Riot announce first international League of Legends event of 2025
15 January 2025
With the turn of the new year, we’ve got a whole new year of international esports events to look forward to. For our UK website we wrote an article earlier about everything that is to come in 2025 and we’ve got some good news for the international fans as well. That goes for the players and fans of League of Legends especially, because Riot Games has just announced the details for the first international League of Legends event of 2025. From March 10th to March 16th, the first-ever edition of First Stand will be held in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
First time for First Stand
The year 2025 will be the first year in which the previously mentioned First Stand event will be organized. It will serve as the first international League of Legends event of the year, with the goal of marking the start of the new LoL esports season. In the summer, First Stand will be followed by the Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) and towards October/November, Riot Games will announce the dates for the 2025 World Championship, simply known as Worlds 2025. As usual, this will be the crowning event of the season, where the best teams in the world compete for the title of World Champion.
As for First Stand, the new event was first announced by Riot back in the summer of 2024, though no dates or other important information were revealed at that time. All we knew at that point was that it was going to be the new LoL season opener, the first of three major international League of Legends tournaments, to be held at the start of the year. That has become the month of March, with the LoL Park in Seoul as the location. The arena offers seating to 450 live spectators with spots so close to the action that they can actually follow it on the players’ screens.
Five teams
As for the teams that will compete in the first-ever First Stand, Riot Games has decided to go by the results of the season’s first Splits. After the end of each region’s Split, they will each send in one team. In practice, this means that the following teams will be present in Seoul in March:
Winner of LEC Winter |
Winner of LPL Split 1 |
Winner of LTA Cross-Conference |
Winner of LCP Split 1 |
Winner of LCK Cup |
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The sides will face each other in a Group Stage during which they will battle every competitor once. These group matches will use a Best-of-3 format and Fearless Draft mode, meaning that no Champion can be played more than once during the entire series. The best four teams will then progress to the Playoff Stage, or perhaps better said, the bottom-placed side after all four rounds of action are played is eliminated. The Playoff Stage will feature a single-elimination bracket, using a Best-of-5 format and Fearless Draft mode. The prize pool for First Stand 2025 has not been announced yet, but we do already know that the winner will earn a second bye into the bracket stage of MSI 2025.