Outright winner
Pick the champion before or during the event. The bet settles when the final ends.
So what: higher payout, but the price carries the margin of every round and your stake is locked until the trophy is lifted.
Tournament · Valorant
VALORANT Champions is Riot Games' world championship and the last event of every VCT season. Champions 2026 is being played in Shanghai from 24 September to 18 October 2026, with 16 teams and a $2,250,000 prize pool. NRG are the defending champions after winning in Paris in 2025. This page covers Champions markets, how outright prices shrink through the playoffs and every winner since 2021.
Liquipedia: VALORANT Champions Tour (Champions editions, dates, prize pools, winners and runners-up).
Short answer
Bookmakers price every Champions series, every map, map and round handicaps, total maps and total rounds, plus the outright winner and region specials. Series are best-of-three and the grand final is best-of-five, so a team with a 60% chance per map wins about 65% of BO3 series and 68% of the final.
This year
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Dates | 24 September – 18 October 2026 |
| Host city | Shanghai, China |
| Teams | 16, qualified through the four VCT international leagues and China |
| Prize pool | $2,250,000 |
| Defending champion | NRG (Champions Paris 2025) |
Liquipedia: VALORANT Champions 2026. Check the official VCT schedule for match times.
Outright vs match
Pick the champion before or during the event. The bet settles when the final ends.
So what: higher payout, but the price carries the margin of every round and your stake is locked until the trophy is lifted.
Pick the winner of one series. It settles when that series ends.
So what: usually the lowest margin on the page, and you can react to form, rosters and the draw.
Winning region, total maps in the final, pistol-round winners, overtime on a map, top player by kills.
So what: thin markets with wider margins; compare the price on two or three sites before you bet.
Odds through the bracket Example odds
A worked example: a team with a 60% chance in every series and an example outright overround of 25%.
Upper bracket quarter-final
Upper bracket semi-final
Upper bracket final
Grand final
Champion
Title chance = chance per series to the power of the series left. With 4 series to win: 13.0%, fair odds 7.72. Each series won removes one factor.
What it means: a pre-event outright price at 6.17 includes the margin on every round, so backing the same team series by series can pay more or less depending on the match margins you get.
Champions playoffs use double elimination, so a team that loses once can still win the title by the lower bracket. The example follows the upper bracket.
Worked example, not a forecast. Book odds = fair odds ÷ (1 + overround).
Example odds Example odds
Example odds, not live prices. The sum of implied probabilities shows the margin.
| Team | Example odds | Implied | Fair odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| NRG | 6.00 | 16.7% | 7.17 |
| Fnatic | 6.50 | 15.4% | 7.77 |
| Team Heretics | 7.00 | 14.3% | 8.37 |
| Paper Rex | 8.00 | 12.5% | 9.56 |
| EDward Gaming | 9.00 | 11.1% | 10.76 |
| 100 Thieves | 9.00 | 11.1% | 10.76 |
| Any other team | 2.60 | 38.5% | 3.11 |
| Sum | 119.5% | margin 16.3% |
Add up 1 ÷ odds for every team. Here it is 119.5%: the bookmaker keeps 16.3% of outright stakes on average.
What it means: the names show how the table works; they are not predictions.
Example odds set by esportranker. Not live, not a forecast.
Prize pool history
$1.0M at the first two editions, $2.25M at every edition since 2023.
From 2023 Riot moved VCT to partnered international leagues in the Americas, EMEA and Pacific, with China added as a fourth league, and raised the Champions prize pool to $2.25M.
What it means for betting: Champions is now the end of a fixed league season, so form from the year's Masters events and league playoffs is a useful guide.
Liquipedia: VALORANT Champions Tour (Champions editions, dates, prize pools, winners and runners-up).
Past winners
5 different champions in 5 editions. No organisation has won Champions twice.
| Year | City | Champion | Runner-up | Final | Prize pool |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Paris | NRG | Fnatic | $2.25M | |
| 2024 | Seoul | EDward Gaming | Team Heretics | 3–2 | $2.25M |
| 2023 | Los Angeles | Evil Geniuses | Paper Rex | 3–1 | $2.25M |
| 2022 | Istanbul | LOUD | OpTic Gaming | 3–1 | $1.00M |
| 2021 | Berlin | Acend | Gambit Esports | 3–2 | $1.00M |
Liquipedia: VALORANT Champions Tour (Champions editions, dates, prize pools, winners and runners-up).
In Shanghai, China, from 24 September to 18 October 2026, with 16 teams and a $2,250,000 prize pool.
No. The Esports World Cup runs its own Valorant tournament in the summer. Champions is Riot's world championship at the end of the VCT season.
NRG won Champions Paris 2025, beating Fnatic in the grand final.
No. Acend (2021), LOUD (2022), Evil Geniuses (2023), EDward Gaming (2024) and NRG (2025) have one title each.
Series winner, map winner, map and round handicaps, total maps, total rounds, pistol rounds, overtime and the outright winner. See our Valorant betting guide for how each market works.
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