Valorant Masters Santiago 2026: Most popular matches of the opening playoff rounds

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As the final stretch of the Valorant Masters Santiago 2026 playoffs begins, the eight-team bracket has delivered exactly the kind of high-stakes clashes the draw promised. The playoffs brought together the four regional Kickoff winners — Nongshim RedForce (Pacific), FURIA Esports (Americas), BBL Esports (EMEA), and All Gamers (China) — and the four teams that fought their way through the Swiss Stage: Paper Rex, Gentle Mates, NRG, and G2 Esports. With the trophy and crucial VCT Championship Points at stake, every series has carried major implications for the teams’ 2026 season.

The double-elimination format guaranteed that every opening-round result carried weight in both directions: winners advanced to the Upper Semifinals with momentum and a cushion, while losers dropped immediately to the lower bracket to face the tournament's first elimination matches. Across Playoffs Rounds 1 and 2, running from March 6 to 10, eight series were played. Below, we breaks down the most popular matches of the opening playoff stage, based on peak concurrent viewership data for all co-streamers and official channels of this Valorant Champions Tour event. 

Paper Rex’s match against FURIA was the most popular game of the Valorant playoffs so far, earning almost 650,000 Peak Viewers as the opening match for the stage. Paper Rex claimed a dominant 2:1 win over the Americas first seed; after losing the first map, they claimed two back-to-back wins with relative ease. With the Pacific squad once again proving they bring momentum for playoffs, Paper Rex is a team to watch for their upcoming game.

Turkish team BBL Esports enjoyed strong viewership, bringing their own passionate regional audience as well as international interest as the top-seeded team from EMEA. Their first game against reigning world champions NRG Esports received over 616,000 concurrent viewers, and following a tough overtime loss to the champions, their next elimination match against FURIA received 578,738 Peak Viewers. 

While the Day 4 matches offered some promising match-ups for viewership — a showdown between two highly popular regional teams, NRG and PRX, and a cross-region showdown between G2 Esports and Nongshim RedForce — the games failed to beat out the debut playoffs games. Day 4, March 9, was a Monday, which also had an unfortunate effect on viewership as not the best day for high viewerships

Missing from the charts: Gentle Mates' trajectory through the bracket continued to carry the French-language viewership surge that defined the Swiss Stage. French concurrent viewership held meaningfully above its historical baseline for Valorant international events for as long as the French organization remained in the bracke; however, this was unable to overcome the international attention received by the other cross-regional matches.

With the remaining championship games scheduled for March 9 and 10, the tournament's viewership ceiling remains firmly ahead of it. The matchups produced by Rounds 1 and 2 have set up several of the high-profile cross-regional series that historically drive Valorant's biggest international audience numbers, and playoffs could well reach over one million concurrent viewers.