Introducing adjusted clutch requirements

Today, we are rolling out changes to what counts as a clutch in HLTV's scorebots and all-time leaderboards, adding thousands more clutches.

A clutch seems like a simple thing to measure: a round that ends where just one player is alive on the winning team, and the opponents are all dead.

And for the most part, that method is a sound one. We catch most of the big highlights with this method.

But there's always room for improvement, and users over the years have questioned why things like Andreas "⁠Xyp9x⁠" Højsleth's 1v5 ninja defuse against North didn't initially count (it was later added manually.)

There are also examples of 'fake' clutches from simply reading the killfeed. Imagine a 4v2 where the bomb explodes, and the 4 Ts hunt the 2 CTs. 3 of the Ts die in the hunt, and the last T kills the last two CTs. In the old system, that's a 1v2 clutch.

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All-time Leaderboard

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From today, we will not need to manually add ninja defuses for them to count as clutches. If you're on your own on CT side when you defuse the bomb, it's a clutch even if some Ts are alive.

We are also aiming to disqualify those 'fake' clutches by adding a further requirement; if the CTs have bought a defuse kit, you need to be last alive before the 5 second mark where the round becomes unwinnable for CTs rather than the de jure end of the round. Without a kit, that's 10 seconds.

There's also clutches where CTs run off to save when they know they can't win. Killing three players in a 1v4, and forcing the last to save, is intuitively a clutch but previously would not have counted.

These changes amount to 1% of all clutches being removed and many more being added (about 3.5% of the previous total.)

You might see small differences in a player's rating because of this, but we believe the improvement is worth it.

Patch notes

- We now detect clutches where more than one player survived at round end, catching defusal clutches and ones where opponents saved.

- Defuse clutches require one CT to be alive when the defuse began

- We disqualify T side clutches if more than one terrorist was alive when the CT's had their last chance to start defusing the bomb (5s with a kit, 10s without).