VCT NA Stage 1 Challengers betting picks – Saturday, February 26

Esportbet brings you free betting predictions for a pair of VALORANT Champions Tour (VCT) 2022 North America Stage 1 Challengers matches on Saturday, February 26. Here are our selections for Sentinels vs OpTic Gaming and The Guard vs XSET, with top odds courtesy of BetOnline.


Sentinels will clash with OpTic Gaming (formerly Envy) on Saturday in one of the most heavily-anticipated matches of the week. The top VALORANT betting sites believe Sentinels should secure a comfortable victory, which seems fair, but we wouldn’t underestimate OpTic.

Admittedly, OpTic have managed only one win across the first two weeks (1-1), and even that came against NRG, but that’s hardly worse than Sentinel’s performances. They are 2-0, but Sentinels needed three maps to make it past NRG (2-1) and Knights (2-1), which isn’t great.

We don’t see a problem with Sentinels being priced as the favourites, but they have not looked dominant enough to justify their current price. We expect a highly competitive series and a high chance of a third-map decider.

This bout is very similar to the Sentinels vs OpTic Gaming clash since XSET look stronger on paper, but have yet to show anything remarkable. XSET are 1-1 with a win against Evil Geniuses (2-0) and a 1-2 defeat against Cloud9 (1-2). On the other side, The Guard are 2-0, with wins against Luminosity Gaming (2-0) and 100 Thieves (1-2).

It’s tough to take much from those results, knowing that XSET won only against Luminosity, while The Guard defeated the shaky Evil Geniuses and 100 Thieves before the recent roster changes. So even though there isn’t much to separate The Guard and XSET results-wise, we have to remember that The Guard won against XSET (19-17, 13-4) just over two weeks ago.

XSET should be favoured, but at +162, it’s hard to pass on The Guard.