"HLTV Rating explained: 2.0, 2.1 and the new 3.0"

Bottom line: HLTV Rating is the community-standard measure of a CS2 player's overall performance, where 1.00 is an average game. Rating 2.0 blended kills, damage, survival, KAST and impact; the Rating 3.0 overhaul (August 2025) replaced impact with a new Round Swing metric that prices how each kill shifts a team's chance of winning the round, and adjusted the whole thing for the economy of each duel. This guide explains all three versions — with the underlying stats measured across our own CS2 data.

What HLTV Rating is

Player rating is an attempt to answer an impossible question — "how well did this player actually play?" — with a single number. HLTV's version is the one the Counter-Strike world settled on, and its scale is calibrated so that 1.00 is an average professional performance. Above 1.10 is a strong game; 1.20+ is elite; below 0.90 is a poor one.

The appeal of a composite rating is that no single stat tells the whole story. Kills ignore the player who trades and takes space; KAST ignores how big a player's rounds were; ADR ignores survival and clutch context. A rating rolls them together and weights them, so one number captures more than any of its parts.

From 2.0 to 3.0

HLTV Rating has gone through three eras:

• Rating 2.0 (2017) became the modern standard. It combined kills per round, survival, KAST, ADR and an "impact" component (which rewarded multi-kills and clutch plays) into one figure.
• Rating 2.1 recalibrated the weights of those same ingredients for CS2 without changing the core idea.
• Rating 3.0 (August 2025) is the biggest overhaul since 2.0 — a genuine rethink of what the number measures, not just a re-tune.

What changed in Rating 3.0

Rating 3.0 is built from six sub-ratings:

Two changes stand out:

Round Swing replaces "impact." This is the headline. Round Swing measures how much each kill changes a team's probability of winning the round, given the map, the side, the economy, how many players are alive, and whether the bomb is down. A kill that flips a lost round into a likely win is worth far more than a kill in an already-won round. Over a season, most players land between roughly −1.5% and +1.5% on this metric, with the very best reaching around +3.7%. It's a much more contextual measure of impact than the old version, which counted multi-kills and clutches more mechanically.

Everything is economy-adjusted. Kills, damage and survival are now weighted by the buy behind them. Killing an opponent who has a full rifle-and-armour setup is worth more than fragging someone on a starter pistol — in the new maths, a pistol-vs-full-buy kill is worth roughly half the points of an even-economy duel. This fixed a real distortion in 2.0, where a cheap kill and a hard-won one counted the same.

(Worth noting for accuracy: after 3.0's launch HLTV rebalanced the formula to put a little more weight back on kills and slightly less on Round Swing, restoring the roughly 60-40 output-versus-cost balance the rating has always aimed for. The six components above are unchanged; only their weights were tuned.)

The raw material: multi-kills

You can see why the "Multi-Kills" sub-rating exists by looking at how rare the big rounds are. Here's how often each multi-kill happens in our data:

Double kills are routine — over 1.2 million of them. But an ace (a five-kill round) is roughly 172 times rarer than a double, at just 6,966. That steep drop-off is exactly why a rating has to weight a 4K or an ace so much more heavily than a 2K: the rarer the feat, the more it says about the round. (These are our own figures, illustrating the kind of input the metric is built on — not HLTV's rating numbers.)

A note on where the number comes from

One honest clarification: EsportsOdds computes its own player rating and serves the underlying stats — kills, ADR, KAST, headshots, multi-kills, opening duels, clutches — not HLTV's proprietary Rating figure. If you want to build your own rating, or study the components that go into any rating, you need those raw inputs, cleanly and per match. That's what the API provides.

Getting the underlying stats from the API

Every ingredient of a modern rating is available per player, per map and per match through the EsportsOdds CS2 data API: kills and deaths, ADR, KAST, headshots, first kills and first deaths, trades, clutches and multi-kills. Building your own rating formula, or auditing how the published ones move, is a single request away — clean JSON on a flat $99/month plan.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good HLTV rating?

On the standard scale, 1.00 is an average professional game. Above 1.10 is strong, 1.20+ is elite, and below 0.90 is a poor performance. The scale is deliberately calibrated so that the average pro sits at 1.00.

What is HLTV Rating 3.0?

The 2025 overhaul of HLTV's player rating. It's built from six sub-ratings — Kills, Damage, Survival, KAST, Multi-Kills and the new Round Swing — with kills, damage and survival adjusted for the economy of each duel. It replaced the "impact" component of Rating 2.0.

What is Round Swing?

Round Swing measures how much each kill changes a team's probability of winning the round, accounting for the map, side, economy, players alive and bomb status. It's the headline new metric in Rating 3.0 and a more contextual measure of impact than the old system.

How is Rating 3.0 different from 2.0?

Rating 3.0 replaces the old "impact" component with Round Swing plus a separate multi-kill rating, and adjusts kills, damage and survival for the economy of each engagement — so a hard-won kill against a full buy counts for more than a cheap one. Rating 2.0 treated them the same.

Where can I get CS2 player rating stats via an API?

The EsportsOdds CS2 data API serves EsportsOdds' own rating plus every underlying stat — ADR, KAST, multi-kills, opening duels and more — per player and match, as JSON, on a flat $99/month plan.