Blast Premier

The Blast Premier series is divided into two seasons per year: Spring and Fall. Each season lasts around four months with 16 regular season partnered teams participating in the Group stage, ending with a season finals for the 6 top teams from the group stage. The season finals are also open to two teams from each season's Showdown events, which are open to a much broader array of organizations, including those that did not advance in the regular season. Non-partnered teams usually qualify for the Showdown events via invites or via regional tournaments (One such example being the ACE North American Masters for teams from North America). The winner of each season's finals goes on to participate the Global Finals at the end of the year, as well as winners of other prestigious non-BLAST Premier events and those that rank highest in the BLAST Premier Global Leaderboard, a standings of the top events of the year from multiple leagues and tournaments.

In August 2023, Counter-Strike developer Valve announced that the partnership system that Blast Premier used would be abolished in 2025, forcing all tournament organizers to pivot to an open circuit or an invitational system using Valve's rankings. In order to prepare for the change to an open circuit, Blast announced that the 2024 Blast Premier season would feature 16 partnered teams: the previous 12 partnered teams that, with the exceptions of 100 Thieves, MIBR and Evil Geniuses (who had their spots sold to BIG Clan, Heroic and Cloud9 in 2021, 2022 and 2023 respectively), had been partnered since Blast Premier's inception, and four one-year affiliate teams, those being GamerLegion, Team Falcons, Team Spirit and Virtus.pro.

BLAST announced their plans for 2025 and beyond during the 2024 Spring Final in London. To align with Valve's new rules forcing their partnership system to cease, BLAST will use three formats: Bounty (a 32-team invitational tournament where teams receive bounties for winning matches against their opponents), Open (a 16-team tournament mimicking the Intel Extreme Masters), and Rivals (where the top 4 teams in the Valve rankings, plus the next-best teams in Europe, the Americas and Asia) will play each other in the old Final format). With this, 2024's World Final was the last BLAST Premier World Final.

Partner league

Open circuit

In August 2023, Counter-Strike 2 developers Valve banned tournament organizers from having "unique business relationships" with teams. As a result, Blast revamped their tournament format starting in 2025.

The new "Bounty" tournament assigns the 16 highest-rated teams of 32 bounties in addition to the regular prize money earned, where victorious teams claim half their opponent's bounty, with the other half added to their own bounty. The tournament will feature bests-of-three in a single-elimination format. The new "Open" tournament features 12 teams invited from the Valve Regional Standings, in addition to four teams qualified through new regional "Rising" tournaments, which feature invited teams as well as teams from open qualifiers. Open tournaments feature two groups of eight playing a double-elimination best-of-three bracket. "Rivals" tournaments involve eight directly invited teams competing in four-team double-elimination brackets, before a best-of-five grand final.