CS2 Ranks: Distributions and Comparison to CS:GO (2024)

This dataset covers 2.1M ranked Premier players Leetify has seen from February 1 to February 22, 2024.

What's changed since last time?

• Nearly 80% of players used to be under 10k before - now only 31%
• The average rank has increased to ~12k, previously at ~7k
• Higher ranks are being filled out leading to a wider distribution - Almost 4% of players are 20k+ now, compared to 0.2% before

Ratings have generally increased for every player. The table below shows the changes across the 10k rating buckets:

With this new rating adjustment, we also decided to see what the corresponding CS:GO ranks are:

Keep reading for more info on the history of ranks in CS2, as well as an overview of how to interpret Premier mode's CS Rating.

This section was originally published 2023-11-30.

This dataset covers anyone that Leetify has seen since the conclusion of the replay outage (2023-11-09). This is all Leetify users AND any of their teammates and opponents who had a rank in Premier (a total of 1.9 million players).

The last time we looked at the rank distribution, there were promotion games at every 1000 CS Rating. This led to a smoother distribution, instead of the clustering just below 5k and 10k that we see now when people get stuck at the promotion threshold.

The rank distribution has also condensed a bit since September. Back in September 2023, only 62% of players were below 10k rating, with many more players being in the 10-15k range than we see now. 78% of players are below 10k now, with 65% of all players between 4000 and 9999 CS Rating.

Keep reading for more info on the history of ranks in CS2, as well as an overview of how to interpret Premier mode's CS Rating.

This section was originally published 2023-09-09.

CS2 comes with a completely overhauled rank system called "CS Rating," which gives you a hard number for your rank along with leaderboards to show how you stack up both worldwide and compared to your friends.

In the beta season, CS Rating spanned from 1k+ to at least 40k, with the highest ranked players just after launch currently sitting at 36k. It's unknown if there's an upper cap.

Each time you cross a multiple of 5000 CS Rating, you'll get a new color for your rank badge:

In this post, we look more closely at how the player base is distributed across different rating buckets and how CS Rating compares to CS:GO ranks.

We will cover these aspects of the Beta Season rating distribution:

1. CS:GO Rank distribution of the same set of players
2. Breakdown of percentages inside the 20k+ bar
3. Why are there zero people below 1000 rating?
4. Confirming our results against the CS2 Leaderboard
5. Estimate of how ranks correlate between the two games

How do CS:GO Ranks Compare?

We also looked at the CS:GO rank of every player we found for our CS Rating distribution chart. There were 440k players we've seen with a CS Rating, and 310k of those players also had a CS:GO rank sometime in August 2023.

You'll notice that this graph skews HEAVILY to the right. This probably is due to a combination of factors:

First off, the CS:GO ranks overall are skewed to the high side in 2023. Back in January, we plotted the rank distribution of everyone on Leetify. It mirrors this rightward skew.

This shows that the ranks have been skewed in general. It isn't something that is completely isolated to the sample of players with CS Ratings in CS2.

However, the process required to get a CS Rating probably worsens this skew. The only people with CS Ratings at this point are people who have 10 wins in the Limited Test within just over a week of having access to it. This will naturally favor more dedicated and higher skilled players, who are more likely to win games overall. This could further exaggerate the skew towards higher ranks that we see in the CS:GO ranks of players with a CS Rating.

What's inside that 20k+ bar?

0.32% of players have a CS Rating above 20k, making it exceedingly rare to achieve any of the top 3 badge colors you can get for CS Rating.

Further dividing this 0.32% shows that

• 0.31% of players have a CS Rating of 20000-24999
• 0.013% of players have a CS Rating of 25000-29999
• 0.00092% of players have a CS Rating of 30000-34999

The highest overall CS Rating we have seen in a game we processed is 33224 (as of 2023-09-08).

Are there really zero people with less than 1k CS Rating?

On the other end of the chart, you'll notice that there is no bar for sub-1000. It is true, we found zero people in the range of 0-999 CS Rating. Perhaps Valve set the floor for the CS Rating system such that nobody drops below 1k? Or perhaps people just haven't had time to get there.

Reach out on Discord if you've seen someone with a CS Rating below 1k, we would love to know :D

Checking our results against the CS2 Leaderboard

The CS2 Leaderboard shows a "% Rank" value which lets you see how close your CS Rating puts you to the top of the playerbase.

My rating is 11112, putting me at the top 30% of players according to the Premier screen. If you add the values of all of the bars from 11k and above on our chart, you get 30%, meaning that for my personal example our data matches what Valve is telling us inside the game.

Feel free to try this for yourself, and let us know on Discord if you have a value that doesn't follow this test.

Estimating Equivalent Ranks

We can compare percentiles to see approximately how the ranks correlate between CS:GO and CS2.