Counter-Strike is at its best when teams compete on a level playing field and when ability is the only limit to their success. Over the past few years, weve seen professional Counter-Strike drift away from that ideal. The ecosystem has become gradually less open, with access to the highest levels of competition increasingly gated by business relationships. We think that Counter-Strike should be an open sport. So were going to add new requirements to running large-scale competitive events. The finer details are still in progress, but here are the broad strokes:

• Tournament organizers will no longer have unique business relationships or other conflicts of interest with teams that participate in their events.
• Invitations to all tournaments will use our ranking system (detailed here), or otherwise be determined by open qualifiers.
• Any compensation for participating teamsprize pool or otherwisewill be made public and will be driven by objective criteria that can be inspected by the community.