Which bomb-sites are hardest to hold?

We dive into site hold, retake, attack, and post-plant data to see if the statistics hold true to common wisdom.

"This site is the hardest to retake in the game," the commentator shouts. We've all heard it — on most maps and most sites at this point. But what does the data say?

Previously this was a hard question to answer, at the professional level anyway. But now, thanks to Skybox EDGE, we have collected data on top teams on each and every bombsite in gun rounds (each team above an average equipment value of $3250).

There's a lot of intuitive know-how on this topic: A bomb-site that is hard to take, in theory, should be easy to keep hold of in the post-plant. T-sided maps like Anubis should have more lopsided bomb-sites: easy to take and hard to hold. We can also see if Inferno deserves its reputation as a save haven, or if teams are being unnecessarily risk averse. Let's get into it.

First things, which bomb-sites are easiest to hold?

Nuke's Upper A bombsite stands tall at the top of our list. As anyone who has tried to solo queue on the map knows, it's difficult to get through Hut or Squeaky Door at the best of times; it's good to know the pros struggle with it too.

But 44% is still quite low, really: CTs lose the 'easiest' bomb-site more often than they can hold it in gun rounds. This shows why teams need to be proactive in the mid-round to gain information and man advantages. Turtle in your bomb-sites, and you're giving yourself, on average, a 30% chance of denying the plant.

Anubis' B bomb-site often has 3 CTs present when it is attacked, but it still ranks lowest at just 21% hold success. What's remarkable is that — if you exclude 'weird' bombsites like Inferno and Nuke's B sites, where the key gunfights occur before the 'site hold' on Banana and Ramp — the next bombsite is Anubis' A site. More than any other map, Anubis requires CTs to take (often disadvantageous) early duels to prevent these full-power executes.

Anubis B does rank as one of the easier bomb-sites to retake at 22% but that is still perilously low. Some of that is due to saving, where a retake is 'failed' due to not even being attempted, but that is a true chicken or egg situation: People save because it is so hard to retake, not the other way around.

Nuke and Ancient's B sites are the easiest to retake on paper, which makes sense. On Nuke, there are very few strong post-plant spots and on Ancient it's the same; Ts probably need Cave and Long control to feel secure, and they often have neither.

Inferno is the biggest culprit for saving but is fairly average here. B sits above 21%, and A — even with all those hidey holes and tight chokepoints — is at 18%, only the fifth hardest. Dust2 B is also talked about as an impossible retake, but sits just below the 21% average at 20%.

The actual horror show is Mirage B, where teams often put their weakest player. Should that poor jumpspotter fall without backup, the round is all but done. Dust2 A is next, even with the new box, at just 16%.

The next question is whether our traditional logic holds true. If a site is easy to hold, is it hard to retake?

Sort of. In our scatterplot we can see three groups emerge, but there is not a massively significant negative correlation (P = -0.229, for the nerds) between the two.

Most of our sites are easy to hold and hard to retake, as you would expect. Nuke and Ancient B are the intuitive opposite, hard to hold but easier to retake.

Six nuisances, however, are just plain hard: Executes are easy, and so is holding on for the 40 seconds of the bomb timer.

The four main examples are A and B on Dust2, and the very similar sites of A on Anubis and B on Vertigo.

The latter two, given this, are arguably the most important anchor spots on the game. If you can buy enough time, or do enough damage to make a retake easier, your team will win rounds they have no right to be competing in.

We could look at this using rating, but that includes set plays where your anchor might push Main, or fight Middle, or retake the other site. Let's just look at hold %, which is still imperfect — your level of backup is obviously still very important — but narrows down scenarios just a bit.

These are the stats of the best teams at holding these sites, and their respective anchors.

Anubis has Ayush "⁠mzinho⁠" Batbold, Myroslav "⁠zont1x⁠" Plakhotia, and Valeriy "⁠b1t⁠" Vakhovskiy as our tier one representatives — two headshot machines alongside the bodyspammer zont1x. Their hold success of 35-36% is 11-12% above the average. For context, Janusz "⁠Snax⁠" Pogorzelski and Nemanja "⁠nexa⁠" Isaković put G2 at 18% (-6%), while Petr "⁠fame⁠" Bolyshev and Virtus.pro are at 11% (-13%).

On Vertigo, Boris "⁠magixx⁠" Vorobiev pops up as Spirit make another appearance (though Spirit had Danil "⁠donk⁠" Kryshkovets there at the start of 2024). The specialist, however, is usual rotator David "⁠dav1deuS⁠" Tapia Maldonado who has 96.7 ADR in full gun rounds on the B defence, again according to EDGE.

Because teams shuffle spots and players so often, it's hard to make a similar list which combines data from every map. Some examples from teams that haven't changed are Shahar "⁠flameZ⁠" Shushan (average hold of 31%, 7.88% above the expected average), Jimi "⁠Jimpphat⁠" Salo (34%, 7.39% above average), and b1t (31%, 5.11% above average) — three frontrunners for anchor of the year come January. The best anchor of 2023, Emil "⁠Magisk⁠" Reif, has had a down year for Falcons, and sits at 24% (-1.35%) in his spots.

Sometimes, a player is deliberately worse at holding. Karim "⁠Krimbo⁠" Moussa, for example, is among the worst at 19% (-5.69% below average in his spots), but is more of a 'star anchor' — he plays for kills and to preserve his life, rather than doing all he can to prevent the plant. So take these figures with a pinch of salt.

Even if players are hard, we can isolate teams' performance compared to expected. Let's start with CT side.

We've plotted teams' hold success rates against their retake success rates. Initially, we thought this might show some teams' style; teams that 'lose' the site but then simply take it back straight away.

This is partially true. Natus Vincere are known for selflessly bombing through smokes as a team to deny bomb plants and engage in favorable trade wars. This increases their 'hold' percentage to +4.32%, but might be part of the reason they're actaully below average in terms of retakes (-1.61%); once the bomb is down, NAVI's overarching strategy has already been breached.

But the data also throws up some surprises. The team that succeeds in retakes least, from our sample anyway, is FaZe (-5.96%). This is partially due to Vertigo, but even when we remove their 7th-choice map FaZe sit at -3.70%, only beating Imperial. When this core were at their best in 2022 retakes and low-percentage plays were their bread and butter. The 2024 iteration, seemingly, has lost its magic touch.

MOUZ, Spirit, and Vitality are the trio of teams that are able to excel both before and after the bomb is down.

How about offense?

Vitality stay in the top-right quadrant and are joined by a huge cluster of teams including NAVI, SAW, The MongolZ, and paiN.

FaZe slip just below average in post-plants, continuing their downtrend in late-rounds, while FURIA stand out as a team that is good at getting the bomb down but poor at converting that into rounds.

G2 are the big shock, struggling in attack success (-3.27%) and post-plant conversion (-4.58% — just 78% overall). Only Ninjas in Pyjamas are worse (74% of postplants, -8.12% compared to the expected figure).

It might not be too big a shock, really: G2 are clearly reliant on individuals in the mid-round for their wins, rather than amazing executions or renowned post-plant discipline. But this is still a concerning figure for a team that has still managed two trophies in the last three.

These statistics are just scratching the surface of what Skybox EDGE is offering teams.

There are, of course, gaps in this dataset. Like anything in this realm, we are missing context. Hold success only considers if the bomb is planted or not; if you get 2 kills as an anchor in a 4v4, but the bomb is planted, that is considered a failure. These situations will happen.

Many such holes can be poked in what we have presented. But over this large a sample size, these trends exist for a reason.

So, next time your team wants to retake B on Mirage or A on Anubis, keep in mind that you're spinning a roulette wheel that has 5 red slots, and 31 green. Once the bomb is down, the Ts are always the house.

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