With Masters Stage 3 coming to a close and the last chance qualifiers on the horizon, teams that cannot qualify for the rest of the Champions Tour 2021 will continue to look for competition. Those who haven’t made it to the level they want to be at will keep searching for a way to make a name for themselves. And all the while, Valorant will continue to develop as an esport. The first and biggest step may have already been taken by Community Gaming (CG).

CG has continued to help the landscape of Valorant grassroot tournaments and tier two scene, with their newest series changing the name of the game. Introducing the Valorant Weekly Contenders Circuit. With weekly in the name it’s pretty apparent how often it is happening. Running for eight consecutive weeks, each tournament allows teams to earn money and points for an even greater goal at the end of the tunnel.

Each tournament has a prize pool of $300 split between the two finalist teams, adding up to a total of $2400 for the first eight weeks. On top of that, teams will get points based on how they finish in each tournament. Each tournament has up to 64 teams participating, with the points being awarded as follows:

1st-100 Points

2nd-50 Points

3rd-4th-30 Points

5th-8th-20 Points

9th-16th-10 Points

17th-32nd-5 Points

33rd-64th-2 Points

At the end of the 8th week, the top 8 point scoring teams will qualify for the grand finale. This final event will have only the best of the best, and will feature the biggest individual prize pool of the entire Circuit, with $2,000 on the line. But that isn’t the only thing that makes this so special. This is the first tournament in Valorant to feature an agent ban phase.

Banning has been common in Valorant for a while, with best of 3’s and best of 5’s featuring a ban and pick phase. But never before have characters been taken away. Valorant currently only has 17 agents, a much smaller pool than most games. League of Legends, Riot’s flagship game, features a ban system where each player gets to ban away a champion that no one can use. To make sure that not too many agents are taken away, CG has come up with an interesting solution.

Before teams make map bans, each team will get one agent ban that will only be applied to the enemy team. For example, if Team A bans Yoru and Team B bans Sova, Team A can still use Yoru but not Sova, while Team B can use Sova and not Yoru. Because of the agent ban coming before map selection, teams must use strategy to figure out the best overall agent to take out of contention.

With these games all being best of 1s, Contenders Circuits is a high stakes weekly competition that can be a fun Friday night or lead to bigger and better things at the start of a potential esports pro career. Through three weeks of competition three different teams have been crowned champion; could you be the next?

Signup here for the next Community Gaming Valorant Contenders Circuit, and get ready for the competition this Friday, September 24th. Check-in starts at 5PM EST and the first round begins at 6PM ET.