Only a few VCT LOCK//IN pick’em brackets remain perfect after 2 days

Pick’ems are a great way to stoke fan engagement, but for the VCT LOCK//IN event kicking off the partnership era of VALORANT in 2023, picking and choosing results feels more like filling out a March Madness college basketball bracket than ever before.

For context, no one has ever filled out a perfect March Madness bracket, and according to the numbers on VLR.gg, most of the over 30,000 users who submitted pick’ems for VCT LOCK//IN have fallen short too.

Only 5,759 users got all five opening-round picks right after the first two days of the LOCK//IN, correctly picking NRG, Giants, Karmine Corp, DRX, and Cloud9 to win their first matches, according to the Leaderboard page on VLR. That figure is good enough for 17.8 percent of all submitted pick’ems.

As for which match caused the most damage to perfect pick’em submissions, it appears that Cloud9’s dominant victory over Paper Rex was the most destructive since over 56 percent of submitted pick’ems had Paper Rex winning the opening match against the top NA team. Coincidentally, had DRX’s shaky win over BBL Esports gone the other way, the amount of remaining perfect pick’ems would be far lower, as only 2.1 percent of submissions had BBL winning that opening match.

There are a surprising amount of pick’em submissions with zero correct picks: 3,639 submissions, or 11.3 percent. But this figure likely includes a large amount of pick’ems where the user forgot to make their picks.

The final set of opening matches in the Alpha bracket is set to begin later today, which guarantees that more perfect pick’ems will be ruined. Whether or not a perfect complete bracket has been picked remains to be seen.