CS2 Majors are the only tournaments Valve sponsors directly, and Valve publishes the rules that every Major has to follow on GitHub. Organizers add their own details on top (schedules, prize split, some match formats), but the skeleton is the same every time. This guide walks through it using Valve's rulebook and points out where recent Majors have gone further.
The format at a glance
| Stage | Teams | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 1 | 16 invited | Swiss, top 8 advance |
| Stage 2 | 8 invited + 8 from Stage 1 | Swiss, top 8 advance |
| Stage 3 | 8 invited + 8 from Stage 2 | Swiss, top 8 advance |
| Playoffs | Top 8 from Stage 3 | Single elimination |
Teams that do better in the rankings start later. A team invited straight to Stage 3 needs three Swiss wins to reach the playoffs. A team starting in Stage 1 needs nine, across three separate stages.
How teams get invited
Under Valve's current rulebook every one of the 32 places is an invitation from the Valve Regional Standings (VRS). The older system of regional qualifiers (RMRs) is gone. Valve uses three regional lists, Europe, Americas and Asia, for invitations, and a global list only to seed teams once invitations are accepted.
How many invitations each region gets for each stage depends on the previous Major:
- Stage 3: one invitation per team from that region that reached the playoffs last time.
- Stage 2: one invitation per team from that region that reached Stage 3 last time but did not make the playoffs.
- Stage 1: the remaining 16 places, split by region.
The split Valve published for the Winter 2025 Major (Budapest), based on results at Austin 2025:
| Region | Stage 1 | Stage 2 | Stage 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Europe | 6 | 5 | 5 |
| Americas | 6 | 2 | 2 |
| Asia | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| Total | 16 | 8 | 8 |
A few rules decide who actually takes those spots:
- Invitations go to rosters, not organizations. They are sent to intact rosters, and the roster a team registers has to match the one that was invited. Stage 3 invitations go out first, then Stage 2, then Stage 1.
- Region is set by the players. A roster belongs to the region of the majority of its players. A tie goes to the region with more Major places (Europe, then Americas, then Asia).
- Declines pass down the list. If a roster declines or is no longer intact, the next-highest roster in that region gets the invitation. Only if a region runs out of eligible rosters does a last-chance regional qualifier fill the gap.
- One substitute, one change. Each team can register one coach and one substitute, and can bring the substitute in once during the event (mid-match only for a medical emergency).
How the Swiss stages work
In a Swiss stage, teams only play opponents with the same win-loss record. Three wins advance a team, three losses eliminate it, and teams should not meet the same opponent twice in a stage if it can be avoided. Every team plays between three and five matches.
Valve's rule on match length is simple: every match that can send a team through or knock it out is a best-of-three, and every other match is a best-of-one. Here is how that plays out across a 16-team stage:
| Round | Records | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | 0-0 (8 matches) | BO1 |
| Round 2 | 1-0 and 0-1 (8) | BO1 |
| Round 3 | 2-0 (2), 1-1 (4), 0-2 (2) | 2-0 and 0-2 BO3, 1-1 BO1 |
| Round 4 | 2-1 (3), 1-2 (3) | BO3 |
| Round 5 | 2-2 (3) | BO3 |
That adds up to 33 matches: 20 best-of-one and 13 best-of-three. Two teams go through at 3-0, three at 3-1 and three at 3-2. The same number go out at 0-3, 1-3 and 2-3.
Organizers can go further than Valve's minimum. At IEM Cologne 2026, every Stage 3 match was a best-of-three, a first for a Major, and Stage 3 got an extra day to fit it. Check the format of each stage on the event page before you assume a match is a single map.
Seeding and the Buchholz score
Before the event, all 32 teams are sorted by their position on the global VRS. That order is the seeding for Stage 1. In Stages 2 and 3 the invited teams take seeds 1 to 8 (using that pre-event order) and the teams coming up from the previous stage take seeds 9 to 16.
Seeds decide the pairings:
- Round 1: 1 vs 9, 2 vs 10, and so on down to 8 vs 16.
- Rounds 2 and 3: within each record group, the highest seed plays the lowest seed available without a rematch.
- Rounds 4 and 5: the six teams in each group are paired from a fixed priority table that starts with 1 vs 6, 2 vs 5, 3 vs 4, and moves down the table only to avoid rematches.
After the first round, a team's seed within the stage is recalculated in this order:
- Current win-loss record in the stage.
- Difficulty Score (Buchholz).
- Initial seed in the stage.
The Difficulty Score is the sum of current wins minus the sum of current losses of every opponent a team has faced. Valve's own example: Team A has played opponents now at 2-0 and 1-1, so its score is 3 wins minus 1 loss, which is 2. Team B has played two opponents at 1-1, so its score is 2 minus 2, which is 0. If A and B have the same record, A gets the higher seed because its wins came against tougher teams.
Buchholz matters because seeds decide who you play next and who chooses veto order. A higher seed draws a weaker opponent in the next round, and the higher seed in a match chooses whether to be Team A or Team B in the map veto.
Playoffs
The eight teams that advance from Stage 3 are seeded by their final Stage 3 seed and placed in a fixed bracket:
- Bracket A: 1 vs 8 and 4 vs 5.
- Bracket B: 2 vs 7 and 3 vs 6.
The winners of each half meet in the semifinals, and the two semifinal winners play the grand final. Valve's rulebook, the baseline every Major follows, sets every playoff match as a best-of-three. Recent organizers have gone further and made the grand final a best-of-five: StarLadder Budapest 2025 was the first Major to do it (Vitality beat FaZe 3-1), IEM Cologne 2026 did the same (Falcons beat FURIA 3-0), and PGL has announced a best-of-five final for Singapore 2026. Always check the specific event's format before betting a final.
Final Major rankings are decided by playoff position first, then Stage 3 record and Difficulty Score, then Stage 2, then Stage 1, then initial seed.
Map veto at a Major
Valve fixes the pick and ban order for every Major match. In a best-of-one:
- The higher seed chooses to be Team A or Team B.
- Team A removes 2 maps, Team B removes 3, Team A removes 1.
- Team B chooses its starting side on the last map.
In a best-of-three:
- The higher seed chooses to be Team A or Team B.
- Each team removes one map, Team A first.
- Team A picks map 1 and Team B chooses the side. Team B picks map 2 and Team A chooses the side.
- Team B then Team A remove one more map each. The last map is the decider, and Team B chooses the side.
Our map veto guide covers how teams use these steps and how to read a veto before betting.
Majors in 2026 and 2027
| Major | Dates | Status |
|---|---|---|
| IEM Cologne Major 2026 | June 2 to 21, 2026 | Falcons beat FURIA 3-0 |
| PGL Major Singapore 2026 | Late Nov to Dec 13, 2026 | Upcoming |
| FiRe Major Buenos Aires 2027 | May 31 to June 20, 2027 | Announced |
| Perfect World Shanghai Major 2027 | Nov 22 to Dec 12, 2027 | Announced |
IEM Cologne 2026 had a US$1,250,000 prize pool and m0NESY was named MVP. For Singapore, PGL lists the event as November 25 to December 13 (some reports put the first Stage 1 day on November 24), with Stage 3 from December 2 to 6 and the playoffs at the Singapore Indoor Stadium from December 10 to 13. Dates for the 2027 events come from the organizers' announcements and can still change.
What the format means for betting
Early Swiss rounds are best-of-one. Rounds 1 and 2 and the 1-1 matches in round 3 are single maps. A team that wins 65% of its maps wins 65% of those matches but about 72% of best-of-three series. That gap is why the first two days of every stage produce the surprises. Our BO1 vs BO3 guide has the full table.
Advancement markets compound match chances. "To advance", "3-0" and "0-3" markets need a whole run of results. If a team had the same chance w of winning every match, its chances would be:
| Match win | 3-0 | Advance | 0-3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50% | 12.5% | 50.0% | 12.5% |
| 55% | 16.6% | 59.3% | 9.1% |
| 60% | 21.6% | 68.3% | 6.4% |
| 65% | 27.5% | 76.5% | 4.3% |
| 70% | 34.3% | 83.7% | 2.7% |
| 75% | 42.2% | 89.6% | 1.6% |
The advance column is w³ × (1 + 3(1 - w) + 6(1 - w)²). In a real stage the chance is not constant. Swiss pairing means a team that keeps winning keeps meeting other winners, so a strong team's 3-0 chance is lower than the table suggests, and its later matches are best-of-three, which helps it. Use the table as a sanity check on prices, not as a model.
- Watch the format of each match. A 2-0 team plays a best-of-three in round 3, while a 1-1 team plays a best-of-one. Price them differently even if the teams look similar.
- Seeding affects the veto. The higher seed picks Team A or B, which changes who bans last in a best-of-one. Buchholz therefore has a small effect on map selection late in a stage.
- Stage 1 is the hardest to rate. It holds the lowest-ranked invited teams from three regions, many of whom rarely play each other, so ratings built on regional results transfer less reliably there.
To check whether a price is worth taking, convert it with the odds edge calculator. Our picks come from SkinBetHub's proprietary signal model, built on prediction-market data, are posted with their odds before the match starts, and every result stays on the results page.