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Thirty-one young Counter-Strike 2 players have left the Prospects ranking, the monthly list of the best players under 21 kept by the leading Counter-Strike news and statistics site. The site published the full list of graduates on August 4, 2026, as its second Prospects season closed and a third one prepared to start.
The list splits into two groups. Eleven players leave because they played too many maps at the top level to count as prospects any longer. Twenty leave because they turned 21. Twelve of the 31 had reached the ranking's top ten at some point in the season.
Counts from the graduates list published on August 4, 2026, by the statistics site that runs the ranking.
What makes a player a prospect
The ranking does not try to list every good young player. It lists the good young players who have not yet established themselves at the highest level, and it draws that line with six written conditions. They have applied since January 1, 2026, the date the site gives for its Season 2 criteria, and the site adds that eligibility is updated after each Major, the most prestigious tournaments of the Counter-Strike calendar.
A player must be under 21 and below every one of five experience limits. Most of the limits are counted against ranked opposition: a map counts toward a limit only when the player's team and the opposing team both sit inside the given band of the world ranking. Big Events are the site's own label for the most important tournaments of the calendar.
| Condition | Limit | What is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Age | Under 21 | The player's age |
| Big Events | Fewer than 50 maps | Maps at the most important tournaments |
| Top 20 | Fewer than 50 maps | Maps in a top-20 team against a top-20 team |
| Top 30 | Fewer than 100 maps | Maps in a top-30 team against a top-30 team |
| Top 50 | Fewer than 300 maps | Maps in a top-50 team against a top-50 team |
| Career | Fewer than 1,000 maps | Every map of the player's career |
Criteria as printed by the ranking's publisher in its February and August 2026 reports.
Crossing any one of the five map limits ends a player's time on the list, however young he is. Turning 21 ends it too, however little he has played. That is why the August list mixes players who have just become regulars at the biggest events with players from smaller teams whose careers are still taking shape.
Related readGame Changers NA Stage 1: eight teams reach the 2026 main eventHow the monthly list is built
The ranking holds 50 names and is published every month. In its February report the site said it uses the same method each month, so that readers can follow which players are rising and which are falling. That edition drew mainly on data from the six months before February 9, 2026, and it came with an interactive dashboard holding the data behind the order of the 50 players.
The April report set out the method in more detail. The order comes from nine factors, gathered in three weighted groups: recent performance, offline pedigree, and outside factors. Recent performance carries 45 percent of the result and offline pedigree, meaning results on LAN, the in-person events where the best teams meet, another 45 percent. The last 10 percent goes to outside factors, among them the player's age and his FACEIT ELO, his rating on an online matchmaking platform.
Each factor is measured against the player's peers and adjusted for how many maps he has played, so a small sample is pulled toward the average. The site also said it had moved from z-scores to percentiles, and that its aim is to find the young players who do best relative to the opposition and situations they face. The February report added that FUT's in-game leader, the player who calls the team's strategy during a round, gets no boost from that role in the ranking.
Not every place is decided by the numbers alone. The top 40 enter automatically. The last ten are top-up places that guarantee regional spread: at least four players from Asia, four from South America, two from North America and one from Oceania.
Related readLeague of Legends Game Changers Rising returns to EMEA with stagesEleven graduates on maps
The eleven players who pass a map limit show where young talent reached the top level in 2026. FUT accounts for four of them. It is the team the site called a young international side with an average age of just over 19 when it beat Astralis 3-1 in the best-of-five final of PGL Bucharest in April, its first notable LAN trophy, about a year after it entered Counter-Strike. dem0n, Krabeni and cmtry all crossed the 50-map limit at Big Events, as did a fourth FUT player. All four reached the top ten during the season: dem0n peaked second, Krabeni sixth and cmtry eighth. The four were also four of the five players FUT fielded in the Bucharest final, alongside lauNX.
PARIVISION also loses two prospects to the Big Event limit: xiELO, whose best place was third, and nota, whose best was seventh. cobrazera, listed with The MongolZ, where the site notes he has been benched, leaves the same way after peaking fourth. Together with the FUT four, that makes seven of the twelve top-ten graduates who left on Big Event maps.
Three graduates passed other limits. xKacpersky of Ninjas in Pyjamas, who held first place through March, crossed the top-30 limit of 100 maps. sirah of 100 Thieves and jackasmo of fnatic passed the top-50 limit of 300 maps, with 325 and 352 maps respectively. sirah stood seventh in February, and jackasmo's best place was 17th. The eleventh graduate on maps, a B8 player the site says broke out this season, passed the top-20 limit.
Related readMOUZ NXT sign two players and return to a full fiveThe site points out one contrast at 100 Thieves: poiii, 19, stays on the list. He joined the team with less experience behind him than sirah had, so he remains under the limits sirah has now passed.
Twenty who age out
The other twenty graduates leave simply because they turned 21, and their teams describe a different part of the scene. Only three of them reached the top ten: koala, now with DENDELE, peaked eighth, while tenzy of magic and adamb of OG both peaked ninth. The site counts these three among its twelve top-ten graduates.
Below them, seven aged-out players had peaked between 11th and 30th, among them flayy of 9INE (13th), Grizz of Marsborne (20th), Sdaim of Nemesis (25th) and jocab of FOKUS (27th). The other ten all peaked between 31st and 50th. Two of the twenty, laxiee and ksloks, are listed with no team at all.
The split by peak is sharp. Every graduate who never climbed above 30th left on age, while the map limits took nine of the twelve top-ten graduates and two of the nine who peaked between 11th and 30th.
How the season looked at the top
The graduation list also reads as a record of the season's leaders. Of the 31 graduates, twelve peaked inside the top ten, nine peaked between 11th and 30th, and ten peaked between 31st and 50th.
Peak places as given in the graduates list of August 4, 2026.
The turnover at the top was heavy. Eight of the ten players in the February top ten are on the graduation list, and so are eight of the ten in the April top ten. xKacpersky led the February edition ahead of dem0n and xiELO. In April the first place went to the fourth FUT graduate, with xKacpersky second, dem0n third and cobrazera fourth.
Within the top-ten group the reasons are uneven. Seven left on Big Event maps, one on top-30 maps, one on top-50 maps and three because of their age.
FUT's four and the Major
The IEM Cologne Major, played from June 2 to 21, was the last Major before the graduation. On the eve of the event the site counted 31 players making their Major debut, nine of them ranked prospects spread across all three stages. FUT supplied four of the nine and, the site wrote then, all four were set to graduate after the Major.
The August list confirms that forecast: the four FUT players who arrived in Cologne as prospects now leave the ranking together, all on Big Event maps.
The ranking had already lost a leading name after its first season. The February report noted that Lake had graduated from the list after that season, and the graduates list recalls that xKacpersky held first place in Season 2 through March.
What comes next
The site said the first ranking of the new season will be published in the coming days.
The graduation post does not change the criteria: the six conditions of January 1, 2026, stay as they are, and eligibility is next updated after the following Major. That is the PGL Major Singapore, which its organizer has set for November 24 to December 13. The next monthly editions will show which younger players take the places left by FUT's four, by the PARIVISION pair and by the twenty who turned 21.
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