BLAST to host Americas RMR in Mexico

During a live press conference early Wednesday morning, BLAST announced the dates of the open qualifiers and the locations for the upcoming RMRs. For the Americas, BLAST will be hosting the event in Monterrey, Mexico starting April 3rd through April 9th.

Monterrey, Mexico is an interesting venue as it is not considered one of the main Mexican cities, however, it is a hub for esports in recent years. North American-based teams MIBR, ATK, among others in the past have used Monterrey as a "home base" of sorts.

BLAST has also elected to host the Asian RMR in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and the EU RMR will be hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark.

When asked about the open qualifiers for the RMRs, BLAST told the dates are still not decided but will be announced as soon as possible.

It should be noted that the journey to get to Paris (and the following Majors) has seen some changes recently, with some teams having to play open and closed qualifiers to reach the RMR LAN. From there, teams can then try to reach the Challengers or Legends stages.

During the press conference, the tournament organizer also announced that the in-arena commentary will be done in English, one of the big questions asked after it was first announced that the first Major of 2023 would be held in France.

BLAST also talked about the possibility to have the Challengers and Legends stages open to the crowd, but the company's main focus is producing the best Playoff stage possible.

The BLAST Major in Paris will start on the 13th of May and will end on the 21st of the same month. The tournament has a prize pool of $1,250,000. Pre-sales of tickets start on January 23rd and the general sales will start on January 26th.

Due to the lesser performance of Americas region teams in IEM Rio, the region will have one less team competing in France in comparison to Brazil, only getting to field five rosters from both NA and SA.

The press conference ended at 05:02AM.