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Riot Games announced today its first official esports tournament for Valorant, called First Strike. This event will create the first official regional champions for Valorant. The current plan for the tournament is to start qualifiers next month, all leading to the regional finals in December.

Valorant is a deeply competitive title, one for which esports is a critical extension of the experience we want to provide to players,” Riot Games said in a blog post. “First Strike will be the first tournament produced by Riot Games and an important foundational step to establishing regional legacy.”

The dev diary video below shows what the team wants out of this tournament, as well as what they hope for the future of Valorant as an esport.

Prepare to qualify

Anyone interested in competing in First Strike should “start building and practicing with your rosters now,” as Riot recommends. The qualifiers will start in the latter half of October. Around that time, Riot will release more information regarding rules, policies, and registration. To participate in the qualifiers, players must be at least sixteen years old and have an Immortal 1 rank. However, these are just the baseline rules for the qualifiers. Riot Games will have additional prerequisites to announce.

The Valorant First Strike tournament will host regional finals in North America, Europe, CIS, Turkey, Asia, Oceania, Brazil, and the Middle East. Riot Games has not yet talked about a World Championship tournament for First Strike. However, they may want to see how this goes first.

Riot also assured fans that they are “listening to your expectations and hopes for the future of Valorant esports.” In particular, Riot is on a tear to beef up “competitive integrity” by boosting its anti-cheat team. They plan to continue working closely with the anti-cheat team during both the qualifiers and finals to keep the competitive spirit level for everyone.

Be sure to stay tuned for future updates on Valorant’s first official tournament.