BLAST changes dates of Spring Showdown and Paris Major RMRs

Tournament organizer BLAST has announced changes to the dates for the Paris Major Regional Major Rankings and the BLAST Premier Spring Showdown. Besides a slight adjustment of the RMR schedule, the Showdown will be brought forward by two weeks. The changes come following negative feedback from the organizations and the fans.

The new date for the Spring Showdown is March 29 to April 2; it was originally scheduled to take place from April 12 to 16.

Meanwhile, the RMRs, which were all supposed to take place from April 3 to 12, have now been postponed slightly, so that the Asia RMR will take place from April 4 to 8 (possibly shortened to April 5 to 8), the America RMR from April 5 to 9, Europe RMR A from April 6 to 9 and Europe RMR B from April 11 to 14.

The European Last Chance Play-In takes place on April 15. For one, the RMRs for the Paris Major were scheduled to end on April 12, the same day the Spring Showdown was scheduled to begin. On the other hand, the IEM Brazil should start on April 17, one day after the originally planned end of the Spring Showdown. Of course, that would have caused a lot of stress for the players.

Organizations have complained

Such an overload would have created problems for teams wanting to attend two or more of those three events because they would not have had enough time to travel between events. Even with the new schedule, the European Last Chance Play-In will take place just two days before IEM Brazil, leaving little time for teams competing in both events to get from one location to the other.

The new schedule

It’s not the first time BLAST has made changes to the Paris Major qualifying routes, as following criticism from fans, the tournament organizer has added additional open qualifiers for the RMRs. The RMR dates have also been changed more than once since the original April 3-9 schedule was announced in November.

The new dates for the upcoming BLAST events are as follows:

• Europe Last Chance Play-In: April 15
• Europa RMR B: April 11-14
• Europa RMR A: April 6-9
• RMR Americas: April 5-9
• Asia RMR: April 4-8
• Spring Showdown: March 29 – April 2

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