Valve Publishes New CS2 Tournament Rules

Building on a new ruleset released before the launch of Counter-Strike 2 last year, Valve has just published an update to the CS2 tournament ruling. The latest batch of rules concerns tournament licensing and organisation regulations for tournament operators working with Counter-Strike 2 after 2025. Valve recognised the substantial overhaul as potentially disruptive, with the company writing in a blog post, ‘… we expect that there will be some rough edges as we transition to the new requirements.’

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What Are The New CS2 Rules?

The new rules pertain to the CS2 ‘Open Circuit’, and at the top of the table sits the core requirement that all events are split into two types: Ranked and Unranked. Both of these will require operators to seek differing licenses. To put a definition on those terms, Unranked events will not contribute towards the centralised team standings operated by Valve. They also have prize pool restrictions – $100,000 per event or $250,000 per year.

Ranked events must rely on Valve’s standings and a qualification structure – they’re prohibited from directly inviting teams to compete. There’s also a new ‘Tier’ system that determines which teams can compete in a tournament based on their position in the overall standings.

Any operators looking to hold Tier 1 events in 2026 must announce said tournaments before January 2025. BLAST’s latest roadmap is one of the few working examples we have of this new operating model being put into practice.

Unfortunately, some players have voiced concerns about the new competitive update. We’ve seen complaints surfacing online talking about how the same teams will get their invite to the top-tier tournaments every time, making it impossible for new or low-level teams to rise.

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