The Upthrust India Rising Series semi-finals start Sunday with 32 teams, four groups and only 16 grand final spots
The tournament that Krafton pitched as its first genuinely open-for-all BGMI event of the year has reached the part where the field gets real. Sunday marks day one of the Upthrust Esports India Rising Series 2026 semi-finals, a four-day round-robin with 32 teams across four groups and only 16 spots available in the grand finals that follow from April 24 to 26.
For context, the tournament opened with more than 500 teams coming out of the in-game qualifiers in late March. What remains this weekend is the last cut before the money stage. The full prize pool sits at ₹10 lakh, with ₹3 lakh going to the winner, and more importantly the series has been flagged as a potential pathway to slots in BMPS 2026 for teams that come out of it with momentum.
How the semi-finals work
The format is straightforward on paper and brutal in practice. 32 teams have been split into four groups, and each group plays across all four days from April 19 to 22. At the end of the weekend the combined standings are ranked, and the top 16 go through to the grand finals. Everyone else is out. There is no survival stage, no wildcard round. Finish outside the top sixteen overall and the season is done.
That kind of pressure tends to reward consistency over single hero games. A team can win a map convincingly on day one and still miss out if it cannot back it up. Krafton's scheduling has four matches per group per day, so every side gets plenty of chances to bank points, which in turn means mistakes early in the weekend show up in the final table.
Why this tournament matters for the scene
The Upthrust Rising Series has been designed to do something the BGIS playoffs have not always done, which is give unestablished rosters a genuine shot at the top bracket. The open-for-all format and the in-game qualifier route let teams qualify without needing an organisational backer. Over the course of Round 1 and Round 2 a handful of squads that nobody had heard of in January have built real profiles.
The sub-plot of the weekend is the BMPS 2026 slot question. Krafton has not fully confirmed how many direct qualification spots the Rising Series will feed into BMPS, but the general expectation across the scene is that at least the top two or three from the grand finals will end up with a line straight into India's biggest BGMI event of the year. For a team that came through the 512-squad qualifier stage, that kind of reward changes the whole calculation for the rest of 2026.
What to watch from day one
Early days of round-robin formats tend to be scrappier than the business end, but there is no margin here for a slow start. Teams that drop points on day one usually find themselves chasing the format for the rest of the weekend, and four days is not enough to make up for two early bad games.
Streams are on the KRAFTON India Esports YouTube channel, and the full schedule across the four days has matches running from early evening into the night Indian time. If you are picking up the tournament for the first time, the opening day tends to tell you which rosters have actually clicked as a unit and which ones are still working out rotations under live pressure. By Wednesday evening we will know which 16 sides are still standing, and which of them has the form to turn a ten-lakh prize pool into a BMPS 2026 launchpad.
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