapporo. What moves is the calendar of in-person events.

In Year 5, Esports Insider listed three offline events: the ALGS Open, the Midseason Playoffs and the Championship. The ALGS Open was the first LAN of that season, a double-elimination tournament for 160 teams, the 120 of the Pro League plus 40 from the Preseason Qualifier, with a US$1 million prize pool. Year 6 has no ALGS Open. Its three LAN events are the Playoffs of each split and the Championship.

The change gives each split its own international event, with both played for the same prize money. The first Playoffs also link the two halves of the season directly, since results in Riyadh set how many places each region receives in Las Vegas.

Smaller changes sit inside the frame: the Preseason Qualifiers take the Online Open name, Legend Bans reach the Challenger Circuit, APAC South changes its broadcast schedule, and the transfer window and the 12-match rule set how rosters and points move during the season.

The road ahead from April

The calendar for the rest of Year 6 is set. Split 1 of the Pro League begins on April 4 and 5, with the Challenger Circuit running alongside it, and the Pro League Qualifier that follows it decides who plays Split 2. The Split 1 Playoffs are played at the Esports World Cup in Riyadh from July 7 to 11. The Split 2 Playoffs run at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas from October 29 to November 1, the Last Chance Qualifier is held in November, and the Championship closes the season in Sapporo from January 28 to 31, 2027.

Electronic Arts presented the calendar as part of a longer plan. Monica Dinsmore, head of esports at Electronic Arts, said the roadmap reflects investment in the long-term future of the series, with more competition and more prize money, Esports Insider reported.

The .esports registry publishes Esports Observer, so the whole scene can read its news for free.