VCT Americas Stage 1: two groups of six and three Masters London spots

Three weeks before the first match, the league season of Valorant in the Americas has its rules on paper. Riot Games, the game's publisher, posted its guide to VCT Americas 2026 Stage 1 on Thursday, March 19, 2026. The stage begins on Friday, April 10 at 2 pm Pacific time, at the Riot Games Arena in Los Angeles.

VCT Americas is one of the four international leagues of the Valorant Champions Tour, the worldwide professional circuit usually shortened to VCT. Stage 1 is the first of its two league phases of the year. Twelve teams are split into two groups, eight of them reach a playoff bracket, and the guide is blunt about what waits at the end: only three teams qualify for Masters London, the second global event of the season.

Tickets went on sale on March 20, the day after the guide appeared.

Riot Games, guide to VCT Americas 2026 Stage 1 published on March 19, 2026.

What Riot's guide sets out

The guide is signed by the Valorant Esports Staff and covers the format, the tickets, the broadcasts and the league's commercial partners. On the competition itself it is short and firm.

The twelve teams play in two groups of six, named Alpha and Omega. Each group is a single round robin: every team meets each of the five others in its group once. Every match is a best-of-three, a series won by the first team to take two maps, a map being one full game of Valorant.

The top four teams of each group advance to the playoffs. That stage is a double-elimination bracket, in which a team is out only after its second defeat. Three teams leave it with a place at Masters London.

The guide does not print a match calendar. It sends readers to the schedule on Riot's esports site, which carries the days and the times of the broadcasts.

The count of matches follows from the format. Six teams that each play five opponents once produce 15 series per group, and 30 across the two groups. No team plays more than five before the playoffs.

The two groups, team by team

The composition of the groups has been known for a month. Esports Insider published the Stage 1 groups of all four leagues on February 16, 2026, and Riot's guide names the same teams in its presentation of each side.

Riot's guide presents Group Alpha as a meeting between Brazil and the rest of the Americas, and names LOUD, MIBR, Leviatán, Cloud9 and G2 in it. In Group Omega it puts NRG ahead of the rest and mentions KRÜ.

The teams with international play this year are not spread evenly. Three teams from the Americas played at Masters Santiago, the first global event of the year, which ended on March 15: FURIA, G2 and NRG, according to the field Riot published before that event. Two of the three, FURIA and NRG, sit together in Omega. G2 is the only one of them in Alpha.

How the groups were drawn

The groups were not chosen by the league. They come from a draw held after Kickoff, the tournament that opened the season in January and February.

Esports Insider described the method in its February 16 article. In each league the draw took place after the lower bracket final of the Kickoff, and it used seeding pools built from the Kickoff results. The outlet gave an example from the bottom of the table: the first team drawn from the pool of those that finished eleventh and twelfth went to Group Alpha, the second to Group Omega.

Riot's guide refers to the event as the Stage 1 Draw Show and says it determined the groups and the matchups of all twelve teams.

One result of the Kickoff is recalled in the guide itself: FURIA, it says, upset expectations in that tournament. The organization then took one of the three places of the Americas at Masters Santiago.

From thirty series to one bracket

The whole stage can be read as a funnel with three levels. Riot's presentation of the 2026 season, published on December 2, 2025, gave the general design for the four leagues, and the Americas guide confirms it for Los Angeles.

The December presentation set the group phase at five weeks, with five matches for each team. It also spelled out the other side of the top-four rule: the teams that finish in the bottom two of their group see their stage end there, with no playoffs.

A third of the field therefore stops after five matches. For those four teams, the next competitive date is Stage 2, the second league phase of the year.

The Americas guide gives no detail of the playoff bracket beyond its double-elimination design. The EMEA league, which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa, published its own Stage 1 format on March 20 and went further: there, the group winners receive a bye into the second round of the upper bracket, and the fourth-placed teams start in the lower bracket, where one defeat ends their run. That is the rule of the EMEA league. The Americas guide states no such seeding.

Why the stage counts twice

A team plays Stage 1 for two rewards. The first is one of the three tickets to London. The second is Championship Points, the points collected through the season that decide part of the field of Champions Shanghai, the world championship that closes the year.

Riot said in its December presentation that two teams reach Champions through the Stage 2 playoffs and two through points. Esports Insider published the scale of points for the season on December 2, 2025.

The group phase pays 1 point for each match won, so a team that wins all five of its series takes 5 points before the playoffs begin. The EMEA league's format page of March 20 gives the same values for its own Stage 1, with the note that tiebreaker matches do not count: 1 point per win in the groups, then 6, 4, 3 and 2 points for the first four places of the playoffs.

The table shows why London matters beyond its trophy. A team that qualifies gets access to the largest single award of points before Stage 2, with 8 for the winner and points down to sixth place.

Two Americas teams already banked points in Chile. Riot's guide recalls that NRG finished in the top three of Masters Santiago and G2 in fourth place, a placing worth 2 points on the scale above.

Teams that changed since Kickoff

Several of the twelve do not come back as they left. Esports Insider has reported changes at three of them since the Kickoff began.

Sentinels, in Group Omega, announced a new head coach, Ewok, in place of kaplan, the outlet reported on February 23. The team had not won a match at the Kickoff. On March 6 the same outlet reported that Sentinels had signed JonahP, a former G2 player, ahead of Stage 1.

LOUD, in Group Alpha, signed erde from LEVIATÁN Academy as its in-game leader, the player who calls the team's tactics during a match, Esports Insider reported on March 5. LOUD had finished second-last at the Kickoff.

ENVY, also in Alpha, is new to the league this year. Riot's December presentation listed it among the four newly ascended teams of 2026, the ones promoted from the lower circuit. It changed a player during the Kickoff itself, bringing in Demon1, according to Esports Insider on February 6.

For KRÜ Esports, the open question in February was of another kind. Esports Insider wrote on February 16 that the organization had visa issues and that it was unclear whether it would field its official line-up or a substitute roster in Stage 1. Riot's guide does not address the point.

Tickets, broadcasts and the road to London

The guide invites fans to watch the league live at the Riot Games Arena in Los Angeles. Tickets were put on sale on Friday, March 20 at 12 pm Pacific time, through the ticketing company Tixr. The guide gives no prices.

The league is broadcast on its official channels on Twitch and YouTube in three languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese. Creators who want to show the matches on their own channels, a practice known as co-streaming, need approval and apply through forms that differ by region. The guide lists four partners for the stage: Red Bull, Secretlab, Verizon and Pulsar.

The destination has a sale date too. Riot announced on March 15 that Masters London will be played from June 6 to June 21 at the Copper Box Arena, with twelve teams from the four leagues. General sale of tickets for that event opens on March 27 through Ticketmaster, at prices from £10 for a seat with a slightly obstructed view on a weekday to £125 for the best tier on the day of the grand final, June 21.

London uses the same format as Santiago, Riot said in December. Twelve teams, three per league: for the Americas, that is three names out of twelve, to be decided in a bracket whose first match is still several weeks away. The groups start on April 10.

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