The first major tournament in 2025, Masters Bangkok 2025, ended with an unexpected victory for the Korean team T1. Despite the fact that the event ended not so long ago, the regular season in each of the four competitive regions continues, and the second major Masters Toronto 2025 awaits the audience. To qualify for it, teams need to go through the first stage of qualifications in their regions, and the Chinese league starts the earliest. Today, we have prepared a material for you in which we will tell you all the known information about VCT 2025: China Stage 1 so that you don't miss the start of the event.
General information about the tournament
VCT 2025: China Stage 1 is one of four qualifying events in each of Valorant's regions. The tournament is attended by VCT partner teams fighting for an invitation to the upcoming Masters Toronto, as well as for China Points, which are necessary to qualify for the upcoming Valorant Champions 2025. The event is organized by Riot Games together with the well-known media company Tj Sports.
Date and format of the tournament
Competitions in the Chinese region start the fastest compared to other regions. The event will take place from March 13 to May 4, 2025 in LAN format at VCT CN Arena in Shanghai.
Unlike the first Kickoff qualifiers, where the organizers abandoned the group stage, VCT 2025: China Stage 1 will still have it, which is why the tournament format will be divided into 2 stages. During the group stage, 12 participating teams will be divided into 2 groups, Alpha and Omega, with 6 teams in each. The group stage will last from March 13 to April 13, and during it, the teams will compete in the Single-Round Robin format. All matches will be Bo3, and the 4 strongest teams from each group will advance to the playoffs.
In the playoffs, which will take place from April 17 to May 4, the teams will compete in the Double-Elimination format. This means that the team that earns 2 defeats will leave the event. All matches will be held in the bo3 format, with the lower bracket final and the grand final in the bo5 format.
Participating teams
As mentioned above, 12 partner teams from the Chinese region will take part in the tournament. They were divided into two groups by the draw method:
Group Alpha:
Omega Group:
Match schedule
There are 3 days left until the tournament starts, so the developers have already revealed the schedule of the first game week during the group stage. As you can see below, the tournament opens with a match between XLG Esports and BiliBili Gaming, which will begin on March 13 at 13:00 EET. It is worth noting that the two strongest teams from each group will get a slot in the top bracket semifinals, while the two weakest teams will go straight to the losers' bracket.
Favorites, outsiders, and a dark horse
In conclusion, we 1ould like to tell you about the teams worth paying attention to during the upcoming tournament. Note that the text below reflects the author's subjective opinion.
Favorites
To begin with, we want to mention the favorites, and first of all, EDward Gaming deserves this title. The reigning world champions not only remain the strongest team in the region, but also one of the strongest in the world, which they confirmed at Masters Bangkok 2025, where they took 3rd place, beating most of the eminent teams from other regions.
Another favorite is Trace Esports. Although the team has not won any prizes on the international stage, they are stronger than most other teams within the Chinese region, and are currently second only to the above-described champions EDward, according to the results of past qualifiers.
Outsiders
It is quite difficult to identify the outsiders of the tournament, because the level of Chinese teams is quite inferior to the international scene, and most of them look weak. But if we take dry statistics on the results, TEC Espots and All Gamers look the worst. These teams took the last places at the VCT 2025: China Kickoff qualifiers and showed similarly mediocre results during last year's event. It is worth noting that All Gamers recently expanded their Valorant roster to 12 players, as we wrote about in our material. But even this doesn't fix the team's rather sad situation on the Chinese scene.
A dark horse
A surprise team that may unexpectedly do well at the upcoming tournament is XLG Esports. The fact is that the team has recently struggled on the Tier 2 scene, but at the end of 2024, they won Ascension and received a slot in the VCT. Despite the fact that it would seem that the team would have problems with the experience of fighting the strongest clubs in the region, this did not happen, and XLG Esports performed quite well in the previous qualifiers where it took 5th-6th place out of 12 teams. Given that this was the first tier-1 regional tournament for the team, we can assume that they are only getting better and may surprise the audience at future qualifiers.
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