How many Elo points can you win or lose per game in CS2 Premier matchmaking? How opponent's rank affects points
Valve launched the new CS2 Premier Mode with CS Rating in early September. Its goal is to establish a world ranking, remove the upper limit for competition, and bring matchmaking closer to the professional state. But how does it work, and how fast can you climb it?
How many Elo points can you gain in one match of CS2 Premier Mode?
The system uses numeric values from 0.000 (although they seem to start from 1) to 35.000. Dataminer Aquarius says it is an Elo (likely Glicko) based ranking. These systems generally compare ranks between the opponents and award or detract points based on the difference.
In short, you win versus a strong opponent and get more points than when you defeat a weak one. And vice versa for losing. These formulas use many variations and manually added modifiers. So, there's almost no way to estimate an average step.
Average Elo points gain/loss in Premier might use a system similar to Dota 2
Players report that an average gain is around +100 +200, while a loss can be bigger, up to -500. Some fans think win/loss streaks affect your rank.
In Dota 2 matchmaking reworked in April, Valve used rank confidence. This is a multiplier that diminishes with time as you play more and more matches. You can read more details by the following link.
In a default system, your initial jumps between ranks can be really wild, which is what should happen during the calibration, but we cannot see it. But Elo-based ranking still needs more data to get you on the right skill level. So these jumps can happen even after the calibration, but this time, they're likely capped by Valve to escape extreme results. Once again, this is how they operate in Dota. It is possible that Valve had capped only winning Elo to bring the bell curve of rank distribution in place.
There's been only 10 days of playtesting the Premier mode. Dataminers report on over half a million players who have already calibrated. Our guess is that after some time, the system will stabilize itself.
