BLAST announces Bounty Hunt

BLAST has announced their entry to the Dota 2 esports scene with Bounty Hunt, a new tournament featuring OG, NiP, Team Secret, Team Liquid, Alliance and Nigma, slated to take place between June 8 and 13.

Who are BLAST and what are they doing?

BLAST are a tournament organizer who were previously only active in Counter-Strike, with an esports media production company known as RFRSH behind them. They were infamous for conflict of interest issues regarding Astralis, and previously other CS:GO teams like GODSENT and Heroic as well. Their BLAST Pro Series was a unique series of LAN events that ran over a single weekend and prioritized the live audience experience over the viewers at home, running three concurrent best-of-one group stage matches at the same time with a best-of-three grand final featuring the top two teams of the round robin bracket.

It was replaced by BLAST Premier in 2020, a new and much more traditional format which earned a lot of plaudits for its inaugural Spring 2020 LAN tournament in the CS:GO community. Though the global health crisis has forced them to adjust the schedule, there is currently no sign that the competition would be shuttered this calendar year. BLAST has also recently launched a tournament focused on lower-ranked teams known as BLAST Rising, which includes teams like Team Dignitas and ENCE and runs completely online.

What is Bounty Hunt?

Bounty Hunt is BLAST's first Dota 2 tournament featuring OG, NiP, Team Secret, Team Liquid, Alliance and Nigma. It has a prize pool of $145 000 and it will take place entirely online between June 9 and June 13. The tournament's unique selling points are "a dynamic prize pool" and a "fan prediction game", with the teams seeding each other and then playing out a best-of-three double eliminationn bracket before the best-of-five grand final.

The dynamic prize pool

According to BLAST's announcement, each team begins with a set bounty - $20k for the top two seeds and $15k for the rest - and 40% of their bounty is up for grabs in every single game, with $45 000 offered in additional bounties. If a team manages to win the tournament without dropping a single match, they could win up to $96 000 with the additional bounties included, which will be partially chosen by the viewers at home in a fan vote.

The fan prediction game

$5 000 is on offer for the fans to predict the winners of each match, the number of collected bounties and some other as-of-yet-unrevealed "twist and turns".

BLAST Dota Twitch channel

It seems BLAST has revamped their existing Twitch channel as BLASTDota, with VODs featuring their last CS:GO event at the time of writing, which you can check out below (or on their YouTube channel):