The group stage of BLAST Open London will be held online, as recently announced by BLAST on X. The 16-team event will culminate in a LAN stage with a total of six teams gracing the Wembley OVO arena in London for the playoffs.
Last year, BLAST Spring Finals 2024 hosted the entire event in London, with the first portion being played behind closed doors at the OVO arena. For BLAST Open London, similar to Open Lisbon, the group stage was supposed to take place in the BLAST Studios in Copenhagen.
BLAST announced their changes as a footnote in an announcement of a multi-year partnership with GamingMalta.
The online event will feature two double-elimination groups, with each group’s winner progressing directly to the semi-finals in London. Each group’s runner-up will go into the quarter finals along with whoever runs the gauntlet of the lower bracket.
The VRS implications of this change make the event in the English capital considerably less attractive to top teams that wish to attend. With the Group stage matches no longer being LAN, they are worth considerably less to teams hoping to bolster their VRS points to aid their qualification to the major.
Graham “Messioso” Pitt, general manager of Complexity, took to X to outline the ramifications of taking the group stage online. He also agrees with a remark, down in the replies, that the act of taking the groups online not just devalues the tournament as a whole, but also increases the value of other LAN events in the calendar.
The online portion of BLAST Open London will kick off on the 27th of August, and the playoffs a week later on the 5th of September. Out of the 16 teams competing, 12 of them will be determined by the VRS, while the remaining four sides will come from the BLAST Rising tournaments in Europe, North America, South America, and Asia.
Teams knew for a while now but BLAST hid it in here barely.
The BLAST Open tournament now has the group stage online – this means BLAST just removed 24 LAN matches from their calendar leaving only the 5 playoff matches.
This likely destroys the VRS value of the tournament as… https://t.co/khocVgCMjd pic.twitter.com/AFUR78NSOB
— Graham Pitt (@messioso) June 19, 2025
The tournament organiser BLAST will be returning to London for the second year running after they held their spring finals there last year. Team Spirit took home the trophy after beating NAVI 3-1 in the best-of-five grand final. The UK’s pride, William “mezii” Merriman and company on Vitality, were eliminated in the semi-finals by the eventual tournament winners.
The roster that Vitality put forward last year in London contained Lotan “Spinx” Giladi rather than Robin “Ropz” Kool, and as such, this was before the reign of terror Vitality had, which began near the start of 2025. With the major just finished and King mezii claiming his crown as the undisputed greatest UK CS player to ever do it, Vitality will surely be coming into the event as favourites.
