How to unlock Premier in CS2

Valve calls Premier its Active Duty pick and ban competitive mode. Before a match the teams pick and ban maps from the Active Duty pool, and the result moves one number, your CS Rating, which Valve describes as a visible measurement of your Counter-Strike performance and uses to place you on global and regional leaderboards.

Premier runs in seasons. Season One began when Counter-Strike 2 launched on 27 September 2023, and later updates have opened new ones. For a season's medal, Valve's recent season announcements ask for an account in good standing, 25 Premier wins and an active CS Rating when the season ends.

Valve's help page on Prime Status and Free to Play is specific: to have access to Premier mode, a player must own Prime Status and be Profile Level 10. Free players can play every other mode, but not Premier. Prime is also what earns XP: without it, Valve says, no XP is earned in any mode on any server.

Once both are met, Premier is a mode you can queue for, alone or with friends. Valve does limit parties by rating: at launch it barred players with a very high established rating from partying with accounts that had none, and it has adjusted the allowed range since.

It takes ten wins, not matches played. When Season Two began, Valve recalibrated every rating from the season before and said each player would need to re-establish their CS Rating by winning ten matches, a figure it gave in its season announcements.

Until then the account has no rating to show. Only Prime players receive CS Ratings at all, and the party limits above can keep an account without one out of a group with very highly rated players.

Competitive is played map by map, and each map has its own skill group, shown once you have the wins Valve asks for on that map. Premier puts the Active Duty pool through a pick and ban phase and rates you with one number across all of it. Both ranks need Prime: Valve issues Competitive Skill Groups and CS Ratings only to Prime players.

Only Premier feeds the leaderboards, where Prime players who play Premier are shown once they are among the top 1,000 in their region.

It means the work Valve asks for before Premier is done: the account has Prime Status and the level that opens the mode, and nobody has placed a rating on it yet. The first ten wins, and the rating they set, are yours.

At KeyScope that is the Premier ready account, listed below with what its page says is on it. The Prime guide explains the Prime Status underneath it.

A Premier ready account suits someone who wants their own number: you play the placement wins, and the rating that follows is the one you earned. An account that already carries a rating suits someone who wants to start at a given level. KeyScope's rated accounts are sold by band, and each band is a floor, not an average: an account in a band holds at least that rating when it is listed.

Keep the seasons in mind with a rated account. When Season Two began, Valve recalibrated every rating from the season before and asked each player to win ten matches to re-establish it, so a rating bought in one season is not promised to carry into the next.