With the goal of streamlining the CS:GO Major qualification process in mind, Valve has officially instituted a new Regional Standings ranking system for tracking results across multiple events to better identify the teams that should be invited to the “later qualification stages” of future events.
Valve has officially released standings for the Americas, Europe, and Asia, using a model that factors a team’s prize pool earnings, the strength of their opponents, and their head-to-head results against other teams. Opponent strength ratings will be heavily influenced by the team’s expected win rate vs. actual win rate.
As of the official Dec. 21 standings, Liquid lead the Americas, Heroic are on top of Europe, and Lynn Vision out of China are the top ranked team in Asia. The most recent Major winners, Outsiders, are third in Europe behind Heroic and G2.
The Regional Standings will be first used officially to determine which teams will be invited to the closed qualifiers for Regional Major Ranking events, the tournaments that will determine which teams qualify for Majors and the stage they’ll start in. The first instance of this will be for the BLAST Paris Major in May 2023.
The top teams in each region’s Regional Standings will get invited to the closed qualifiers, with the standings receiving periodic updates up until the start of the open qualifiers. All the teams that don’t receive closed qualifier invites will play through open qualifiers. For recent Majors, RMR events were made up of teams that reached the previous Major plus open qualifier teams.
The complete Regional Standings is made up of over 300 different teams.
