Counter-Strike 2 gets a new Tournament Rulebook for 2025
Earlier this year, Valve went public with their new emphasis on ensuring that every tournament is played on a ‘level playing field‘ with fair opportunities to participate for all. The new CS2 Tournament Rulebook for 2025 backs up this approach with clear guidelines to be followed – let’s take a closer look.
Ranked vs Unranked CS2 Tournaments
While every tournament organizer will need a Limited Game Tournament License, Valve is ranking the CS2 tournaments as follows depending on:
- Unranked events – a tournament which does not contribute to Valve Regional Standings and hence does not affect seeding for other tournaments. These individual tournaments should not exceed $100,000 in prizes.
- Ranked events – seeding depending on direct Valve Regional Standings, Closed Qualifiers, Open Qualifiers and Wildcard Invites
Naturally, regardless if you’re interested in CS2 betting or not, ranked events are more competitive, more exciting and have more on the line for competing teams. Here’s a closer look at some specific details for ranked events:
- Invites should be 1.5 times the number of Qualified rosters
- Direct Valve Regional Standings are regulated by Valve and updated monthly
- Invited teams may seed to the Main Event directly or require a Closed Qualifier as the best CS2 teams
- Open Qualifiers must be truly open to any team in the specified region and demographic
- Wildcard invites involve players with a history of playing in the VRS or winning a tournament in the past year
Standardized Tiers of CS2 Tournaments in 2025
Beyond the disparity between Ranked and Unranked tournaments, Valve also outlined a Tier system to specify the quality of the tournament which may alter CS2 odds:
- Tier 1 – direct VRS invites with the top-ranked rosters (from Rank 1) proceeding directly to the Main Event, a total of 16 rosters are invited besides Tier 2 talent.
- Tier 2 – organizer may invite teams from Rank 9 or lower or use Open Qualifiers or both systems.
- Wildcard tournament – a new entry in CS2, this involves including an unlimited number of Wildcard invites, filtered based on achievements apart from other rosters.
Keeping everything fair
In addition, there are other approaches Valve is utilizing to keep things fair. This involves placing an emphasis on the timing of announcements, enforcing full disclosure from event organizers and minimizing exclusivity and discrimination at all costs.
Valve believes this emphasis on regulation and fairness will be key to maintaining a sustainable esports scene for years to come.
If you fancy reading through the entire press release from Valve – feel free to take a look.
How will this impact CS2?
Tournament organizes such as BLAST and PGL have already made it clear that their respective invite-only tournaments are changing their structures to align with Valve’s vision for tournaments.
Meanwhile, for CS2 betting, this system provides a clear classification as to which tournaments are more exciting esports betting opportunities based on their qualification system and tier. In addition, it’ll be worth staying up to date with the Valve Regional Standings to better understand tournament seeding.
What about Dota?
A closing thought brings us to Dota, Valve’s other high-profile esports scene. We’re curious to see whether Valve chooses to implement a similar approach for their Dota 2025 tournaments, though nothing has been made public so far. The question to ask – why not?
