Masters Santiago 2026: twelve teams, a Swiss stage and the schedule

One week before the first match, Riot Games has laid out how Masters Santiago will be played. The publisher's esports site posted its guide to the event on Friday, February 20, 2026, with the twelve teams, the two stages of the tournament and a day-by-day calendar that runs from Saturday, February 28 to the grand final on Sunday, March 15.

Masters Santiago is the first global event of the 2026 season of the VCT, the Valorant Champions Tour, the circuit Riot Games runs for its tactical shooter. It brings together three teams from each of the tour's four international leagues, in the capital of Chile. Eight of them start in a Swiss stage, a format in which teams with the same record meet each other, and four go straight to the playoffs.

Riot Games, guide to Masters Santiago published on February 20, 2026. The event runs from February 28 to March 15.

The twelve teams, league by league

The field comes from the four Kickoff tournaments, the opening competitions of each league, which were played in January and February. Riot Games said in its presentation of the season, published on December 2, 2025, that the top three teams of each league's Kickoff advance to Masters Santiago. The guide lists the result: twelve names, grouped by league.

The four leagues are the tour's regional top divisions: Americas, Pacific, EMEA and China, the last listed by Riot Games as VCT CN. Each began the year with a twelve-team Kickoff. Inven Global, reporting Riot's plans on December 4, 2025, counted 48 teams across the four leagues for the season, which means one team in four made the trip to Chile.

Two of the names in the Americas group arrive by different roads. FURIA and NRG are among the ten partner teams of their league, organizations that hold a long-term place in it, according to the list Sheep Esports published before the Americas Kickoff. G2 came up through Ascension, the circuit that until now promoted teams from the lower divisions.

Twelve places instead of eight

The size of the field is new. Sheep Esports reported when the 2026 season was presented that the first Masters of the year grows from eight teams to twelve, and Inven Global wrote that each league's allocation rises from two places to three.

The way those places were won also changed. Riot Games described the 2026 Kickoff as a triple-elimination tournament: a team is out only after its third defeat. Sheep Esports explained the mechanism in its guide to the calendar. A team that loses in the upper bracket drops into a middle bracket; a second loss sends it to the lower bracket; a third ends its run, and no team climbs back up. Each of the three brackets has its own final. Only the team that goes through the upper bracket without a defeat wins the Kickoff itself, the outlet wrote.

The start was not equal for everyone. In each league, the four teams that had qualified for Champions Paris, the world championship of the 2025 season, received a bye into the second round, Riot Games said. A bye is a free pass: the team skips a round without playing.

For the Americas, the Kickoff was held at the Riot Games Arena in Los Angeles from January 15, with the bracket seeded through a random draw, according to the publisher's guide to that tournament. EMEA began on January 20, Pacific and China on January 22.

How the Swiss stage works

The Kickoff result decides where each team enters in Santiago. The guide says the four Kickoff winners, one per league, skip the first stage and go directly to the playoffs. The other eight teams, the second and third qualifiers of each league, play the Swiss stage.

A Swiss stage has no groups and no fixed bracket. After each round, teams are paired with opponents that hold the same record of wins and losses. In Santiago the rule is short: two wins and a team advances, two losses and it is eliminated. Four teams advance and four go home.

Every match of the stage is a best-of-three, a series won by the first team to take two maps. A map is one full game of Valorant, played on one of the game's arenas.

The arithmetic of the format fixes the workload. In the first round the eight teams play four series. In the second, the four winners meet each other and the four losers do the same, four more series: two teams reach two wins and advance, two reach two losses and leave. The four teams left, all with one win and one loss, play two deciding series in the third round. That makes ten series in all, and no team plays more than three.

The playoffs and what a win is worth

The playoffs gather eight teams: the four that come through the Swiss stage and the four Kickoff winners. Riot Games describes them as a double-elimination bracket. A team that loses once falls into a lower bracket and keeps playing; a second defeat eliminates it. The last team standing in the lower bracket meets the winner of the upper bracket in the grand final.

The pairings are not known yet. Riot's page on the event's prediction game, published on February 16, says the playoff draw and schedule are due on March 4, the last day of the Swiss stage.

The matches count beyond Santiago. In its description of the playoffs, the guide says every win earns Championship Points toward Champions Shanghai, the world championship that closes the 2026 season. Championship Points are the points teams collect during the year; Riot Games said in December that the season continues to qualify two teams for Champions through points and two through the Stage 2 playoffs. The publisher also said then that the points system was being refreshed. The guide gives no point values.

One individual award is attached to the event. A panel made up of broadcast talent, co-streamers, who are creators allowed to show the matches on their own channels, and media will choose a single most valuable player. The winner is crowned after the grand final.

The calendar, day by day

The event lasts 16 days, of which 13 have matches. Three pauses are built in: one day between the two stages, and two before the final weekend.

The opening day, February 28, falls on a Saturday, and the Swiss stage ends on Wednesday, March 4. The playoffs start on Friday, March 6 and run for five straight days, through Tuesday, March 10.

Espacio Riesco and the price of a seat

The guide does not name the hall. Riot Games did so when it opened ticket sales: its announcement of December 1, 2025 places the event at Espacio Riesco, in the Huechuraba district of the Santiago metropolitan region. All 13 match days of the calendar are open to spectators, the same announcement shows, from the first Swiss round to the grand final.

General sale began on Wednesday, December 10, 2025, through the vendor Punto Ticket, with a limit of four tickets per purchase. Prices were set by stage and by seat type, in Chilean pesos with a US dollar figure alongside.

Tickets were still on sale on February 17, when Riot published its visitor information. That page presents the event as the first time the world's best Valorant teams and players come to Chile. Sheep Esports has described it as the second major international event of the game in South America, after LOCK//IN in São Paulo in 2023.

Around the matches, and after Santiago

Riot's visitor page lists what the venue holds besides the stage: an artist alley with twelve artists from the game's community, a store with merchandise sold only at the event, an exhibition of the trophy, watch lounges and an area of computers where visitors can play together. A new space named El Foro hosts press conferences, autograph sessions, player question-and-answer sessions and panels with the game's developers, on subjects that include maps, sound design and the ranked system.

Visitors can also compete. The Santiago Skirmish Series, announced on February 18, is a one-against-one tournament played on site. Four qualifiers of 16 players each, 64 players in all, are held on March 4, 6, 9 and 13, in single-elimination matches decided in one game. The players who qualify join creators and other competitors in a 32-player double-elimination final on Saturday, March 14, played on the stage used by the professional teams.

At home, the publisher runs a prediction game for viewers. Entries for the Swiss stage opened on February 19 and close on February 28 at 10:00 AM Pacific time, with the start of the stage; those for the playoffs open on March 4 and close on March 6 at the same hour.

The season moves on quickly once the trophy is handed over. According to Riot's December presentation, the leagues resume with Stage 1, in which the twelve teams of each league are split into two groups of six and play each of their group opponents once, in best-of-three series, over five weeks. The bottom two of each group are eliminated and the top four go to the Stage 1 playoffs.

The top three of those playoffs qualify for Masters London, the second global event of the year, which Riot Games says uses the same format as Santiago. Stage 2 and its playoffs follow, on the road to Champions Shanghai.

Before any of that, the eight Swiss stage teams have the opening weekend in Santiago to themselves. The first series begins on February 28.

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