Rocket League Winter Opens: Why should you tune in?

It’s almost time for the Rocket League Winter Opens to get underway. That means a whole lot of Rocket League! While this is certainly good news, there are a lot of tournaments to get to grips with. Not only are there both open and closed qualifiers but they all lead up to the opens themselves!

Rocket League is actually one of the easier esports to keep up with. This is largely because it is so well covered online. However, with the sheer volume of upcoming tournaments, it can be hard to know where to start. Have no fear, Strafe.com is here!

Rocket League Winter Opens Regional Guide

With most esports comes a whole load of acronyms. What’s more, the Rocket League Winter Opens have more regions than fans may be used to. During this tournament, there will be open qualifiers, closed qualifiers and the final open tournament in:

• EU - Europe
• NA - North America
• SAM - South America
• OCE - Oceana
• MENA - Middle East and North Africa
• APAC - Asia Pacific
• SSA - Sub Saharan Africa.

While fans may be tempted to only tune in for the final tournament of the Opens, they’ll miss out on half of the teams coming up through the qualifiers. In most regions, 8 of the 16 competing teams will need to take part in qualifiers instead of being invited through their Rocket League point ranking.

Tournament Structure - how is it all going to work?

With a total of 21 tournaments taking place across 7 regions, there’s a lot of Rocket League to come!

Open Qualifiers

Generally speaking, up to a maximum of 48 teams will compete in each Open Qualifier tournament. From there, only the top 8 will be able to proceed to the next stage. All of the matches will take a best of 5 format. It’s not common for a lot of the games to be broadcast, you may need to dig into Twitch to find a stream!

Closed Qualifiers

Here, 16 teams compete in a Swiss system format. Eight of those teams come from the points ranking and 8 from the open qualifiers. Again, only the top 8 will proceed onto the actual Rocket League Winter Open itself.

Winter Open

The final stage will see the top 16 compete once again. The first 8 qualify through points rankings and don’t need to play any of the qualifiers. The next 8 may have played their way through from the open qualifiers to get to this stage. There will be both a group stage and a playoff stage with the overall winner earning $30,000 and 20 coveted RLCS points!

Why watch the Rocket League Winter Opens

In the current split, RL teams are still fighting to earn enough points to make it to the Winter Split Major. The event is due to begin on April 6th in San Diego, California and currently, no teams have confirmed their qualification.

After the roaring success of the Fall Split Major, which saw brand new team Gen.G Mobil1 Racing coming out on top, there are no guarantees about who will win in San Diego. That’s all part of the fun though, right?