BLAST announces Bounty Season 2027 location as Malta

BLAST have announced that BLAST Bounty Season 1 2027 take place in Malta and will be take place between January 11- January 24, 2027. It will be the first Tier-1 event of the year. BLAST have also revealed details about the new format, prize pool and more in their announcement.

One of the biggest changes for the Bounty Season 1 2027 is that the entire tournament will be a LAN event, moving away from it being held partially online previously. Bounty Season 1 2027 will also see a reduction of teams with the event to have 16 teams instead of the previously featured 32. The 16 teams who will take part in the event will see 12 being invited from the Valve Global rankings and the remaining four would be from Closed Regional Qualifiers from Asia, Europe, North America and South America.

The new format will also see the introduction of three new stages, which will be:

• Play-In
  The play-in will have the 16 teams split across four groups of four teams and will be a double-elimination bracket. Group winners will advance to the quarter-finals while the second and third place will move to the last chance qualifier. Finishing fourth in the group would result in direct elimination.

• Last Chance Qualifier
  The eight teams who make the last chance qualifier will face off for four playoff spots. The winners will qualify for the Playoffs while the losers would be eliminated.

• Playoffs
  The Playoffs will be a single-elimination bracket with the final set to be a BO5 encounter.

BLAST has revealed that drafting will stay but with a change as for the Play-ins the four highest-seeded teams are automatically placed into separate groups. The remaining teams then choose their preferred group through a drafting order:

• Seeds 13–16 pick first, starting with seed 13

• Seeds 9–12 pick next, starting with seed 9

• Seeds 5–8 pick last, starting with seed 5

The Last Chance Qualifier games is set to be 'pre-dawn' and the group winners will confirm the Playoff bracket as well, based on the results from the Last Chance qualifiers.

BLAST have also announced that they will give acceptance fees to teams who accept the invite to the tournament and the breakdown is as follows:

• Rank 1–4: $60,000

• Rank 5–8: $30,000

• Rank 9–16: $5,000

The rankings would be decided at the time of the invites being sent out. The total prize pool of $1,250,000 will be split in three groups - bounties, team payments and prize money. The Play-in group winners will have a a $40,000 bounty, second -place with a $25,000 bounty, and third-place with a $15,000 bounty which adds up to a total of $320,000.

The first-placed teams in the groups will get $30,000 while the fourth and last placed teams will get $5,000. The second and third placed teams, who make it to the Playoffs through the Last chance qualifier will get nothing but will make $15,000 from a team bounty while the teams who exit in the last chance qualifier will get $10,000.

The rest of the prize pool, $750,000, are the team payments, with the distribution being:

1. $150,000

2. $100,000
   3-4. $80,000
   5-8. $50,000
   9-12. $25,000
   13-16. $10,000