CS: GO: tournament system, historical champions and streamers

CS: GO: tournament system, historical champions and streamers
CS: GO represents as one of the most prominent eSports disciplines, and numerous individuals are becoming interested in it. And so we will now talk about this cyber sports phenomenon where the world's best teams play, and you can explore the best cs teams on profilerr It is assumed that you have some idea about eSports, but are unfamiliar with one specific discipline. Let's go through the main features and tell you about each of them.
A little background about the game
CS: GO is a classic game that everybody should be familiar with. The game is a team shooter in which two teams of five individuals alternate between playing for terrorists and special forces. The task of the first is to plant a bomb in a specially designated location. The task of the second is to keep them from doing it at the appointed time.The game is broken into rounds until one team wins 16 times. Between rounds, depending on the success of the team, in-game money is transferred, which can be used to buy better weapons in the new round.
Tournament system
Unlike many disciplines, CS: GO does not have a strict tournament system.Valve, the game's publisher, only hosts two $1 million Major tournaments every year, one that takes place in the spring and one in the fall. And in general, the tournaments themselves are not held by them themselves, but each time they are given to a new third-party contractor. Qualifiers for Majors are held in three regions: America (USA, Canada, and South America), Europe, and Asia. It is worth noting that the volume of the US market is 900 million dollars, and the audience includes people aged 16-60.

In the intervals between them, hundreds of various private tournaments of various levels are constantly held throughout the game, and given that the organizers themselves are ready to hold them in such a quantity, we can safely say that they pay off, and the game is able to live on its own and without a publisher. The largest now is the series of tournaments from BLAST and from ESL under the names Intel Extreme Masters and ESL Pro League. Their final tournaments are in many ways comparable in terms of prize money and prestige to Major tournaments. And sometimes in the financial issue and surpass them.
General Dynamics of CS:GO Esports
According to Profilerr expert Volodymyr Huda, the total number of CS: GO tournaments has decreased by 10% last year, but Valve and contractors again held two majors, as it was before the coronavirus pandemic.

449.7 million hours of CS: GO tournament viewing were recorded in 2022, representing an 8.8% increase over 2021. IEM Katowice, PGL Major Antwerp, and the IEM Rio Major 2022 were the most popular months for the discipline.But August became the most inactive month in terms of total hours watched - usually at the end of summer esportsmen go on vacation, therefore, the organizers try not to schedule competitions for this period.
Historical champions and legends
Since esports in Counter-Strike has been around for twenty years, there are a lot of legends here, so let's say a few words about the main milestones in the history of CS:GO and the teams that dominated at the time. With the release of the new game in 2013, two Swedish giants, Fnatic and Ninjas in Pijamas, became the strongest teams. Initially, the NIP team was considered stronger. They were simply invincible and destroyed everyone. But then another Swedish team Fnatic appeared and until 2015 they were the strongest team in the world.

After their fall, there was a period of instability for some time, until in 2018 the Danes from Astralis firmly entrenched themselves on the throne. But now they, too, have fallen from the summit and dispersed.

The strongest teams now
Right now, the CS scene is in a kind of transitional period. And last year, Ukrainian guys from NaVi ascended the throne for a long time and still hold leading positions in the charts.

The best team right now is the FaZe Clan European mix. But they are not as dominant as top 1 as many other teams were.

If we talk about the regions, then everything is very one-sided now. Absolutely the best is the European region. Both East European and Western European teams are strong in it. There are good teams in North America, but they are not that strong. Teams from Brazil show themselves a little better, but they are not very stable either. Well, the weaker region is Asia.
Main channels and streamers
For the second year, Brazilian Gaules has been the most popular CS: GO streamer on Twitch. In 2022, his channel scored 120 million hours watched, and the peak online amounted to 707.6 thousand viewers. The second line of the top was held by the official ESL_CSGO channel, where the tournament broadcasts were in English.

Most of the positions in the top were occupied by channels from tournament organizers, however, several other streamers, in addition to Gaules, also made it to the top ten. For instance, the Brazilian mch_agg and the American fl0m both went up many spots simultaneously. German streamer ohnepixel ranked only 130th in 2021 but moved up to ninth in 2022.

Ale_apoka, a Brazilian streamer with over 5.2 million hours seen in the CS: GO discipline in 2022, surged several hundred rankings simultaneously. bysl4m scored almost the same number - many official Russian-language streams of tournaments were on his channel.

Valve's shooter remains one of the most prominent esports disciplines in the business, with CS: GO competitions attracting an increasing number of spectators each year. At the same time, outside of esports events, the number of viewers on Twitch in the game sector has fallen slightly - numerous factors have contributed to this, including fierce competition in the genre, a decline in the frequency of broadcasts by notable streamers, and so on.