Background on Professional Counter Strike

 The professional eSports scene in Counter Strike has been around for many years, but it got most popular with the release of Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Most players who are in the top tiers of the professional scene have been playing since Counter Strike Source, and there are some that are still around whom have been playing since 1.6, which is 20 years ago!

There are many tournament and professional league organizations that organize professional Counter Strike playing, but the most important tournaments are the ones that are sponsored by VALVe, the creators of Counter Strike. These are called majors, and they often have the largest prize pools. Not only is the prize pool paid for by VALVe, but VALVe uses in game cosmetic purchases to support the teams. During majors, one can buy stickers to place on weapons that have teams' logos on them. Players get to show their support in game, and a portion of the proceeds goes directly to the teams. 

The Counter Strike professional scene is supported by organizations who own teams and make money from brand awareness, advertisements, sponsorship deals, and prize money. Most of the top CS:GO professional teams are located in Europe, but there are some outliers in the Americas, Asia, and Australia. Most tournaments are won by European teams, however in 2018 at the Boston Major a North American team Cloud 9 became the first and only NA team to win a major, showing the world that North America has something to offer in the professional scene. Unfortunately, shortly after this iconic victory, the North American team dissolved and there haven't been any NA teams who have come close to what Cloud9 were able to do. 

The top four CS:GO teams as of October 2020, with all players being European - photo courtesy of HLTV World Ranking

Professional Counter Strike has similar rules to normal competitive Counter Strike matches. There are a lot more formalities though. Typical matches are best-of-one (BO1), but for tournaments, the playoff stages are usually BO3 or even BO5. Teams are able to veto maps for these BO3 / BO5 series, which allows teams to use certain maps to their advantage. If team A knows their opponent (team B) is good on a certain map, they might veto it so that their opponents don't have an advantage.

While the professional CS:GO scene has been held with very high esteem and respect among players, there is something threatening to uproot and invalidate the past few years of Counter Strike called the coach spectating bug.