Riot Games announces Project Blender 2026 with $100,000 prize pool

One year after its first edition, Riot Games and Gozulting announced this Monday, September 7, the return of Project Blender in 2026, a major competitive project in EMEA that is open to all teams and skill levels on VALORANT. In 2025, nearly 300 teams already took their chance during the first phase, and for this second edition, the cash prize has been increased to $100,000, with an eight-team LAN final in Paris.

In 2025, this LAN final was also planned but was ultimately canceled by the organizers “due to logistical challenges and difficulties securing the necessary visa.” They will therefore look to make up for it this year. As a result, there will be not one, but two in-person stages, both taking place in Paris: the second phase at Paris Games Week, at Porte de Versailles, which recently hosted the Esports World Cup, and the other at the Palais Brongniart.

The tournament will therefore take place across three phases, with an Open Qualifier on October 3 and 4, 2026, a group stage at Paris Games Week from October 21 to 24, followed by the finals at the Palais Brongniart from December 18 to 20. It is worth noting that part of the schedule overlaps with VALORANT Champions Shanghai, which will take place from September 24 to October 18, making the participation of Karmine Corp, Team Liquid, FUT Esports, and Team Vitality uncertain. It is also worth noting that the VCT format will undergo major changes in 2027, making this offseason period particularly complex and uncertain for many players, rosters, and clubs.

The Open Qualifier will feature up to 256 teams in a single-elimination BO1 bracket, with two teams qualifying for the next stage. These two teams will join six invited teams in the group stage, split into two groups of four, and play in a BO3 round-robin format. The top two teams from each group will advance to the playoffs, played in BO3s followed by a BO5, with the two finalists securing their spot in the December final stage. There, they will join six invited teams in an eight-team bracket, with the quarterfinals and semifinals played in BO3s and the grand final in a BO5.

As in 2025, the tournament will reintroduce the Blender Draft System, a new format unique to this tournament that limits the agents available to each team from one map to the next. In BO3s or BO5s, agents used on one map are therefore banned for the team concerned on the following map, forcing teams to build their compositions across multiple maps rather than focusing solely on the map currently being played.

Before the match, a coin toss determines which team starts the map selection and ban phase. In a BO3, the agents used by Team A on the first map are banned from the second and third maps. For Team B, the agents used on the first map are banned on the second, then those used on the second map are banned on the third in the event of a deciding map.