Counter-Strike 2: Premier Season Duration & Rank Distribution
Counter-Strike 2 has introduced many new features including a new matchmaking system, the MR12 system and a new ranking system. The new ranking system now is similar to an ELO system where each player would be assigned a number according to their performance and they would have their games affected by the ratings. Winning a game against higher elo players would result in a higher rating gain while losing to lower rated players would result in losing more points and vice versa.
The premier matchmaking has been a feature in CS:GO but was an optional way to queue as players could just queue individual maps as well. For CS2, the old ranking system exists for competitive mode however, the ranks are for each map meanwhile the premier mode uses the CS Rating system.
CS2 per-map rankings as shown in the trailer by Valve. Source
Premier matchmaking and Counter-Strike 2 in general uses the old MR12 system that has been used in the previous counter-strike titles years ago. However, there hasn’t been any changes to the economy that was being used in the previous MR15 system.
Read more: Counter-Strike 2 Max Round Changes: Thoughts & Suggestions
CS2 Premier Season Durations:
As observed during the release of the game, the premier mode in CS2 is supposedly meant to have seasons during which players can earn a rating to climb the leaderboards until the season ends. When the game mode was introduced in the Beta version it was labeled as “Beta Season” in the leaderboards, once the game had released they had reset the ratings; marking the start of Season 1.
Afterwards the seasons started to last less longer than Season 1. Here are the current duration of all the premier mode seasons in Counter-Strike 2:
Beta Season: September 1, 2023 - September 28, 2023 (27 days)
Season 1: 28 September, 2023 - 27 January, 2025 (515 days - 1 year, 4 months, 27 days)
Season 2: 29 January, 2025 - 14 July, 2025 (167 days - 5 months, 16 days)
Season 3: 15 July, 2025 - TBA
|
Season |
Start date |
End date |
|
Beta Season |
Sep 1, 2023 |
Sep 28, 2023 |
|
Season 1 |
Sep 28, 2023 |
Jan 27, 2025 |
|
Season 2 |
Jan 29, 2025 |
Jul 14, 2025 |
|
Season 3 |
Jul 15, 2025 |
TBA |
Current CS2 Ratings Distributions
Season 3:
Season 3 Duration: 15 July, 2025 - TBA
Season 3 Changes:
Season 3 started on the 15th of July, 2025. There is no confirmed date on when the season will actually end and Valve will probably either give us an update before its going to end or it may end after the Bucharest major if it follows the trend of the previous season.
The ranks were reset along with the map pool being updated with Overpass replacing Anubis in the active duty pool.
Season 2:
Season Duration: 29 January, 2025 - 14 July, 2025
Season 2 Changes:
Season 2 started on the 29th of January, 2025 and will last till the end of the Austin Major. There is no confirmed date on when the season will actually end but the Austin Major will end on the 22nd of June, 2025 so the season is most likely to end after that. Update: Valve has announced that the season will end on the 14th of July, 2025.
The ranks were reset along with the map pool being updated and Train replaced Vertigo in the active duty pool.
They have changed the minimum rating threshold during the middle of Season 1 and now you do lose rating when you’re under 4,000 rating however you can not go below 1,000 rating and that is the rating that you can achieve.
Season 2 Ranking Distribution:
As of April 2025, you can see the complete statistics for each rating bracket below: (Updated April 25, 2025):
|
Rating |
Playerbase % |
|
1,000 - 1,999 |
2.61% |
|
2,000 - 2,999 |
4.53% |
|
3,000 - 3,999 |
7.62% |
|
4,000 - 4,999 |
7.47% |
|
5,000 - 5,999 |
5.61% |
|
6,000 - 6,999 |
5.01% |
|
7,000 - 7,999 |
5.40% |
|
8,000 - 8,999 |
5.62% |
|
9,000 - 9,999 |
6.91% |
|
10,000 - 10,999 |
5.13% |
|
11,000 - 11,999 |
5.56% |
|
12,000 - 12,999 |
5.49% |
|
13,000 - 13,999 |
5.13% |
|
14,000 - 14,999 |
5.68% |
|
15,000 - 15,999 |
3.80% |
|
16,000 - 16,999 |
3.67% |
|
17,000 - 17,999 |
3.24% |
|
18,000 - 18,999 |
2.72% |
|
19,000 - 19,999 |
2.64% |
|
20K+ |
6.16% |
Season 1:
Season Duration: 28 September, 2023 - 27 January, 2025
Season 1 changes:
As Counter-Strike 2 was released, the premier ratings were reset and a new season had begun. There hasn’t been any info on how long this season lasts as Valve has not clarified this yet. However, there has been some regular changes to the premier mode and the rating system. They have also changed the promotion/relegation matches to be after every color change of the ratings instead of every thousand mark so you have a promotion game at 5k intervals instead of 1k.
There is no minimum rating threshold however, you do NOT lose any rating points for a loss if you’re under 4,000 rating. This is probably in-place to make sure you don’t end up with a really low rating like under 1k or even in triple digits. Once you go past 4k rating then you will lose points if you suffer a loss.
Ranking Distribution:
This was fixed a few weeks after the release of CS2 and Leetify has tracked almost ~2 million players and have done the rating distribution since the replay outage. You can see the rating distribution for Season 1 below:
The majority of players at the moment are under 10,000 rating at the moment with the most players being in the 10k-15k rating bracket. The current season has had a few updates regarding the rating calculation and the amount of rating that you gain/lose per match.
You can see the complete statistics for each rating bracket below: (Updated March 3, 2024)
|
Rating |
Playerbase % |
|
1,000 - 1,999 |
0.20% |
|
2,000 - 2,999 |
0.60% |
|
3,000 - 3,999 |
1.70% |
|
4,000 - 4,999 |
3.30% |
|
5,000 - 5,999 |
3.20% |
|
6,000 - 6,999 |
3.60% |
|
7,000 - 7,999 |
4.60% |
|
8,000 - 8,999 |
5.70% |
|
9,000 - 9,999 |
8.50% |
|
10,000 - 10,999 |
7.20% |
|
11,000 - 11,999 |
7.80% |
|
12,000 - 12,999 |
8.30% |
|
13,000 - 13,999 |
8.20% |
|
14,000 - 14,999 |
9.50% |
|
15,000 - 15,999 |
6.40% |
|
16,000 - 16,999 |
5.70% |
|
17,000 - 17,999 |
4.80% |
|
18,000 - 18,999 |
3.70% |
|
19,000 - 19,999 |
3.10% |
|
20K+ |
3.80% |
Many users have calibrated at a very low rating as compared to their CS:GO rank or their rating in the Beta season. If we take a look at the leaderboards at the moment, the leaderboard has a slow shift in the ratings.
In late October, we had a handful of people above 25,000 rating with the bottom of the leaderboard being at 17k rating however now, at the start of December we can see many people that are above 25k and the bottom of the leaderboard was at 23,000 rating. The players above 30k rating have decreased though probably due to inactivity.
Beta Season:
Season Duration: September 1, 2023 - September 28, 2023 (27 days)
As Counter-strike 2 is currently in beta; there is still incomplete data on how the new premier ratings work but, there has been data still gathered from the leaderboards and previous user stats and people have started to figure out how the ranking distribution works.
Keep in mind as this is still incomplete data as many people either do not have access to the beta or haven’t won their initial 10 games in order to receive a rating. Leetify has analyzed around ~440k players who had a CS2 ratings and this is how the CS2 ratings distribution were:
Source: Leetify
The Leetify data is a little outdated as it’s been out for a while and players have been still playing to receive their rank. Their blog have mentioned that the highest rating they have processed is 33,224 however, there are people who have broken the 35k mark and there are 2 people currently ranking at 35k+ with the highest rated player having a CS Rating of 35,864 on the in-game leaderboards at the time of writing. There are only 13 people who are ranking at the 30-35k mark. There have not been any players under 1000 rating as of now, a few users have been around the 1500-1600 mark and for some of them it indicates that they will not lose any rating for losing certain matches.
CS2 Leaderboards at the time of writing - Beta Season
CS2 Rating to CS:GO Ranks
In Counter-Strike 2, the premier ranks were classified according to their color. You can take a look at the color grading for each rating below:
| Rating | Color |
| 0 - 4,999 | Grey |
| 5,000 - 9,999 | Light Blue |
| 10,000 - 14,999 | Blue |
| 15,000 - 19,999 | Purple |
| 20,000 - 24,999 | Pink |
| 25,000 - 29,999 | Red |
| 30,000+ | Yellow |
Looking at this data and the percentile in the leaderboards, we can see that this data is somewhat similar to how the previous CS:GO rankings used to be. If we compare the previous rank distribution in CS:GO with the CS2 ratings data we can have an estimate on how the ranking correlates with the CS2 ranking.
|
CSGO RANK |
CS2 RANK |
PLAYERBASE % |
|
Silver Elite 1 - Silver Elite Master |
1,000 - 6,768 |
~29% |
|
Gold Nova 1 - Gold Nova Master |
6,769 - 11,178 |
~33% |
|
Master Guardian 1 - Master Guardian Elite |
11,179 - 14,588 |
~21% |
|
Distinguished Master Guardian - Legendary Eagle Master |
14,589 - 18,156 |
~12% |
|
Supreme (SMFC) |
18,157 - 20,000 |
~2.6% |
|
Global Elite |
20,001+ |
~1.2% |
Source: Leetify
The values are probably not exact and are probably estimated with the cutoff being at a certain value. Similar to DotA 2 where the ranks are separated at a certain value such as ~2,310-3,079 for Archon and so on. However, there are promotion and relegation games which means that if the player is at X,999 rating then they would have to win two games in a row in order to get promoted to the next ratings bracket.
Ever since the launch of competitive mode in CS2 there was a bug which didn’t allow players to go past a certain rank on each map, Valve has recently updated the ranking system for the competitive game mode and players have noticed being able to reach higher ranks now. Leetify has updated the rank distribution of the players in each map after the update.
Season 1 Player base distribution
|
Rank |
Player distribution |
|
Silver 1 |
0.30% |
|
Silver 2 |
1.40% |
|
Silver 3 |
2.40% |
|
Silver 4 |
4.80% |
|
Silver Elite |
8.30% |
|
Silver Elite Master (SEM) |
12.50% |
|
Gold Nova 1 |
14.60% |
|
Gold Nova 2 |
14.40% |
|
Gold Nova 3 |
14.00% |
|
Gold Nova Master (GNM) |
11.30% |
|
Master Guardian 1 (MG1) |
8.00% |
|
Master Guardian 2 (MG2) |
4.80% |
|
Master Guardian Elite (MGE) |
2.20% |
|
Distinguished Master Guardian (DMG) |
0.70% |
|
Legendary Eagle (LE) |
0.20% |
|
Legendary Eagle Master (LEM) |
0.10% |
|
Supreme Master First Class (SMFC) |
0.00% |
|
Global Elite |
0.00% |
You can take a look at the entire breakdown at their blog here.
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