HERO ACL 2026: Preview

HERO Asian Champions League 2026 kicks off on Monday, 11th May 2026 with a total of 16 teams taking stage to battle it out in Shanghai, China. The group stage will run double-elimination brackets across two groups of eight teams each. The winners of both groups will take on each other in the best-of-five grand-final on 17th May 2026.

The opening round begins at 08:30 AM IST with two games running side by side. Home teams TYLOO and Rare Atom play their tournament openers in the second set of games at 10:30 AM IST against Ground Zero and 5star. In Group B, Lynn Vision kicks off proceedings against Alter Ego who will play with tomiko instead of BORORS due to an unfortunate turn of events over the last week.

Check out how Alter Ego lost their star player just weeks ahead of the LAN here:

• BOROS gets banned from ACL

• Alter Ego's statement

• polbandana reveals shocking racist behaviour from BOROS

Moving on, the second half of the day ends with a Chinese derby where Last Bullet take on Kaleido. The tournament carries a prize pool of $150,000 USD where the winner not only walks away with an $80,000 USD cash prize, but also an Esports World Cup slot. HERO Asian Champions League will serve as the Asian qualifier for the Esports World Cup.