VOD: 2025 rules, circuit, and concerns explained on HLTV Confirmed

Dive into the impact changes to the 2025 circuit will have on organizers, teams, players, and more in the latest HLTV Confirmed episode.

With Counter-Strike's tournament circuit gearing up for substantial changes in 2025, Complexity's General Manager and former tournament referee Graham "messioso" Pitt joined HLTV Confirmed on Tuesday to discuss the different ways the circuit will be impacted.

Early discussions focused on how organizations and players may not be aligned in their interests regarding what tournament organizers' events to attend, with the latter group benefiting more from larger prize pools than from participation fees.

"ESL and BLAST are incentivizing the organizations, the teams, to come to their events because money will be going directly to the organizations, which is then going to pay the salaries of these players," Chad "⁠SPUNJ⁠" Burchill explained.

"Whereas the prize money isn't guaranteed, and in a lot of these contracts with organizations, the players actually get the majority of the prize money, so the org itself is not benefitting and not getting money to be able to pay these players."

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Financial incentives for these organizations won't come close to the numbers that ESL and BLAST's partner teams had, though, with messioso hinting at the disparity without revealing exact numbers.

"Not even remotely close," the manager said when asked how incentives will compare for current partner organizations if they only participate in ESL and BLAST's circuits in 2025. "Like unbelievable not close. A quarter, maybe? A third if you're lucky? The pie is smaller. I can't say too much, but essentially there is less money on the table, and there are more people eating."

The Brit also touched on how teams are disincentivized from playing in regional competitions and qualifiers due to how significantly a loss to a lower-ranked domestic opponent could impact their VRS standing, explained in the clip below.

The panel also discussed the reduction of closed qualifiers for tournaments and how organizers and top teams alike would fail to benefit, with teams needing to fly to a central location to play for a chance at making it to an event despite having a wealth of events from other organizers.

"Effectively, if you're inviting a certain amount of teams straight into an event and there are closed qualifiers attached, you also have to invite a certain number of those teams from the same ranking to the closed qualifier," Milan "⁠Striker⁠" Švejda said.

"Let's say you invite 12 global teams and you just want to have the rest coming from closed qualifiers, you also have to have a global closed qualifier to comply with the rules. You generally don't want those teams to play closed qualifiers anyway because those are the best teams, they are going to be the ones with shitloads to play, so nobody is going to want to play these closed qualifiers. They will want to be straight in the main event.

"This is something people need to realize about tournament organizers and why they're not hosting qualifiers. It's not even about the schedule and the difficulties of putting the qualifiers anywhere in the calendar. It is the fact that they are literally working against themselves in terms of wanting to have the best teams at the event with the way the [rulebook] currently works, because of how crazy extreme it has to be for you to even allow some qualifier spots to be in the event."

messioso also highlighted the difficulty for teams ranked in the No. 6-10 and 10-16 ranges in planning their schedule with VRS invite cut-offs varying around teams ranked between 8 and 12, making it hard to predict for those in the middle where their next invite will come from. With a multitude of locations and tournaments played back-to-back, the Brit said that "a lot of teams will be figuring things out as they go."

The complete show spanned three hours with the panel going even more into detail about the changes and their impact. You can watch the complete episode through the embed at the top of the page, or watch directly on YouTube by clicking here.