Counter-Strike is at its best when teams compete on a level playing field and when ability is the only limit to their success.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen professional Counter-Strike drift away from that ideal. The ecosystem has become gradually less open, with access to the highest levels of competition increasingly gated by business relationships.

We think that Counter-Strike should be an open sport. So we’re going to add new requirements to running large-scale competitive events. The finer details are still in progress, but here are the broad strokes:

• Tournament organizers will no longer have unique business relationships or other conflicts of interest with teams that participate in their events.
• Invitations to all tournaments will use our ranking system (detailed here), or otherwise be determined by open qualifiers.
• Any compensation for participating teams—prize pool or otherwise—will be made public and will be driven by objective criteria that can be inspected by the community.

Since tournament organizers have existing long term commitments, these requirements will take effect as of 2025. There will be some rough edges to the transition, but we’re committed to the long-term health of Counter-Strike as a sport and are looking forward to its bright and open future.

A huge W for Valve. Bringing more meritocracy is a great deal for CS. All franchise leagues are terrible for the scene, potentially crippling the viewership. Teams such as EG (Love the team hate the management) must think twice before bagging their season and not accomplishing anything really…

@kate

I agree, We do have the Information and Discussion thread pinned, so probably put the matches as comments, but they will be rendered slightly different than normal comments. But if @HyperCube is fine with it he can post the matches in there for the time being.

Whatever works well for you guys. Having alot of posts is fine, as it should engage more people I think, even though not everyone is interested in it.

That was a surprise. Happy for Big, and a weird feeling for Astralis.

I also dont get the hate people have for BlameF. Hes a capable IGL, and I have no doubt about him. Hes always performed out of his mind, single-handedly carrying the team before device joined. And yet now I see people just piling on him. I genuinely dont get it.