The BLAST Austin Major’s format could hold it back from greatness

The BLAST.tv Austin Major (alongside the StarLadder Budapest Major) is the biggest Counter-Strike tournament of the year. You can have a terrible season, but if you win the Major, all is forgiven, and you become a legend in an instant. With millions set to tune in to the BLAST Austin Major, it should be a showcase of the very best Counter-Strike has to offer. Not just in the teams, but in presentation and format, too.

When the open circuit came into play at the start of 2025, every large CS2 tournament organizer took the opportunity to refine their own formats, doing away with some of the biggest problems fans had voiced for years. It seems that Valve didn’t get the memo, with some of the worst elements of the previous formats still intact as a relic of the past. These are problems that shouldn’t exist – here’s what could hold the BLAST.tv Austin Major 2025 back from true greatness.

Best-of-ones in 2025 insult the Major’s prestige

A Counter-Strike Major should always see the best CS2 team in the world at that moment come out on top. It’s about etching the names of CS legends into history, after all. Why, then, with so much legacy on the line, are we still using a best-of-one format in each of the Swiss Group Stages? It is a notoriously unreliable way of finding the best teams, even more so in MR12, where one poor run of rounds can lose you the entire map. It’s great if you love upsets, sure, but the Major should be about a little more than producing Cinderella runs.

The trio of BLAST, ESL, and PGL all realized this coming into 2025, abolishing best-of-one matches from their Tier 1 events. The effect of this has been clear – underdog wins are truly legitimized, underperformers have nowhere to hide, and the idea of “the best teams wins” has been prevalent, with Vitality winning six tournaments in a row this year.

It undoubtedly dims the prestige of the BLAST Austin Major, knowing that it’s using an outdated format that can single-handedly affect the results. Give us all best-of-three matches for the Major, Valve!

We’ve left best-of-three Finals behind – so should Valve

Okay, I know I’ve just protested for best-of-three matches, but there’s one situation where it’s just not enough. Grand Finals. The Final of a Major is where dreams are realized and crushed in equal measure. There is no scenario in competitive Counter-Strike in which the pressure is higher. Playing a maximum of three (potentially just two maps) from a seven-map pool shouldn’t be enough with so much on the line. My point is that best-of-five Finals are an absolute necessity for the Major – anything less leaves Counter-Strike’s biggest event lagging behind the rest of the tournament calendar.

In previous years, best-of-five Final were reserved for only the most significant events (outside of Majors). IEM Katowice, IEM Cologne – you know the ones. Even then, it felt like the Majors were a step behind. Now, tournament organizers have adopted them for every event, and the Majors are practically archaic in comparison. It puts a greater emphasis on a stronger map pool for teams, which is an underrated area of determining who the best teams are.

Teams will make use of the extra maps, too. Of the ten Tier 1 CS2 Finals we’ve had in 2025 so far, six have needed to go four or five maps to determine their winner, with only four 3:0 blowouts. Notably, this includes multiple barn-burner matchups between Falcons and Vitality, with several instant classics born from the best-of-five format.

Of those six Finals, only the BLAST Open Spring 2025 match between Vitality and MOUZ would have seen a different winner in the best-of-three format. It may not be a common occurence, but frankly it would suck to get a Major winner that wouldn’t have lifted the trophy if they had to dig a little deeper into their map pool. It may be too late to change for the BLAST Austin Major, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t get a best-of-five Final at the StarLadder Budapest Major later this year.