Team Spirit top Counter-Strike 2’s VRS in Valve’s February update

Davide Xu
BLAST Bounty Season 1
Image credit: BLAST, Stephanie Lindgren

Team Spirit has become the number one Counter-Strike 2 team in Valve’s updated global VRS leaderboard.

As of February 3rd, 2025, the Russian esports organisation has surpassed G2 Esports, leading the charge with a total of 1968 points following its latest trophy at BLAST Bounty Spring 2025.

G2 Esports is now the runner-up in the Vlave Regional Standings (VRS), sitting at 1912 points. Meanwhile, Mongolian esports team The MongolZ is in third with 1879 points.

Rounding out the top 10 (in order) are Team Vitality (1821), FaZe Clan (1805), NAVI (1755), Eternal Fire (1687), MOUZ (1652), Team Falcons (1645) and Team Liquid (1603), according to the rankings released by Valve on GitHub.

The last-placed team in the VRS is paiN’s academy team, with only 408 points.

Speaking of paiN, the Brazilian team dropped five places in the rankings compared to January (11th to 16th), despite earning eight points in the VRS. The big loser among top teams was HEROIC, which went from 8th to 20th in large part due to having to revamp its CS2 roster.

After signing former G2 Esports player Nikola ‘NiKo’ Kovač and HEROIC’s core roster in January, Team Falcons’ official rank has gone from 58th to 9th, earning the organisation close to 600 points. However, the team was recently eliminated by G2 Esports at IEM Katowice earlier this month.

Introduced in 2024, the VRS system was designed with an objective and data-driven approach to rank CS2 teams. Each team is assigned a Starting Rank Value based on previous historical records.

By using an Elo-based algorithm and incorporating a series of factors to create a holistic representation of the team’s performances — such as the Age Weight which assigns more importance to recent results — it ensures a fairer ranking to decide which teams are invited to global events.

Other key metrics include the prize pools at stake and collected, as well as the LAN factor, which adds additional weight to victories in offline settings.

The updated rankings will help determine invites to tier-one tournaments in the first half of the competitive season, including BLAST Open Lisbon, PGL Bucharest, YaLLa Compass Qatar and IEM Melbourne.

Davide Xu is a freelance writer for ESI. With a background in finance and a deep passion for competitive gaming, he loves breaking down anything about the industry, from the latest investments to the teams' competitive performances, especially when it comes to League of Legends.