On a monthly average, there are 150,000 concurrent Valorant viewers on Twitch. All of them only see 7 out of 9 Valorant maps names, whether they’re watching ranked or professional games.
What are these Valorant competitive maps, and what information can players and bettors alike take from them to improve their gameplay or bet slip?
Valorant Competitive Maps List
Here are all the competitive maps in Valorant sorted by release date (oldest to newest). If you want to get started with Valorant betting, you may want to consider looking at the data sets involving these maps.
Split
Image Credit: Riot Games
As a closed-beta map, Split has been around even before Valorant’s official launch in June 2020. In VCT 2023: LOCK//IN São Paulo, one of the most recent international Valorant tournaments, Split took the top spot and was picked 21 times.
According to Riot’s Level Design Lead and Senior Game Designer, the vision for the Japanese map was to shift the critical attacking and defending area off-site (towards a center, to be precise). To capture this critical area is to have all the cards since it gives a lot of info and entries for both Attackers and Defenders.
Split was removed from the competitive map pool in June 2022 only to come back fresh from a rework eight months later in January 2023. It’s one of the most popular Valorant maps names in the game.
Haven
Image Credit: Riot Games
For a long while, Haven was the most unique of all Valorant maps. When the game first launched with 4 maps, only 1 had three bomb sites instead of two. It would remain to be the odd one out until Lotus came to the scene nearly 3 years and 5 maps later.
Why wasn’t Haven’s lead followed earlier? Perhaps it’s hard to emulate its layout without risking making something bland and uncreative—as critics of Lotus deem the map to be.
In any case, the Bhutanese map averages a 53.35% Attacker win rate, looking at LOCK//IN São Paulo and Valorant Champions 2022. The three bomb sites slightly favor attacking strategies, although not as much in ranked games (51.1%).
All in all: a fairly balanced map where opportunities abound for both sides. Truly a safe haven for ideas.
Ascent
Image Credit: Riot Games
Other than its mechanical doors and freeing aesthetics, nothing is really special about Ascent—except its traditional three-lane layout is the cornerstone that all other maps are and will be based on.
In June 2020, the Italian map was among the first maps to welcome new and starry-eyed players to Riot’s flagship FPS video game. Ascent, as Valorant’s foundational experience, is now more popular than ever too, never leaving the competitive map pool since Day 1. It was the 2nd most banned map in LOCK//IN São Paulo, but it was the most-picked map in VCT Champions 2022.
In the hands of the best Valorant teams, Ascent is also the most defendable map (52.7% and 54.2% Defender win rate, respectively). The same goes with ranked (51.9% in a 3-month time frame).
Icebox
Image Credit: Riot Games
Icy Russia may seem bleak, but the addition of Icebox in October 2020 had the opposite effect on the community. It follows the three-lane layout of Ascent, although the routes leading to the sites combine long sightlines and narrow routes, balancing long-range and short-range fights for both Attackers and Defenders.
Statistically, it’s another Attacker-sided map, with a 53.5% Attacker win rate on Valorant Champions 2022 and 52.9% in LOCK//IN São Paulo. As is often the case when factoring pro Valorant events, these numbers get exaggerated. It’s more around 51.0% in ranked.
With the increasing number of agents that are suited to its layout, Icebox is becoming one of the most versatile maps in Valorant.
Fracture
Image Credit: Riot Games
With the American map Fracture, which was released in September 2021, control of the two main routes branching off on either side of both sites is the name of the game. The developers call it “pinching.” This sounds harsh for Defenders. And with the map’s 53.2% Attacker win rate in LOCK//IN São Paulo, it’s getting harder to defend even for the best Valorant players in the world.
The Defender spawn situated in the middle of the two sites helps Defenders react quickly to an incoming blitzkrieg, while long the ropes that bisect the entire map help Attackers cause confusion and facilitate an attack.
Pearl
Image Credit: Riot Games
Most Valorant maps names describe a theme. With Pearl, the name also describes a concept: keep it simple. This is why the Portuguese map didn’t have a unique mechanical feature at all when it came out in June 2022—except for one crouchable path. Instead, it uses a more detailed three-lane layout and continues to build on ground-level (in this case sea-level) concepts like angle and terrain.
Because the entire map is underwater, there’s some verticality to it. Aggressively pushing A or B, for instance, requires a tilted crosshair.
Both in LOCK//IN São Paulo and Valorant Champions 2022, Pearl is the second-most defendable map, with a 51.4% and 53.2% Defender win rate.
Lotus
Image Credit: Riot Games
The Indian map Lotus is as tranquil as tranquil gets—the lotus flower being associated with the enlightened Buddha himself. The Reddit forums, however, tell a different story entirely. The community just can’t decide whether the compact map is good or bad.
Lotus first reached the international stage at the VCT 2023: LOCK//IN São Paulo, about a month after its release in January 2023. There it was picked up 13 times and was played on 206 rounds, 123 of which were won by the attacking side (the Attacker win rate was 59.7%, the highest of all by 4.9%).
Clarity is the motif. And with everyone across the Valorant ranks arguing about Lotus, ironically, it’s also the needed outcome.
Reserve Maps in Valorant
These are the rest of the maps in Valorant that are outside rotation. Both were removed from the competitive pool in January 2023.
Breeze
Image Credit: Riot Games
Built on a Bahamian coast, Breeze specializes in extended sightlines and open duels. Within seconds into the round, Site A, Site B, and middle players can see and shoot each other from afar.
The pathways are wide just like the bomb sites they lead to. For teams, the large layout is simply a question of who can cover the most area for a possible hold or access.
Bind
Image Credit: Riot Games
The smallest map on Valorant challenges some traditional norms. One of them is the concept of the middle lane, which the developers removed entirely and replaced with direct entry points. This allows an all-out, face-to-face brawl between Attackers and Defenders in less than 5 seconds.
Perhaps this part of the layout is more of a bug than a feature that Riot will have fixed when Bind resurfaces in the future. Or maybe they’ll rebuild everything around it.
