Red Bull Home Ground returns in Valorant with Manchester LAN
Mark Roe / Red BullRed Bull Home Ground, a tournament series put on by the energy drink company, returns with its third edition on December 9-11 with a LAN tournament in Manchester, England.
The tournament is a part of the off-season Valorant Champions Tour event series that Riot Games included in the competitive calendar. The Red Bull Valorant tournament will feature eight teams, decided by invitation, an EMEA open qualifier and a Turkish closed qualifier.
The yet-to-be-announced pool of invited teams will also feature squads from North America.
The tournament will be held at the Manchester Victoria Warehouse, where fans will be allowed to attend the matches. It will be broadcast on Red Bull Gaming’s Twitch and YouTube channels and by a variety of co-streamers in multiple languages.
Red Bull Home Ground Valorant format
This tournament series features a unique home-and-away format for matches. In the best-of-five matches, both teams pick a home map to play on for the opening two games. If a team goes 2-0 after winning their home map and the opponent’s, they are declared the winner of the series.
If the opening two maps are split between the two squads, then the series continues as a best-of-five competition.
Mark Roe / Red BullG2 Esports and Team Liquid won the first two editions of the Red Bull Home Ground. Team Liquid were in the grand final of both tournaments, beating Acend to the title in the second event.
The event will fill the void of VCT competition as Valorant Champions will conclude the Riot Games’ circuit in late September. Fans should expect invites to be announced after the event in Istanbul as teams settle their rosters in the off-season and accept potential invitations to Riot’s new international leagues.
Fans can see the open qualifier teams compete for a spot before the tournament begins. The tournament will begin on December 9 and will be broadcast on Twitch and YouTube.