How's Valve's ranking for Counter-Strike 2 works

2025 is set to be a year of change in Counter-Strike 2, and Valve's ranking is central to it all.

With partnership systems coming to an end, invites for events will soon be required to be based upon Valve's ranking, something we have already revealed our plans to implement with BLAST Bounty, Open, and Rivals.

We're adding the leaderboard to our site so it's easily visible, but it's also important that you can understand how Valve's ranking works, so we've put together this guide to explain everything you need to know about Valve CS2 ranking.

Why Valve are using their ranking system

Referred to by Valve as the Regional Standings system, Valve's aims in using the system are to open up the Counter-Strike ecosystem after years of it being perceived as closed.

Within those years, partnerships have often decided invites to the biggest events, but Valve's ranking instead intends to make tournament invites dependent solely on a team's skill and ability to win their matches.

There are other factors outside the Regional Standings system that are set up to aid Valve's aims, including:

• Tournament operators being forbidden to have business relations with teams.
• All team rewards,, including prize pools, must be public.

Photo: Stephanie Lindgren

The system also aims to give a clear gap between tier one and tier two events, with tier one events being required to invite teams from the top of the leaderboard and blow, while tier two must start with the team placed ninth in the leaderboard and below.

This clear division between events, combined with how the Valve rankings function, will allow for teams within their respective tier to shine. Those in the lower tiers will be able to climb with ease and ascend to the next tier, something that is difficult to do within the current system.

Valve's Regional Standings ranking system explained

Valve's ranking has been criticised, mostly for the fact it often looks different to the most commonly used ranking within Counter-Strike, HLTV's ranking.

However, these disparities only come from the fact that the two rankings are decided upon very different factors.

The Valve Regional Standings ranking system works on the following core principles:

• Heavy focus on recent matches.
• Teams are initially ranked by prize money won.
• Ranking position is affected by the prize money won by beaten opponent, as well as the teams they have beaten.

Photo: Michal Konkol

Like many other things in esports, Valve's Regional Standings ranking system uses the ELO system as a base. This means that every game played will affect a team's position within the standings.

This also means that teams in tier two who play more matches will be able to farm rankings points, as long as they are successful against teams ranked equally to them.

Now, let's take a look at how the Valve rankings are actually calculated by looking at the world's current number one team, Vitality.

How the Valve ranking is calculated

Vitality on the 4th of September 2024 earned a rank value of 1966.7, here is how that was calculated by the Valve ranking system:

The team began with a Starting Rank Value, this is decided by the following factors, of which an average is taken:

• Bounty Offered
• Bounty Collected
• Opponent Network
• LAN Wins

In the case of Vitality, these factors looked like this:

• Bounty Offered: 1.000
• Bounty Collected: 0.766
• Opponent Network: 0.393
• LAN Wins: 0.999

This works out at an average of 0.789.

Photo: Michal Konkol

After that, the following sum should be applied:

• 400 + ( ( Roster_Average - Min_Average ) / ( Max_Average - Min_Average ) ) * 1600 = 1963.3

Which, in the case of Vitality, looked as follows:

• 400 + ( ( 0.789 - 0.000 ) / ( 0.808 - 0.000 ) ) * 1600 = 1963.3

To understand this better, we can go deeper into the aforementioned factors.

• For Bounty Collected, Opponent Network, and LAN wins, only the ten best results in a six month period are considered.
• The raw values for those factors are multiplied by age Weight, or, how recent the match was. Bounty and Opponent Network are then also multiplied by Event Weight, a metric to show how high profile the event in which the match took place was.
  In the case of Vitality, a match at IEM Cologne 2024 has an Event Weight of 1.000, whereas a semi-finals match at BLAST Premier Spring Final presented by Revolut has an Event Weight of 0.660.
  The Event Weight value can also scale through an event, as shown by Vitality's previous game at Spring Final having an Event Weight of 0.654.
• The final value for a factor is the total of the values after those multiplications divided by 10. Bounty Collected is further scaled by the curve function.
• Head to head adjustments are also made based on the starting rank values of the rosters involved.

To work out the Bounty Offered by a roster in Valve's rankings, the following calculations are made:

• First, take the sum of their top 10 scaled winnings.
• Divide that value by the 5th highest value among all rosters.
• The final value (1.00) is scaled by the curve function.

The see Valve's official breakdown of the above explanation, click here.

Photo: Michal Konkol

Concerns about Valve's ranking system and its effects

One big positive that has been brought about by Valve's changes is the return of more tournament organisers to Counter-Strike. PGL and StarLadder have both announced plans to return, and more may do so in the future.

However, this does mean that the tournament calendar for 2025 and beyond is looking more packed than ever, and with players already complaining about burn out, they are concerns this could only get worse in the future.

The Valve CS2 ranking system will greatly favour the most active teams, meaning that teams competing in tier two competitions frequently could climb higher than their true ranking against established top teams on LAN.

Likewise, tier one teams who are aiming to protect themselves and not attend every event so to avoid burnout could also see their ranking hurt by this, therefore limiting their opportunities in the future.

Photo: Michal Konkol

The packed schedule has also seen many of the tournament organisers limit the amount of open qualifiers there actually are for their events, largely due to the fact there is no time for them left within the calendar.

The absence of open qualifiers could mean that at least for a short while after the implementation of the Valve rankings, the system may seem more closed than ever as tier two teams are prevented from truly crossing the bridge into tier one due to invite-only events.

The BLAST World Leaderboard

Until the 2025 season begins and the Valve Regional Standings ranking system is used, BLAST will continue to use the BLAST World Leadeboard to determine the final teams invited to BLAST Premier World Final 2024.

So far, three teams have directly qualified for World Final thanks to event wins, while two slots at the event have also been decided by their placing on the leaderboard.

Photo: Michal Konkol

Spirit, NAVI, and Vitality are the teams to have qualified to the event because of trophies they have already won this year. These trophies were won at IEM Katowice, the PGL Major Copenhagen, and IEM Cologne respectively.

Due to Spirit winning both IEM Katowice and BLAST Premier Spring Final presented by Revolut, another spot at the event has been awarded to teams placing highly on the BLAST World Leaderboard.