CS2 comes with a completely overhauled new rank system called "CS Rating," which gives you a hard number for your rank along with leaderboards to show how you stack up both worldwide and compared to your friends.

So far, CS Rating seems to span from 1k+ to at least 40k, with the highest ranked players just after launch currently sitting at 36k. It's unknown if there's an upper cap.

In this post, we look more closely at how the player base is distributed across different rating buckets and how the CS Rating compares to CS:GO ranks.

We will cover these aspects of the rating distribution:

1. CSGO Rank distribution of the same set of players
2. Breakdown of percentages inside the 20k+ bar
3. Why are there zero people below 1000 rating?
4. Confirming our results against the CS2 Leaderboard
5. Estimate of how ranks correlate between the two games

How do CSGO Ranks Compare?

We also looked at the CSGO rank of every player we found for our CS Rating distribution chart. There were 440k players we've seen with a CS Rating, and 310k of those players also had a CSGO rank sometime in August 2023.

You'll notice that this graph skews HEAVILY to the right. This probably is due to a combination of factors:

First off, the CSGO ranks overall are skewed to the high side in 2023. Back in January, we plotted the rank distribution of everyone on Leetify. It mirror's this rightward skew.

This shows that the ranks have been skewed in general. It isn't something that is completely isolated to the sample of players with CS Ratings in CS2.

However, the process required to get a CS Rating probably worsens this skew. The only people with CS Ratings at this point are people who have 10 wins in the Limited Test within just over a week of having access to it. This will naturally favor more dedicated and higher skilled players, who are more likely to win games overall. This could further exaggerate the skew towards higher ranks that we see in the CSGO ranks of players with a CS Rating.

What's inside that 20k+ bar?

0.32% of players have a CS Rating above 20k, making it exceedingly rare to achieve any of the top 3 badge colors you can get for CS Rating.

Further dividing this 0.32% shows that

• 0.31% of players have a CS Rating of 20000-24999
• 0.013% of players have a CS Rating of 25000-29999
• 0.00092% of players have a CS Rating of 30000-34999

The highest overall CS Rating we have seen in a game we processed is 33224 (as of 2023-09-08).

Are there really zero people with less than 1k CS Rating?

On the other end of the chart, you'll notice that there is no bar for sub-1000. It is true, we found zero people in the range of 0-999 CS Rating. Perhaps Valve set the floor for the CS Rating system such that nobody drops below 1k? Or perhaps people just haven't had time to get there.

Reach out on Discord if you've seen someone with a CS Rating below 1k, we would love to know :D

Checking our results against the CS2 Leaderboard

The CS2 Leaderboard shows a "% Rank" value which lets you see how close your CS Rating puts you to the top of the playerbase.

My rating is 11112, putting me at the top 30% of players according to the Premier screen. If you add the values of all of the bars from 11k and above on our chart, you get 30%, meaning that for my personal example our data matches what Valve is telling us inside the game.

Feel free to try this for yourself, and let us know on Discord if you have a value that doesn't follow this test.

Estimating Equivalent Ranks

We can compare percentiles to see approximately how the ranks correlate between CSGO and CS2.