Valve Regional Standings Explained: How CS2 Teams Earn a Major Spot
No franchises, no partner leagues, no closed doors: since 2025 a public ranking decides who plays Counter-Strike's biggest events. What the VRS measures, why Valve built it, and how it shapes the Singapore Major.
Every month, on the first Monday, a public GitHub repository owned by Valve updates with a list of numbers. For Counter-Strike teams, those numbers are the difference between playing a Major in front of 12,000 people and watching it from home. They are the Valve Regional Standings, or VRS, and since 2025 they have quietly become the most important document in the sport.
The latest example is the PGL Major Singapore, which starts on November 24. All 32 teams in it were invited on their VRS ranking, with the final cut-off in early November. Here is what that ranking is, and why Valve chose it over the franchise leagues other games use.
Why Valve wanted rankings
On August 3, 2023, Valve announced new rules for big Counter-Strike tournaments, effective from 2025. Invitations would have to come from Valve's official ranking or from open qualifiers, and tournament organisers could no longer have special business relationships with the teams that played in their events. Valve said Counter-Strike had become "increasingly gated by business relationships."
That was aimed at the partner systems run by the big organisers. ESL and BLAST had both signed long-term deals with a group of clubs, guaranteeing them places in leagues and events. Both organisers announced changes to fit the new rules. The result is an open circuit: any team that wins enough can, in principle, reach the top.
What the VRS measures
The VRS is an Elo-style model: teams gain or lose points based on results at Valve-sanctioned events. Its core is a Starting Rank Value built from four factors:
- Bounty Offered: roughly, how much prize money a team has earned. Rich teams are worth more to beat.
- Bounty Collected: how much prize money the teams you have beaten have earned.
- Opponent Network: how many different teams you have beaten, and how well connected they are.
- LAN Wins: wins at in-person events, which count for more than online matches.
The four are averaged and scaled to a value between 400 and 2000. Then come head-to-head adjustments from recent match results. On November 3, 2025, for example, Team Vitality's starting value of 1843.1 plus a head-to-head bonus of 64.9 gave a final rank value of 1907.9. Recent results carry the most weight, so a team cannot coast on an old title.
Regions and Major invites
There is one global ranking and three regional ones: Europe, the Americas (North and South together) and Asia. Each team belongs to the region where most of its players are based.
Majors use the regional tables to divide places. The format, in use since 2025, is 32 teams across three Swiss stages. For the StarLadder Budapest Major in December 2025, the first Major where every stage was invited purely on VRS, the split was:
- Stage 1 (16 teams): 6 from Europe, 6 from the Americas, 4 from Asia
- Stage 2 (8 teams): 5 Europe, 2 Americas, 1 Asia
- Stage 3 (8 teams): 5 Europe, 2 Americas, 1 Asia
Once all invitations are accepted, the global ranking sets the seeding inside each stage. Big tournaments outside the Majors use the same list: top-tier events start their invitations from the top of the VRS, while second-tier events must start from ninth place or lower, which leaves room for rising teams.
How it plays out
The system has produced stories that a closed league could not. For Singapore, Eternal Fire went from long odds to a Major place by winning a late event, and four teams, 100 Thieves, 1win, BC.Game and DENDELE, will make their Major debuts.
It has also produced friction. BC.Game, the team of former world number one s1mple, qualified through the Asian region, and the move drew criticism from figures in the scene who called it sad that a star had to change regions to reach a Major. FUT Esports and Astralis ran into a VRS roster issue involving two players, and FUT asked Valve for an exception. Fnatic, NRG and paiN all missed out.
Why it matters
The VRS is Valve's answer to a question every esport has to face: should the top level be a closed club or an open ladder? Riot chose partnership leagues for League of Legends and Valorant. Valve chose a number anyone can check.
The open model has costs. Teams have less guaranteed income, and organisers carry more risk. But it keeps Counter-Strike's oldest promise, that any five players can climb to the top. When the Singapore Major starts on November 24, every team on stage got there on results. Read our Singapore preview for the field, and our Majors history for what came before.