Everything About CS2 Ranks | List and Guide

Counter-Strike 2 is obviously all about competition, complete with its own ranking system.

The thing is CS2 comes with two separate systems as opposed to its revered predecessor, CS:GO.

And Valve keeps their mouths shut tight as far as the inner workings of these are concerned, so it’s up to guides like this one to shed some light on Counter-Strike 2 ranks and how to rise through them.

Naturally, if you want to get better at CS2, you have to master the rudiments: your aim, map layouts, how to place smoke grenades properly and effectively, etc. That’s a no-brainer and you gotta practice with your friends and strangers online if you want to boost your skills in these departments.

But these are the basics and at one point you’re going to have to learn to work with your team as a single, cohesive unit. This is easier if you have a clan or a group of folks regularly playing together, like your friends. Achieving similar cohesion with random players is usually difficult, if not straight out impossible.

For starters, let’s begin with a list of all the available ranks:

Eighteen ranks, from the lowest to the highest, the latter attainable only by a fraction of players and unavailable to mere mortals.

A-hem.

As you can see, these ranks are copied straight from CS:GO. But here’s one important caveat:

Instead of one general rank, you get separate ones for each map you play on. This means the one you’ll have on Dust II, for instance, will be different from the one on, say, Office or Overpass.

Anyway, achieving a certain rank and then progressing up the ladder is going to take some work entailing winning matches and working together with your team. Let’s take a look at what’s needed here.

How to gain your first rank

If you want to receive your first rank and begin your Ranked adventure, you need to complete ten placement matches to assess your performance. Once that’s done, you will receive your first rank.

This means you will be facing players of a similar skillset, ones whose aim, crosshair placement, positioning, map awareness, teamwork skills, and the overall grasp of the game’s rules is like yours.

Naturally, this will only make you want to rank up, so here’s a bunch of hints on how to do that:

Advancing from Silver to Gold Nova

Silver ranks mean you’re a beginner. Your aim is kinda spotty, you don’t really know the layouts of the maps and it’s hard to say if you have any idea what you’re doing (/joke), but fret not, all it takes is a little practice and wins against other newbies to rank up.

Climbing the Silver ladder is rather easy, because all you need is to shoot straight here. Fans of the game suggest that you should try out headshots-only FFA game servers or grab a map titled Aim Botz – Aim Training from the workshop. This should drastically improve your aiming skills and help you advance to the Gold Nova stage.

Advancing from Gold Nova to Master Guardian

This is where you should no longer focus on your individual performance, but your usefulness for your team instead. After all, Counter-Strike 2 is a team-based shooter and only if you work together will you be able to achieve victory.

Perfect aim alone will not help you rise through the Gold Nova ranks unless you learn how to place your crosshair properly, learn the maps’ layouts (the radar will help you with that) and get hold of throwing smoke grenades and Molotov cocktails (deployed in right spot, these babies can make a difference).

Also, you have to use your opponents’ weaknesses to your team’s advantage.

Advancing from Master Guardian to Legendary

Alright, you worked on your teamwork skills and got really good at cooperating with your allies, reaching the Master Guardian rank segment in the process. How can you attain the Legendary ones, though?

Master Guardians are usually people with pretty sick individual skill levels. Still, many of them don’t know squat about working with others to form a cohesive, deadly unit.

Use this to your advantage, but also know that this can work both ways (i.e. your team may also fall apart if there is no cooperation between the players).

Reaching Legendary takes a lot of grinding, literally thousands of hours spent on gaining experience. This is a necessary sacrifice, as it will help you become a consistent player.

Reaching Supreme Master and Global Elite ranks

You’ll reach these once you’ve put in enough time, mastered the art of teamwork, and became a perfect shot. And to be honest, there isn’t much difference when it comes to Supreme Masters and Global Elites. The former can easily wreck the latter.

What else can you do to reach the highest ranks? First off, do not resort to playing with strangers, instead form a team of players you know and respect.

This will help you communicate with them clearly and with precision, greatly increasing your chances of winning a match.

Yes, communication is key here. Ignore that and you’re bound to fail big time.

Aside from that, learn from the pros, analyze their games, read all sorts of guides, ingest all the knowledge you can get.

Also, find a role you’re really good at and work to become amazing in it. Mixing roles, trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that is a rookie mistake that’s very likely to cause your team to lose the match and possibly hate you in the process.

Focus on just one thing instead. Determine who you are – entry fragger, lurker, support, in-game leader, perhaps an AWPer (the player who uses one the most powerful weapons in the game: AWP, formerly known as Magnum Sniper Rifle, highly popular and requiring an extreme amount of practice) – and stick to that role. Only then will you become an invaluable asset to your team.

Naturally, you can shake up things a bit and experiment with various other roles that you can play on the virtual battlefield, but better refrain from that in ranked matches, unless you feel like ruining your progress.

Actually, the same thing applies to maps. Pick your favorites and master them. There’s no point in squandering your time and effort on all the maps, especially now that each of them has a separate rank.

Alright, but what are Premier ranks?

This is a good question. Premier Ranks are a new feature introduced in CS2 and it’s a system more in line with modern matchmaking. It’s all based on the Elo system. It’s something you might’ve already heard of, since it’s used in chess.

Each player is assigned a score and the victor takes the difference in points between their ranks and their opponent’s. Truth be told, a player with a lower rank has much more to gain than the one with a higher rank.

Anyway, Premier ranks are limited to the Premier mode and require you to a) purchase Prime Status, b) proving your worth in other modes. To get your first Counter-Strike Rating, you need to complete ten placement matches, just like in the case of classic ones.

As opposed to CS:GO, though, this time the system is way more transparent. You know how many points you have, how many you need to advance to the next rank, and how many you can earn in a particular match. No more second-guessing known from the previous game.

As far as the ranks are concerned, here they are:

Seven tiers, each with its respective color and point range. While the fanbase of the game tried to make sense of it by correlating these with the classic ranks, these are two separate systems, each with their own set of rules, so they don’t translate 1:1.

Alright, we suppose this covers the essentials when it comes to ranking up in Counter-Strike 2. GL & HF!