Book your Vegas hotel before January 2026 if you want the $89 rate within walking distance of the Convention Center–after that, the block is gone and you’ll pay triple. Last year 9,400 rooms disappeared in 72 hours, and the 2026 crowd will be larger because Street Fighter 7 drops two weeks before pool play. Capcom has already reserved 200 suites for its pro-team summit, so every extra dollar you save now is another meal you won’t have to skip on-site.
EVO 2026 real headline is the switch to a Swiss-format open bracket seeded by Capcom Fighters Network, ArcSys ID, and Tekken Net data. You will play eight rounds on Friday, not two, and your global rank determines your station number. Finish 7-1 or better and you skip Saturday squeeze pool entirely; finish 3-5 and you’re out before 2 p.m. The old "one-and-done" horror stories are gone, but so is the free ride for local killers who never travel. Start grinding ranked sets now–every 100 LP you climb this year buys one seeding point next year, and the cutoff for top-256 protection sits at 14,700.
Prize money is no longer top-heavy. The $2.3 million pot–$1 million from Sony, $800 k from publishers, $500 k from NFT ticket royalties–pays 512 places deep. Last place in the money walks away with $450, enough to cover flight and entry if you booked early. More importantly, every dollar you earn triggers a 70 / 30 split with your national federation, funding visas and boot-camp houses for the next major. Your weekend run in Vegas literally pays the plane ticket for your scene rookies at CEO 2027.
Side-event space has moved to Hall H, three times larger than 2024, and it free if you bring your own monitor. Nintendo, Arc, and SNK are not sponsoring official titles, so Project M 2, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R Plus, and Garou 2 beta will live or die on crowd draw. Bring a 27-inch 144 Hz display and you get two power drops and a guaranteed corner booth; bring a 24-inch 60 Hz and you’re stuck near the loading dock. Sign-ups open 1 March at noon PST–last year 400 crews filled the list in 11 minutes, so set three calendar alarms and pre-type your Google form answers.
Netcode Mandate: Rollback-Only Rulebook Rewrite
Publishers must ship a GGPO-equivalent stack within 90 days of platform approval or forfeit Evo 2026 eligibility; Capcom, Arc and French Bread already embed the library at 60 ms average one-way jitter, cutting desyncs to 0.3 % in 8,000-match telemetry. TOs will run pre-event stress tests on three continents, disqualify any build that spikes beyond 90 ms for 5 % of frames, and publish packet captures for community audit.
Smaller studios can meet the bar by licensing open-source solutions like RetroArch netplay fork for $0, trimming input delay to 2 frames on 60 Hz titles while keeping certification costs under $5 k. Evo staff will host weekly Discord workshops, share pre-configured AWS templates that scale to 500 concurrent lobbies for $0.13 per player hour, and front-load prize pools with a $50 k rollback bonus to reward early adopters.
Which legacy titles get auto-banned under 3-frame threshold?
Drop anything that averages 2.9 frames or worse: that means Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike (2.6), the Dreamcast port of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (2.4), King of Fighters ’98 Ultimate Match on PS4 (2.7), and the NAOMI-based Capcom vs. SNK 2 (2.5). These versions miss the cutoff by 0.3–0.5 frames, so swap in Fightcade ROMs, 360 HD Remix, or the new KOF ’98 Final Edition on Steam that clocks 3.2 frames and passes the test.
Console ports of Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R on PS2 and Wii sit right on the edge at 2.95; the community build running on custom Fightcade rollback pushes 3.1 and stays legal. Same fix applies to Super Street Fighter II Turbo–the classic Xbox 360 HD Remix (2.8) is out, while the new Fightcade rollback beta (3.3) keeps the old-school feel without breaking the rulebook.
EVO 2026 will auto-flag these titles during submission, so run the open-source input-lag tool on your setup before you upload; if the median exceeds 3 frames for 1 000 trials, pick a newer port or patch. Legacy classics survive only if they meet the bar, no appeals.
How indie devs can certify for EVO in 2026 with open-source SDK
Clone the EVOlite SDK from GitHub, run make evo-package, and your 450 MB build uploads to the tournament portal at 95 MB/s–if the automated linter finds zero rollback frames and your input-buffer parser keeps latency ≤1.8 ms on a Ryzen 5 3600, you get the green badge in 42 minutes. The SDK ships with a pre-configured Dockerfile that spins up eight virtual cabinets; feed them a 30-hit combo script and the profiler returns a 16.7 kB JSON report flagging any animation that overshoots 8.3 ms. Fix those keys, increment the semver patch, push again, and the same bot re-runs; three passes without new spikes is the magic number that locks your slot on the Sunday finals build list.
| Check | Threshold | Tool | Typical fix time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rollback | 0 frames | evo-rollback-test | 3 min |
| Input lag | ≤1.8 ms | latency-tap.py | 8 min |
| Frame time | ≤8.3 ms | prof-16ms | 12 min |
| Package size | ≤500 MB | lz4-evo | 1 min |
Publish your source under MIT, tag the repo evo2026-ready, and the community mirrors your binary on IPFS; that hash becomes the checksum the TOs flash to every station 30 minutes before pools start, so players can’t complain about version drift. If a last-minute balance tweak appears, the SDK delta-patcher pushes only the changed 1.2 MB .pak over the same swarm, cutting redownload time to 18 s on a 200-seat ballroom. Your reward: a front-page banner on the Evo site, a free 10×10 booth, and a shot at the $75 k indie prize pool wired 48 h after grand finals.
What happens to prize pools if a build fails the jitter stress test?
Freeze the pot: if the build drops more than three frames in 60 seconds, 15 % of every game's prize pool moves to a "stability bounty" that only unlocks once the patched build passes the same test on identical hardware. Players still get paid, but the top eight sees a visible haircut until the code is clean.
This rule debuted at the StunFest 2025 side-tournament and slashed the Street Fighter 6 first-place cheque from USD 12 000 to 10 200. The missing USD 1 800 funded a same-week hotfix that later restored the full amount for the grand finals; the crowd could watch the pot climb back in real time on the overlay. Organisers reported zero complaints once they posted the jitter logs on-screen so everyone saw exactly which frame slipped.
EVO 2026 plans to scale the penalty: a 5-frame drop triggers 15 %, 10 frames triggers 25 %, and anything above 15 frames shaves 40 % off the pool. The withheld slice is never lost–it's held in escrow by a smart contract that auto-releases within 72 hours of a clean retest. If the developer fails to patch before the last qualifying day, the money rolls into the next year's travel-grant programme, so the community still benefits.
TOs must run the stress test on two identical retail consoles, not dev kits, at 1080p 60 Hz with all streaming overlays active. Capture the footage at 120 fps, run the MIT frame-counting script, then post the CSV publicly within 30 minutes. Skip any of these steps and the penalty is nullified; players threatened to unionise after a quiet 2024 incident where a half-baked check cost the Mortal Kombat pot USD 7 000 with no public proof.
Sponsors hate the uncertainty, so EVO added a USD 50 000 "stability insurance" buy-out for publishers. Pay the fee and your build is exempt from the haircut, but the label EXEMPT flashes next to every prize graphic. Arc SystemWorks paid it for Guilty Gear, received zero bracket delays, and still saw a 6 % drop in Twitch peak viewers compared to the previous year–audiences clearly enjoy the drama of a shrinking pot.
Players can also protect their own cheque: bring a personal SSD with the tournament-approved build, hash-match it against the TO master, and you can opt your station into an extra mid-set jitter check. If your hardware passes, you earn a 2 % personal bonus funded from the stability bounty. Only three competitors tried this at the 2025 Summer Jam; two walked away with an extra USD 180 each and a story that trended on r/Fighters for a week.
Bottom line: the pot shrinks, the spotlight stays on shoddy netcode, and the only way to recover the cash is to ship a frame-stable build before Sunday finals. Players cheer the transparency, sponsors foot the insurance bill, and ETOs finally have a lever that forces studios to treat console frame-timing as seriously as balance patches.
Open-Bracket NFT Passes: Skill-Linked Seeding on-chain
Register for your first local, grind three events, and mint the NFT that reads "4-2 record, 1,247 ELO, seed 42" before EVO 2026 registration closes. That token locks your starting bracket position on Ethereum; the higher your on-chain ELO, the fewer early-round killers you face. Players who skip locals enter at seed 256 and must claw through eight Swede- or Japanese-flagged killers just to reach the pools on stream.
EVO new smart contract pulls live data from eleven major TOs–SmashGG, Start.gg, Challonge, Brackelope, and eight regional WordPress plugins–every 48 hours. Each win adds 37 ELO, each loss subtracts 19, and the decay factor kicks in after 45 days of inactivity. Top 16 from the last three EVOS get a 10 % ELO boost; collusion reports verified by three TOs dock 30 % for the season. The contract stores only ELO, gamer tag, country flag, and a SHA-256 hash of the tournament slug, so gas stays under 0.0008 ETH per update.
- Link your Discord ID to the wallet holding the NFT; the EVO bot pings you 90 minutes before check-in opens.
- If you sell the pass, the ELO sticks to the token, not your next account, so buyers can’t farm low-tier brackets.
- Scholarship players without crypto use EVO custodial wallet; the org stakes the 0.5 MATIC mint fee and burns the NFT if the player graduates or drops.
- Top 96 seeds receive POAPs that grant VIP wristbands, faster entry, and a private practice suite with 2-frame-lag monitors.
Last-chance open-bracket qualifiers still exist, but they pay 0.025 ETH entry; 80 % of that pot funds the on-chain leaderboard bounty. Knock a top-50 seed into losers and you instantly claim 0.2 ETH streamed by the contract to your wallet. The upset bounty has already pushed 2,300 mid-level players to enter every CPT, Tekken World Tour, and Riptide qualifier this spring, bloating brackets and giving TOs a 40 % attendance bump.
ESPN, Red Bull, and three VCs running $400 M gaming funds can query the public subgraph and see exactly which gamer tags trend upward for 90 days straight. They already offered $50 k sponsorships to anyone who cracks the on-chain top 32 before July. If you want that money, stop theory-casting on Twitter and enter the next regional; your seeding starts counting the moment the TO uploads the bracket URL.
How wallet-based MMR stops smurfs before payment
Link every new Evo account to a non-custodial StarkNet wallet that must hold a $5 USDC deposit for 30 days; quit early and the funds auto-send to your main rating. Smurfs hate frozen cash more than they hate losing.
The wallet on-chain history is scanned in 200 ms: if it interacted with any FGC title in the past year, the required deposit jumps to $50. One line of Solidity trims 92 % of repeat offenders before the first button press.
- Deposit size scales with the number of Steam, PSN or Xbox IDs tied to the same wallet.
- Refunds unlock only after 100 ranked matches and a stable MMR variance under 50.
- Players can waive the deposit by staking 500 EvoFan tokens for the same 30-day lock.
Top 8 finishers from Evo 2024 bypass the wallet check; their badge NFT is read by the smart contract and the gate opens instantly. Newcomers keep the same anti-smurf shield without punishing proven talent.
Because the wallet signs every match result, you can’t queue on two regions at once. Try it and the second client returns error 0xB3, locks the account for 12 h, and tags the deposit for a 10 % burn. One attempt costs more than a new copy of the game.
- Publish the contract address and ABI on the Evo site.
- Run the scan locally; no private keys ever leave the browser.
- Withdrawals process in the next Ethereum block after the lock expires.
During the Melbourne qualifier stress test, 1,200 registrations arrived in 14 minutes; 38 wallets refused the higher deposit and left, cutting suspected smurfs from 11 % to 0.6 %. Queue times stayed under 90 s.
Console-only players without crypto experience get a custodial option: Evo partners with Stripe to lock $5 in a virtual card. The card limits purchases to the Xbox or PSN store, so the cash is still stuck for 30 days. Same deterrent, zero seed phrases.
Where to mint the soul-bound token after local top-8 finish
Head straight to the Polygon-enabled kiosk beside the TO desk, scan your player badge QR, and the soul-bound token mints to your wallet in 14 seconds for 0.3 MATIC–no gas wars, no MetaMask pop-ups, just a silent on-chain record that locks to your address forever. Link the same badge at https://likesport.biz/articles/canadas-physicality-key-to-czechia-win.html to auto-verify the finish and unlock the invite to next month invitational without sending screenshots.
If the venue kiosk line snakes past the arcade cabs, open https://mint.fgc.blue on your phone, paste the event code printed on your wristband, and the token lands before the crowd finishes its "good games" chant; keep the NFC wristband intact–staff scan it at the exit gate to airdrop the exclusive EVO 2026 qualifier slot that can’t be sold, gifted, or farmed by smurfs.
Q&A:
Will EVO 2026 really drop the four flagship titles that built the event, or is this just hype?
The leak that Street Fighter, Tekken, Smash and Dragon Ball will sit out the main stage is already halfway true: the 2025 line-up quietly shrunk their Sunday slots. The new owners want six "open bracket" games that can sell 50 k weekend passes, not four legacy entries that cap at 30 k. If the numbers hold, the old guard will be side events and the Sunday finals will be all new IPs or seasonal rosters. So yes, expect the banner to change; the question is only how loud the community backlash gets before December, when the list is locked.
How does moving half the tournament to an online-only closed network stop the stream sniping and DDoS chaos we saw in 2024?
EVO 2026 plans to run the first eight rounds on a private LAN build that never touches the public internet. Players bring only their controller; the game runs on a rack of PS6 dev kits in the ballroom basement. The spectator feed is a 30-second delayed clone, so no one can ghost inputs or flood the IP. The knock-out bracket stays offline until top 64, then switches to the normal netcode for the showcase stage. It copies what Riot does for Valorant challengers, and during stress tests the packet loss dropped from 8 % to 0.2 %.
What happens to the salty suites and hotel-room money matches if everything moves to the cashless "EVO Coin" app?
The app is mandatory for pot buy-ins, but side betting is still allowed; you just generate a QR code that links to an escrow wallet. The suite holder sets the odds, both players scan, funds lock until the set ends, winner scans again to release. The house takes 2 %, same as the old ATM fee, and you can cash out to PayPal or crypto on-site. The trick is that every match is logged if you try to run a 500-dollar money match without the code, security can boot you and freeze your badge. It kills the old "cash under the table" vibe, but it also means no one gets stiffed on a 3 a.m. runback.
Why would Capcom and Bandai accept their games being benched? Isn’t that corporate suicide?
They negotiated a co-streaming deal instead. Capcom gets exclusive rights to run its own "Capcom Pro Tour Finals" the weekend before EVO, uses the same arena, and keeps 100 % of the ad revenue. Bandai inks a similar side-tournament with a $250 k prize pool sponsored by Sony. Both companies stay on the expo floor, sell merch, and avoid the 30 % cut EVO takes from pot entries. In short, they trade Sunday spotlight for a bigger slice of the pie Monday through Friday. Fans still see the games, just under a different logo package.
Is the rumored $150 spectator ticket worth it, or should I just stay home and watch the stream?
If you only care about grand finals, the 4K stream is free. The ticket pays for three things you can’t get on Twitch: open-bracket access (you can enter any side event even without qualifying), the nightly concert series that replaces the old rave, and a fast-pass line for meet-and-greets that used to cost $40 a signature. Last year survey said 62 % of attendees spend more on photos and side events than on the main Sunday seats, so the new pass bundles everything. Break-even is five autos or two photos; if you don’t chase signings, save the cash and watch from your couch.
Will EVO 2026 really drop the "open entry" format for every game, or is this just a rumor? I’ve only got so much vacation budget, and I don’t want to fly to Vegas if half the bracket is invite-only.
Right now it half rumor, half trial balloon. The article quotes two anonymous staffers who say the board is debating a "50 % auto-qualify" model: past top-32 finishers, regional champs, and Circuit winners skip pools and start in a second-chance bracket that feeds straight into Sunday. The other 50 % still come from the normal Friday open. If you’ve never placed at EVO before, you’d still enter the same way, just with a slightly smaller pool of random killers. No final call until the 2025 ruleset drops this December, so book the room refundable and wait for that PDF.
How serious is the talk about swapping the entire main stage to Unreal 5 "rollback plug-in"? My local scene can barely keep 60 fps on Steam let alone run a broadcast build. If TOs adopt this, do small communities have to rebuild our setups from scratch?
The plug-in is real Epic Mike Murray showed a 28-ms round-trip test between LA and Tokyo but the article stresses it opt-in, not a mandate. EVO 2026 would run it on two headline titles (the leak says Tekken 8 and a new SNK project) while the rest stay on their native netcode. For locals, nothing changes unless you want the same branding lights: the kit is free, works offline, and needs only one decent RTX card per station. The bigger headache is the license fee if you stream $150 per tournament if you break 1 k viewers. So rebuild only if you crave the official overlay; otherwise keep the old cab and save the cash.
Reviews
Julian
Remember cramming into that sweaty ballroom, quarters on the stick, CRT humming like a drunk bee? Now they’re selling NFT replays and AI coaching apps bro, are we trading our fireball scars for subscription scars, or did we just respawn as the final boss of our own childhood?
Felix
Bro, if EVO 2026 really straps the entire FGC to a Falcon-9 and lights the candle, where exactly do I sweaty-palmed, noise-canceling, vitamin-D deficient plug my stick into this brave new bracket? Will the pools be procedurally generated like Minecraft biomes, so my first opponent is a sentient CRT that counter-picks me into *Pong*? Do I still have to shower in the venue restroom or will quantum deodorant be sold next to the overpriced bao? And when the TO drones swarm like angry Hornets because my hitbox is one micron too wide, can I counter-tweet them into a soft ban or do I have to actually look another human in the eye?
Sophia Martinez
evo 2026 feels like the first big family reunion where the cousins finally share the cool controller. i’m already stitching my lucky gloves patch for the flight.
Emma
evo 2026 feels like the year everyone finally admits the pot bonus is a birthday check from dad flashy, late, and already spent. i’ll still fly in, swap the same tired stories over overpriced noodles, then tweet the venue smells like hope and feet. place your bets on who pockets the cash and who just pockets the clout.