What is the Valorant 'Second Place in LAN Curse?'

The Valorant community has unearthed yet another curse that could ruin a team’s chances of winning. This particular curse is for teams playing in the Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) LANs so the casual and ranked players can take a breather. Dubbed the Valorant second place at LAN curse, the name pretty much explains the same. The theory that fans have crafted is that whenever a team places second at an international event, the team ends up exiting the next tournament fairly early on and has little to no success. Paper Rex’s departure from Valorant Champions 2022 makes the curse very believable.

The teams affected by the new Valorant curse

To decode this newly dug-out Valorant LAN curse, let us look at all the teams that finished second and went on to lose the following tournament. The curse is believed to have started with the second place finish of Fnatic at VCT 2021: Stage 2 Masters - Reykjavík, where it finished second to Sentinels. Following this, the EMEA [Europe, Middle East, and Africa] squad failed to even qualify for the next Masters at Berlin that followed in the coming months.

In the next LAN, VCT 2021: Stage 3 Masters - Berlin, Team Envy (now OpTic Gaming) placed second to Gambit Esports and eventually went on to bomb out of Valorant Champions 2021, where the squad crashed at the group stage.

In the first Valorant World Champions aka Valorant Champions 2021, Gambit came second after losing to Acend, the first champion team of Valorant esports. The very next international event that followed was the VCT 2022: Stage 1 Masters - Reykjavík and unfortunately Gambit missed out on this event.

The first LAN of the year – Masters Reykjavik – saw the emergence of LOUD Esports, which was the runner-up of the event. Continuing the curse, LOUD did not have a good LAN at VCT 2022: Stage 2 Masters - Copenhagen since it exited at the group stage.

The last team to have now been affected by the curse is the Singaporean team of Paper Rex. The Asia Pacific (APAC) squad showed great resilience and turned up big at Masters Copenhagen and lost by a slim margin in the grand final to FunPlus Phoenix (FPX). After placing second in Copenhagen, Paper Rex has now been eliminated from Valorant Champions 2022 in the group stage.

Following this defeat, Paper Rex’s CEO and Co-Founder Nikhil Hathiramani wrote on Twitter, “F this curse bullshit - it’s just not meant to be. We had a good run in 2022, but that’s it for us in #VCT this year. GGWP - I’m going to Istanbul but it just feels weird now.”

Valorant Champions 2022 has been in full swing and the playoffs bracket is almost set. The next stage of the tournament is set to kick off on 9th September and conclude on 18th September with the grand final and a newly crowned Valorant Champions squad.

Click here to read more about Valorant Champions 2022 and to follow the scores and updates from the tournament.