Garena recently announced the cancellation of Free Fire World Series 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Free Fire squads all over the world will once again miss their chance to participate in a truly international tournament. To fix this issue, Garena has announced Free Fire Asia Championship 2021, a tournament similar to the Continental Series, to replace the World Series 2021. In this article, we are going to list out everything you need to know about this tournament.
1 - Free Fire Asia Championship 2021 Schedule and Format
The event will start on November 20 and last for over a week, until November 28. It consists of only 2 stages: Play-ins and Finals. The Play-ins will be held on 20 and 21 November, followed by Finals on 28 November.
Free Fire Asia Championship 2021 will have a massive prize pool of 400k USD, one of the biggest Free Fire prize pools to date.
Format
31 teams from 7 regional leagues will participate in the tournament. Amongst them, 7 winners of various regional championships will be directly invited to the finals. Below is the list of tournaments that qualifies for a direct invitation. The India Championship is currently ongoing, with its League Stage recently concluded.
- Vietnam Free Fire League
- Indonesia Masters
- Pro League Thailand
- Summer Cup Taiwan
- MCP Majors (Malaysia - Cambodia - Philippines)
- India Championship
- Pro League Pakistan
The other 24 teams will have to compete in 2-days Wild Card rounds for the last 5 slots. The Play-ins rounds will split 24 teams into 2 groups of 12 teams.
2 - Free Fire Asia Championship 2021 Qualified teams
31 teams from 9 Asian countries will take part in the competition:
- India - 4 teams
- Pakistan - 4 teams
- Thailand - 5 teams
- Vietnam - 5 teams
- Indonesia - 5 teams
- Taiwan - 4 teams
- MCP (Malaysia, Cambodia, and the Philippines) - 4 teams
It is likely that Garena distributed the invites based on previous tournament records. Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, the three strongest Free Fire countries, get 5 invites... while the rest of the regions get only 4. Only one squad, LGDS from Taiwan, has been confirmed for this tournament.
3 - What are the chances for India in this tournament?
After the recent ban of PUBG Mobile last year, the India Free Fire esports scene is growing stronger than ever. There are much more competitive teams now, with the current top being Blind Esports (formerly team Captain). The FFWS 2021 in Singapore attracted around 5.4 million live viewers at its peak, setting a new world record. The Hindi stream managed to reach 1.9 million peak viewers in the World Series, despite no Indian teams participating.
While it is unclear how many Indian teams would advance to the finals, past records indicate that at least one team should make the cut. There has always been at least one Indian team in the top 5 in previous tournaments. The top candidate of India will be decided on the Finals of the India Championship. The Play-ins are on 10 October, followed by the Finals on 17 October.
Interested in more of our articles related to Garena Free Fire? Please check out this post to find out more about Free Fire India Championship Fall 2021 Events