Seven New Teams Just Joined the Road to the BBQ World Cup in a Single Weekend

The road to the BBQ World Cup just had its biggest weekend yet. Across three countries and four events, seven new teams punched their tickets to Las Vegas, where a $1,000,000 prize waits next April.

The haul ran from the American heartland to the Gold Coast of Australia and, for the first time, to New Zealand.

A qualifier is a sanctioned contest that hands its top finishers a seat in the 2027 field. Every event is allotted its own number of seats, so a single weekend can send anywhere from one team to several.

This one sent seven, and it decided a few of them by margins you could measure with a coin flip.

With the weekend in the books, the field now stands at 55 teams from ten countries, with 45 of the 100 seats still open.

Here is how the seven earned theirs.

The American Heartland Sent Four

The biggest field of the weekend fired in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where the BBQ and Fly-In on the River drew 83 teams to the downtown riverfront for its first year carrying BBQ World Cup stakes.

The KCBS Master Series contest shares its grounds with a small-aircraft fly-in, which is where it gets its name, and this year it carried two seats to Vegas.

Triple H BBQ took Grand Champion and the first seat, winning by 5.75 points over a deep field. Bill and Andrea Heyen run the team out of Gillespie, Illinois, and they are not new to the top of a leaderboard.

They won the 2021 American Royal Invitational, one of the most prestigious titles in American competition barbecue, and finished third overall in the 2022 KCBS Team of the Year standings.

They travel and cook with their three sons, Billy, Colton and Cooper.

BBQ Maestros took Reserve Grand Champion and the second seat. Scott Regal leads the team and runs BBQ Maestros, a specialty barbecue store in Indianapolis that sells smokers and rubs and teaches cooking classes, some of them co-led by nine-time American Royal Grand Champion Chris Marks.

Regal built the store to bring low-and-slow barbecue to central Indiana, and now his competition team is taking it to Las Vegas.

Fourteen hundred miles east, in Hiram, Maine, the Kora Kares for Kids contest paired a KCBS Master Series cook-off with a motorcycle ride-in that raises money for Shriners Hospitals for Children.

It carried two seats, and a 51-team field chased them.

Old Virginia Smoke won Grand Champion, taking first in pork and first in ribs on the way to the title.

Luke Darnell and his wife Kim have run the team out of Bristow, Virginia since 2012, and their record is deep.

They were 2016 World Food BBQ champions, the 2017 KCBS Chicken Team of the Year, and the 2021 American Royal chicken champions, and they cooked on Food Network's BBQ USA with Michael Symon.

Smoke Sisters took Reserve Grand Champion by 5.19 points to claim the second Maine seat, and they did it as the youngest team ever to qualify for the BBQ World Cup.

Where most of the field is built on a decade of travel and hardware, the Smoke Sisters earned their place at the front end of a career that is only starting.

A young team beating a 51-team field is exactly the kind of result that tells you the sport is growing new roots.

The Gold Coast Came Down to a Single Point

Australia's final qualifier of the season fired on the Gold Coast, where the Vegas Showdown Beer and BBQ Classic ran under Australian Barbecue Alliance rules with two seats on the line.

The finish was the tightest of the weekend. The top three teams were separated by two points, 1,406 to 1,405 to 1,404 on the ABA's scale.

Big GC's BBQ won by that single point. Grant and Fiona Coleman cook out of Toowoomba, Queensland, and Grant is one of the more traveled names in Australian barbecue.

He represented Australia at the World's Barbecue contest at the 2018 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, where his team took second in brisket cooking with Australian beef, a landmark result for a non-American entry at a major United States event.

The second seat came with a twist. Dusty Que finished second by that lone point, but they had already qualified earlier in the season at Meatstock Sydney, so their place was secure and the Vegas seat rolled down to the next eligible team.

That team was Big Smoke BBQ in third, one point further back again.

Big Smoke is Daniel Barrett, who has competed on the Australian and international circuits since 2016 and won the 2017 Australian barbecue series title.

He also founded Four Monkeys BBQ, a rub label out of Melbourne, and took the 2022 Barbeques Galore title along the way.

Two Australian teams left the Gold Coast bound for Vegas, decided by the width of two points.

New Zealand Puts Its First Flag in the Field

The last of the seven came from a country that had never been on the board. Cook Cartel won King of the Mountain, a New Zealand contest run out of Taranaki, to become the first New Zealand team to qualify for the BBQ World Cup.

The team is a West Auckland family operation, brothers Michael, Brian and Steve Cook, and they are one of the most decorated names in New Zealand barbecue.

Their trophy shelf is long. They were the 2024 New Zealand national champions and the 2023 national brisket champions, they had already won King of the Mountain once before, and they became the first international team ever to win at Meatstock Sydney, where Steve Cook posted a perfect score in one category.

A win at home now carries them across the Pacific to Las Vegas.

New Zealand joins a field that keeps reaching into new corners of the map. It is the tenth country in the bracket, and it arrived the same way most of the others did, through a team that was already the best on its home soil and finally had a stage big enough to prove it beyond it.

A Field That Keeps Getting Bigger

One weekend added seven teams, three of them by margins under six points and one of them by a single point.

That is the shape of the road now. The qualifiers are no longer a slow trickle of American contests.

They are a global schedule that can turn a bracket from 48 teams to 55 in the space of four events on three continents.

The math from here is simple. The 2027 field will hold 100 teams.

Fifty-five are locked, from ten countries, and 45 seats remain. The fall brings some of the biggest events on the calendar, which means the next surge of names could come just as fast as this one did.

For seven new teams, the waiting is over. From an 83-team riverfront in Missouri to a one-point finish on the Gold Coast to a first-ever flag from New Zealand, the biggest weekend the road has seen sent all of them to the same place.

The BBQ World Cup and Expo runs in Las Vegas from April 8 to 11, 2027, with $1,000,000 on the line, and the field chasing it has never been this full or this worldwide.

Sources

Results and event details: KMZU on the BBQ and Fly-In on the River (kmzu.com), the Kora Shriners (korashriners.org), and the Australian Barbecue Alliance (ausbbq.com.au). Team records: Old Virginia Smoke (oldvirginiasmoke.com), BBQ Maestros (bbqindy.com), Four Monkeys BBQ (fourmonkeysbbq.com.au), and Cook Cartel (cookcartel.co.nz). Qualified-team and field data: the BBQ World Cup Qualified Pitmasters tracker and the Meet the Field roster on bbqunited.com. Hero image of Old Virginia Smoke's Grand Champion win courtesy of Old Virginia Smoke.