Valorant player reveals how long matches can actually last

Some Valorant matches seem like they can last forever, so one player decided to test and find out the maximum amount of time you can actually spend in a game.

Regular games in Valorant are played until one team has won 13 rounds, and if you’ve played any of Riot’s new FPS, you know this can take quite a while.

But what’s the longest a match could theoretically last? Well to start, the maximum amount of rounds you could see in one game is 25 – 13 for the winning team, and 12 for the losing side.

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Thanks to an in-depth breakdown from Reddit user ‘quarkez,’ we also know that each round lasts, at most, 100 seconds, or one minute 40 seconds. There’s also seven seconds of transition after each round (this changes to 10 seconds after the final round for the victory screen).

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Next we get to the buy phase, which is 45 seconds in the first, halftime and overtime rounds, and 30 seconds for all others. So if you feel like the Buy Phase at the beginning of matches seems longer, then good news! You’re not crazy.

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But, planting the Spike can increase the amount of time in a round by 45 seconds – the amount of time it takes for the bomb to detonate. If a player starts placing it with four seconds left, they can extend each match by 45 additional seconds.

Add in the 80 seconds of Agent Select before the match even begins, and we get 4683 second – or 78 minutes and three seconds – as the maximum amount of time a regular Valorant match can last.

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This is much longer than Riot’s 30-50 minute estimated match time, but again, the chances of a game going the distance to be a marathon like this are astronomically small.

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For Spike Rush, Valorant’s new express-style mode, the maximum time you could spend in a match while taking into account the same factors as before comes out to just over 19 minutes.

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So if you’re looking to get a few quick regular Valorant matches in on limited time, it seems to be much safer to expect at least 45 minutes per match or longer instead of the 30-50 minute estimate given by Riot.