The latest Valorant Polaris tournament is back again this month, the Valorant Challengers 2023 Northern Europe: Polaris Split 1, and teams and broadcast talent have been announced.
The tournament returns on Monday January 16th 2023 and will again be run by UK-based esports solutions provider Promod Esports. It comes after the latest Beacon qualifiers have concluded, and includes a mix of invited and open qualification teams.
Last year saw UK esports organisation Excel Esports win both Valorant Polaris splits, with Excel winning Northern Europe’s first Valorant Regional League in March and Excel also amongst the Valorant Stage 2 winners in the summer. Note – the Valorant Regional Leagues are now known as Challengers.
Valorant Polaris 2023 Split 1 Teams
The eight teams taking part this time around include HSDIRR, Fokus, Human Tripwires, Apeks, Bonk, Who Cars?, Vamonos and Les Petits Bouffons, many of which are org-less. The latter two teams qualified from the Beacon Division 1 finals, while the others are invited.
There’s of course a mix of European talent involved, with Who Cars fielding an all-Danish roster, and Leare the sole UK player in an otherwise all-Swedish roster for HSDIRR.
The most UK-centric team is Les Petits Bouffons, which is all-UK other than Norweigan player, vong. They include some well-known players previously on big orgs, such as KRAY (formerly of Mad Lions), Russ (most recently with Guild), Luzuh (who was with Rix and then Mouz last year) and L1NK (formerly of Liquid and Acend).
UK players in the latest Valorant Polaris league also include Lime and YaBoiLewis on Fokus, Dev0 and stanley with Human Tripwires, and Keiko and former Fnatic player Mistic on Apeks.
In terms of the most popular regions in the Valorant Polaris league, 14 players are Danish, 14 are from the UK and nine are Swedish, with the rest made up of Bulgarian, French, German, Irish, Russian, Spanish, Estonian, Norwegian, Dutch and Czech players, as shown in this tweet on the Valorant Polaris Twitter account.
Valorant Polaris 2023 Split 1 Broadcast Talent
Looking to the broadcast talent, there are ten casters on board to bring fans all the action from Split 1.
From the UK we have Hazza, Kremer, Ne0kai, ReTr00, SoMarcus, Twiggy and gottmoxi, plus ExWarrior (Cyprus), Giniro (Netherlands) and MP (Finland).
The stage is set, we have some stacked talent both in the teams and on the desk, and now our region is ready for its first Valorant Challengers tournament of the year.
You can check out the Valorant Polaris Split 1 on the Northern Europe Valorant Twitch channel from 5pm GMT on Monday January 16th 2023.
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.
