The teams and casters for the upcoming Valorant UK & Ireland Skirmish have been announced.
Firstly, the broadcast talent line-up announced so far includes well-known UK Rainbow Six casters (anti-clockwise from top left) Geo ‘Geo’ Collins and Em ‘Fluke’ Donaldson, South African Valorant, Overwatch and Apex Legends caster Samantha ‘NaoriMizuki’ Timms and another experienced UK Rainbow Six caster Ollie ‘XRTROIKA’ Hatton.
After publishing this article, we also learnt of UK caster Harvey ‘SkrivCasts’ Rodgers also joining the broadcast line-up. We’ve been told this is the full confirmed list.
The one-off UK & Ireland Valorant tournament will be operated under the ESL Premiership banner and powered by Intel. The Valorant UK & Ireland Skirmish was announced last month.
The Valorant UK&I Skirmish – Powered by Intel, will see the first instance of organised Valorant play for the local ESL UK office. It will include open qualifiers and an eight-team round robin group stage, which will see two groups compete to qualify for position in the playoffs.
It makes sense for Riot to turn to established broadcasting talent from other competitive shooters. Like the CSGO players that have moved to Valorant, we’ve no doubt casters from similar titles will have no problem in adjusting to Riot’s shooter.
Qualifiers for the Valorant UK&I Skirmish got underway this week, and the qualified teams have now been confirmed, including Rix.gg, Tenstar, M4LIK, The Goose House and LDN UTD:
Tenstar beat M4LIK in the upper final in the qualifiers, before M4LIK then beat them in the grand final, though it was a best-of-one grand final rather than a weighted best-of-three, meaning there was no advantage for the upper final winners.
A spokesperson told Esports News UK: “The grand final was purely to determine seeding as all competing teams had qualified for the main event at that point. Due to the condensed nature of the tournament and the amazing turnout the qualifiers had, we would not have the time to play out best-of-threes on subsequent days.”
Valorant has a host of UK talent, from players to broadcast talent and more. Orgs like Team Liquid and Fnatic have a mix of UK players that have played in some of the top Valorant esports tournaments so far.
We’ll update this article with other broadcast talent that may be announced soon.
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- Team Heretics sign Valorant player Monsteerr from LDN UTD
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
