The Closed Qualifier for BLAST Bounty Spring 2025 is the first significant CS2 tournament of 2025. It features 32 teams and gives them the chance to qualify for a $500.000 tournament that will take place between January 23 – 26.
Unfortunately, only eight participants will advance to the LAN event. The qualification matches are scheduled to be played online, between January 14 – 19. In principle, this should make the competition a lot more volatile.
Another factor that will add to the volatility is the recent roster changes. Many teams decided to change at least one player in the last several weeks. In some cases, almost the entire roster was replaced.
It will be interesting to see if competitors like Team Falcons, Team Vitality, FaZe Clan, Team Liquid, and G2 Esports will be able to get a promising start. Most likely, some of them won’t and will need to train hard until IEM Katowice.
Format And Teams
The competitive format of this Closed Qualifier is straightforward. The single-elimination method will be used and each participant must win two consecutive matches to qualify. Every match is best-of-three.
Here are the 32 teams and the initial match-ups:
- G2 Esports vs. B8
- Natus Vincere vs. Imperial Female
- Team Vitality vs. Metizport
- Team Spirit vs. Fnatic
- MOUZ vs. BetBoom Team
- FaZe Clan vs. M80
- Team Falcons vs. ENCE
- Team Liquid vs. 9Pandas
- FURIA Esports vs. Nemiga Gaming
- Eternal Fire vs. Fluxo
- SAW vs. BIG
- 3DMAX vs. HEROIC
- PaiN Gaming vs. GamerLegion
- Complexity vs. Virtus.pro
- Astralis vs. Wildcard
- FlyQuest vs. MIBR
The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 7th, and 15th matches will be very exciting. In particular, Natus Vincere will play against a female team, which isn’t something we see every day. Astralis must defeat Wildcard and show that they’ve fixed their issues. The remaining matches feature top teams that have recently made roster changes.
