"VRS: Valve Regional Standings, defined"

VRS — Valve Regional Standings — is the official points system that decides which teams are invited to Counter-Strike Majors.

It is a points system, not an ELO rating, and the distinction matters. A team's score is built mainly from four inputs: the prize money it has won (on a logarithmic scale, so a $1M win is not worth 1,000× a $1k one), the prize money of the teams it has beaten, the number of distinct strong opponents beaten, and recent LAN results — all decaying over roughly a six-month window. A small head-to-head adjustment, ELO-style, nudges the result on direct matchups.

Because so much of the formula is prize-and-results weighted, VRS rewards big-event success heavily, and it updates weekly. That makes it slower to react than a purely predictive rating, and it can disagree sharply with the editorial HLTV world ranking.

VRS orders teams. For individual performance, see HLTV Rating.

See how CS2 rankings work for all three systems side by side.