It's nearly World Final time, which means it's nearly Major time, which means it's not far from Christmas, which means it's quite close to 2025.

Try to keep up, Marty McFly.

Earlier on this year we introduced some plans for our 2025 circuit, but since then, we have made some tweaks to get them absolutely perfect, and we thought we’d share the whole hog with you now.

Instead of the format you've become accustomed to, we're switching things up next year to keep up with the changing Counter-Strike landscape. This means that every event WILL have a stand-alone winner, with eight events split between two seasons.

Two seasons of four tournaments, one in the first half and one in the second half of the year, with the last locations to be fully confirmed later on.

These four tournaments will be called Bounty, Risings, Open, and Rivals.

Hunting the big dogs: BLAST Bounty

The fun wrinkle with Bounty is that a good seeding comes with pressure - not just metaphorically, but almost literally. Your seeding becomes a bounty on your head, and beating a team secures 50% of their bounty as a guaranteed payout, with the other 50% being added to your total.

Are you a big game hunter? Ready to stack bands? Bounty is the tournament for you - especially if you're a lower ranked team, who get the chance to go 'bounty hunting' and choose their opponents from the higher seeds.

Think you're smarter than karrigan? Spotted a hole in donk's gameplay? Prove it.

Credit: Michal Konkol

This is a 32 team tournament with the top 28 being taken from the Valve Global Rankings. The other four, however, are wildcard teams that we select - with details on that being announced closer to the time.

It will be a BO3 single elimination event, with the first two rounds played online from European servers, and the quarter-finals will be played on LAN in the BLAST studios.

Rising to the Open challenge: BLAST Open

The Open is the biggest and grandest of BLAST's Premier circuit played in iconic arenas that have helped us build our brand and name over the years.

16 teams join us in two groups of eight to play double elimination groups, with a six team playoff in the arena. A little secret for you all - we're looking at Lisbon and London in 2025. Be prepared.

The top 12 teams will be from Valve's Global Rankings, with the other four qualifying from The Risings - a set of regional Tier 1 tournaments.

Best of the region: BLAST Risings

There will be four of those each season in the four main regions of Counter-Strike - NA, SA, Europe and Asia - with four teams invited directly to the final stage of The Risings.

These will be the four highest teams in each region that do NOT automatically qualify to the Open.

The other four will come from a 16 team Closed Qualifier, with 5-16 from the regional rankings chosen to compete. These will be played online, at least in 2025.

Crème de la crème

The Rivals is where the scores are fully settled between the best teams in the world.

Eight teams travel to LAN to show that they deserve the title of the best of the best, with the top 4 teams from Valve's Global Rankings joining us along with a wildcard invite from all four regions.

Credit: Michal Konkol

This will be a BO3 GSL format with a BO5 grand final, and we expect this to be one of the best series of the year. After all, it's the best of the best over five maps.

Games don't get better than that.

Time, money and everything in between

We would also like to share with you all today the dates upon which teams will be receiving invites to each of our events.

Bounty Season 1: Monday 16th December

Rising Season 1: Monday 20th January

Open Season 1: Monday 27th January

Rivals Season 1: Monday 31st March

Bounty Season 2: Monday 14th July

Rising Season 2: Monday 14th July

Open Season 2: Monday 14th July

Rivals Season 2: Monday 13th October

Stacking that cash: Participation fees and Prize Mone

We will be paying teams through two mechanisms: A fixed participation fee as long as the team fulfils all commercial obligations, which increases for the higher ranked teams to help encourage the best teams to come to BLAST Premier events. In 2025, this will equal $4m.

For The Bounty, 1st-8th place ranked teams will earn $40,000, 9th-16th will net you $26,250 and anything else, $7,500. That’s a total of $1.3m paid out over the two BLAST bounty events.

The Open will be a shade over that, equalling $1.4m. A top 12 ranking makes you $45,000, and there’s a $10,000 prize for the teams in the top 4 rankings in Rising.

The Rivals will see $81,250 per team for all eight teams, making that a very lucrative event to qualify for. Be there, or be square.

Frequent Flyer Programme:

The other method of payout will be our Frequent Flyer programme, which amounts to $2m, totalling $6m for 2025.

After playing a fourth BLAST Premier tournament and qualifying for the Frequent Flyers Program, a team earns a decline right that exists for 24 months (or two years) that allows them to decline an event without losing Frequent Flyer status.

In subsequent years, a team will have to play four BLAST Premier events again to qualify for the programme, and you can hold two decline rights at any time, but only use one per calendar year.

We're hoping our new format will get everyone in the mood for what 2025 is going to bring, and we're hoping that this will be the best year of Counter-Strike yet.

This is going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

Full details to come on BLAST.tv