Everything you need to know about the vivo Pro Kabaddi Season 7 playoffs

With the seventh season of vivo Pro Kabaddi in the last leg of its league stage, fans are now looking forward to more edge-of-the-seat action as the fight for being crowned the Season 7 champions intensifies in the playoffs. As five teams have already made their claim on a playoffs spot and the final place also likely to be taken up soon, prokabaddi.com takes a look at the format of this season’s playoffs and what fans can look forward to in the coming week at the EKA Arena by TransStadia in Ahmedabad.

A closer competition

Since the zonal format has been done away with, the playoffs now feature the top six teams from the league overall based on their points, which has already made the battle for qualification tougher than ever. The top two teams will now automatically make the semi-finals while the remaining four will battle it out in eliminators on Monday, 14 October.

Eliminator 1 will see:

The team ranked 3^rd play the team ranked 6^th 

While, Eliminator 2 witnesses:

The team ranked 4^th play the team ranked 5^th

Two teams from here will progress to the next stage after a day’s rest where they take on the big two, who have finished the league stages with the most points, in the semi-finals on Wednesday, 16 October. Any mistake here will mean instant elimination as well so no team can afford to take it easy.

The first Semi-Final has:

The team ranked 1^st battle the Winner of Eliminator 1

And the second Semi-Final will be between:

The team ranked 2^nd and the Winner of Eliminator 2

The winners of the two semi-finals will have earned the right to fight it out on Saturday, 19 October for the opportunity to secure the ultimate prize in kabaddi, the vivo Pro Kabaddi title.

No second chances

The new format has done away with the Qualifiers which were a part of the playoffs earlier and gave a distinct advantage to the top two teams since they had a chance to secure a spot in the final even if they lost their first playoffs match. Now, there are no do-overs for the teams, which means that one mistake could be the end of their hopes of winning the title. This gives even more gravity to each moment of each match and promises fans an exciting week of panga.

With five matches packed into three days of action and little recovery time for kabaddi fans in between, this playoffs race will undoubtedly be extremely engaging, possibly making it the toughest one yet.