BLAST Announces 2025 Counter-Strike Tournament Series Details at Spring Final
Tournament organizer BLAST has announced the locations, dates, prize pools, and other details of their entire 2025 Counter-Strike tournament series during their BLAST Premier Spring Finals. The announcement revealed that for the first time in several years, a Major would be heading to the US, with the BLAST.tv Major 2025 heading to Austin, Texas.
BLAST’s Major in Texas will be the first time a major CS event has been held on US soil since the ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018, which was split across Atlanta, Georgia, and Boston, Massachusetts.
The newly announced BLAST CS2 tournaments will also take on a never before seen shape with three distinct events with their own format. These will consist of BLAST Bounty, BLAST Open, and BLAST Rivals. Each BLAST Season will feature one of these events, as detailed below:
BLAST 2025 CS Schedule

Season 1 – SPRING 2025
- BLAST Bounty: 14 – 26 January
- BLAST Open: 18 – 30 March – Altice Arena, Lisbon, Portugal
- BLAST Rivals: 29 April – 4 May
Season 2 – FALL 2025
- BLAST Bounty: 5 – 17 August
- BLAST Open: 26 August – 7 September – Wembley Arena, London, United Kingdom
- BLAST Rivals: 11 – 16 November

BLAST Bounty will have a “dynamic prize pool to keep teams on their toes.” The 32-team event will feature bounties on each team. Following a match, the winning team will claim 50% of the available bounty as a guaranteed payout at the end of the event. In the opening round, the lowest-seeded teams will get the chance to pick which of the highest-seeded teams they would like to play. And the seeding will then be reset in the following rounds. This means winning teams have a big target on their back.
BLAST Open will pit four underdog teams against the 12 highest-rank teams in the world. This means the four “open” slots will be decided by regional qualifiers, giving regional favs a chance to upset the top teams.
Finally, BLAST Rivals will utilize the Valve Global Ranking to pit the most competitive of the teams against each other in an eight-team tournament with best-of-three playoffs, and best-of-five finals.
The other detail revealed by BLAST about their upcoming 2025 CS season was the huge amount of money invested into the scene. BLAST will reportedly contribute $8.5 million into the competitive Counter-Strike ecosystem, divided into $4 million in participation fees, $2 million in frequent flyers programmes and $2.5 million in prize pool. This disclosure in funding is a bold move from BLAST, as participation fees aren’t always disclosed by tournament owners.
BLAST is an esports entertainment company and tournament organizer based in Denmark. BLAST produces and organizes Counter-Strike tournaments across the globe, and Their BLAST Premier series is one of the highlights of the CS esports calendar. In 2024, the company will host a further four BLAST Premier events, leading into the upcoming 2025 season.