VAC bans and the CS2 Major: who is eligible and what a Banned Team is

Every Counter-Strike 2 player who reaches a Major arrives with a Steam account, and that account carries a history. For most players the history is clean. For a few it holds a VAC ban, the mark left by Valve Anti-Cheat, Valve's own anti-cheat system. At a Major, the championship Valve holds to its own rules, that mark decides whether a player may take part at all, and it can decide the fate of the team that fields him.

The rule fits in seven sentences of Valve's Major Supplemental Rulebook, the text that sets the rules every Major must share whoever organizes it. Those seven sentences reach further than they first appear to: they cover the qualifiers as well as the main event, they bind the organizer before they bind the team, and they leave the final word to Valve.

This guide reads that clause line by line: what a VAC ban is in Valve's own texts, who decides whether a banned player may play, when a team becomes a Banned Team, what such a team loses, how Valve's general power to disqualify works, how a player's identity is tied to a Steam account, how competition PCs are locked down at the venue, and what the rules for other Valve-licensed tournaments add.

Valve, Major Supplemental Rulebook, sections on eligibility and anti-tampering.

Where the rule sits

Valve publishes its rules for competitive Counter-Strike in a public repository, and the Major Supplemental Rulebook is one of its texts. Its foreword sets its ambition: to bring the best Counter-Strike players in the world together in a LAN setting, an event played with every team in the same venue, to claim their title and to show how high the game's skill ceiling is. It also sets its limits. The document does not contain every rule of a Major, only those Valve requires to be uniform across all of them. For the rest, it sends readers to the tournament organizer, which the text abbreviates as TO.

The text prints no calendar date. Its invitation tables refer to the Winter 2025 allocations, and its section on final rankings to the results of the 2025 Austin Major. The most recent Major, the IEM Cologne Major organized by ESL, ran from June 2 to June 21, 2026.

The VAC clause sits in the part of the rulebook headed Participants, under a subheading on eligibility. The same subheading holds a second, shorter rule on staffing. Around them, the Participants part also deals with invitations, rosters, the participant manifest and the agreement every team signs. The placement treats VAC as a question of who may take part in the event, rather than as a rule of play.

What a VAC ban is in Valve's texts

The rulebook does not define Valve Anti-Cheat; it takes the term as known. Valve's other texts show where it stands. The Limited Game Tournament License, the license Valve grants to the organizer of a tournament in one of its games, requires robust anti-cheating measures, and names the standard it means: Valve Anti-Cheat itself, or alternative software at least as robust as VAC that meets or exceeds industry standards.

The same license section shows that a VAC ban is something Valve issues, not the organizer. It warns organizers whose own anti-cheat software interferes with the game, for example by injecting code into the running process, to make sure that activity only runs when the game is operated in the appropriate mode. The reason it gives is to avoid the user receiving an anti-cheat ban from Valve. An organizer's anti-cheat and Valve's are therefore two separate systems, and the second can sanction a player for what the first does if the two are not kept apart.

Valve's developer documentation adds the wider frame of bans on Steam. It describes game bans, which a game's developer can issue through Valve's banning infrastructure instead of building its own system. Such a ban is publicly visible on the player's Steam profile, and the account cannot join secure servers for the games it is banned from. A secure game, in the documentation's words, is one that does not allow convicted cheaters to play on it.

The organizer's first duty

The clause opens with an obligation on the organizer, not on the player. The TO will not qualify any player who has been banned by Valve Anti-Cheat in Counter-Strike, and will not allow such a player in any qualifying event. The text abbreviates the status as VAC Banned.

Two words in that sentence carry its weight. The first is qualify: the duty begins at the qualifiers, not at the main event. The second is any: the sentence covers every qualifying event the organizer runs on the road to its Major, whatever its level. A player with a VAC ban is meant to be stopped at the door of the first qualifier, before he can earn his team a single place.

The duty is the organizer's, but the team carries its own risk, set out in the third sentence of the clause.

Any account, and Valve's written approval

The second sentence widens the net and opens the only door the clause leaves. Any player who is VAC Banned on any of their accounts must be approved in writing by Valve to be eligible to take part in the event.

The phrase any of their accounts closes the obvious gap. A player who plays the Major on a clean account while another account he holds carries a VAC ban is still a VAC-banned player for the purpose of the rule. The sentence ties the ban to the person, not to the account he happens to register.

The same sentence makes Valve the only judge of an exception. The approval must be in writing and must come from Valve. The organizer cannot grant it, and neither can the team. The rulebook sets no time limit after which a ban stops counting, gives no criteria for the approval and describes no procedure for asking for it. Whether a given player obtains it depends on Valve and on the case.

The first and second sentences use slightly different words. The first speaks of a ban in Counter-Strike; the second of a ban on any of the player's accounts, without naming a game. Read together, they leave written approval from Valve as the only route the text states for a player with a VAC ban.

When a team becomes a Banned Team

The third sentence moves from the player to the team. Any team on which a banned player has played, during the period that starts with the first qualifier and ends with the end of the event, will be banned. The rulebook gives such a team a name of its own: a Banned Team.

The window covers the whole qualifying path and the event itself. A team cannot clean its record by dropping a banned player after the qualifiers: the sentence looks at whether he has played at any point in the period, not at whether he is on the roster at the end.

The trigger is that the banned player has played. The text does not use the words registered or signed. The second sentence makes a player Valve has approved in writing eligible to take part; the third does not say whether such a player still counts as a banned player for this purpose.

The rulebook does not say who establishes that a banned player has played, or how. The two sentences that follow give Valve the power to act and the organizer the duty to carry out its decision.

What a Banned Team loses

The consequences come in the last two sentences of the clause, and both are short. The first concerns money: "Any event winnings by such player or such Banned Team will be forfeit."

The sentence applies to the player and to the team alike. It speaks of event winnings in general, without listing what they include, and it says nothing about who receives a forfeited amount; how a given payment is treated depends on the case.

The second consequence concerns the other players on the team: "No player from a Banned Team will be eligible to compete in the event with any other team."

This is the part of the rule with the widest reach. It falls on players who have no ban of their own. A teammate of a banned player cannot leave the Banned Team and join another roster in the same Major, as a stand-in or as a new signing. The rule ties every player of the team to its fate for that event.

The roster rules elsewhere in the rulebook set the frame in which these consequences apply. A Major team's registered roster must match the invited roster, the five players who earned the invitation, which the rulebook calls the Core Lineup. A team may add one optional coach and one optional substitute, provided the substitute would not change the Regional Assignment of the Core Lineup, the region the roster is assigned to, if he replaced any core player. Each team has one substitution with its registered substitute during the event, between matches for any reason, and during a match or between maps only in a medical emergency.

Valve's power to disqualify

Between the definition of a Banned Team and the forfeit of winnings, the clause inserts a broader power. Valve reserves the right to disqualify any player, team, broadcaster, commentator or producer in its sole discretion. The organizer must immediately disqualify that person or team upon notice from Valve.

This sentence is not limited to VAC. It names people who never touch a competition PC, from commentators to producers, and it states no grounds: the decision is Valve's, in its sole discretion. Placed next to the anti-cheat rule, it gives Valve a way to act on a case the other sentences do not cover.

The organizer's role in it is executive. The text gives it no part in reviewing Valve's decision: it must disqualify immediately upon notice. The text describes no appeal from a disqualification and no hearing before one.

The staffing rule, in the same eligibility section, closes the side doors. Individuals who are prohibited from taking part in the event, coaches included, may not be employed by the organizer or partnered with it for the event, streaming partners included, and may not have access to team or staff-only areas. A player kept out under the VAC clause is within those words, so the same limits reach him in those other roles.

Accounts, names and the manifest

A rule built on Steam accounts needs the organizer to know which account belongs to whom, and the rulebook makes that part of the paperwork. The organizer must collect a participant manifest from every registered participant and deliver it to Valve as a spreadsheet file.

The organizer must also inform participants that this information will be transferred to Valve. The SteamID line is the one that matters for the VAC rule: it links each registered person to a specific Steam account in the hands of the company that issues VAC bans. The rulebook does not describe what Valve does with the list. Its mugshot rules point the same way, since the photographs of participants must be named by SteamID.

The coach and the substitute are on the manifest as well as the five players. The eligibility clause speaks of players, but the staffing rule reaches anyone prohibited from taking part, coaches included.

Locked machines at the venue

Eligibility rules keep banned players out. The rulebook's anti-tampering section deals with everyone who is let in, by restricting what can be done on the machines they play on. Competition PCs are secured and managed by event staff, and restricted to what is minimally needed to log in and run the game.

The network rule is the most precise of them. The rulebook asks organizers to allow UDP traffic to Valve's own network and the ports Steam needs to log in, and to block all other traffic, including other TCP traffic to Valve's address ranges. It gives the reason: Valve's address ranges still deliver game content, and a malicious participant could have content disguised as a different app on Steam, through programs such as Early Access or the Workshop. The tournament's connections must not become a path for software to reach a competition PC.

The auditing rule shows what the records are for. Auditing is set up on player machines, the rulebook says, so that if a player is called into question there are records of the actions taken on the machine. It also asks organizers to synchronize the clocks of those machines with an internet time server, so that the time stamps in the records are accurate, and to benchmark the machines after setting up auditing, since it can slow some hardware.

The stage rules add the physical layer. The organizer keeps electronics such as phones out of the competition area with a metal detector at the entrance, apart from permitted gaming peripherals, and inspects anything else players want to bring on stage.

Beyond the Major: other Valve-licensed events

The Banned Team rule is a Major rule. Valve's Tournament Operation Requirements, the rulebook for the operators of Counter-Strike tournaments, do not name Valve Anti-Cheat at all. They take a different approach: they let each organizer write its own disqualification rules, and then bind it to them.

Section 5.4 of that text allows an organizer to have rules that disqualify participants for misconduct, cheating infractions, being flagged by esports bodies as a matchmaking fix risk, or other integrity or compliance issues. Two duties come with it: the rules must be published in advance as part of the tournament's additional information, the set of details every event must make public, and the details of any disqualification decision must be published when it is taken. Section 4.3.2 sets the standard such rules must meet. They must be transparent, based exclusively on specific objective criteria, and applied whatever the roster or the circumstances. The text adds that disqualification rules cannot be applied selectively at the organizer's discretion.

The license supplies the duties that sit under both. Section 3.4 requires organizers to monitor player behavior, to investigate any report of cheating or suspicious activity, and to report substantial suspicions to Valve, and also to a competent authority to the extent the tournament falls under one.

The operation requirements also show what one missing player does to a roster at an invited event. A team invited through the Valve Regional Standings, the ranking Valve uses for invitations, may accept only if at least three of its participating players were on the invited roster on the invitation date. The organizer declares a forfeit in any match in which a roster does not field at least three of its invited players for the whole match. If a roster cannot accept or declines an invitation, the organizer moves down the ranking until every announced place is filled.

What the texts leave open

The clause is short, and several questions it raises are not answered in Valve's published texts.

None of them sets an age after which a VAC ban stops counting, and none describes how a player asks Valve for the written approval or what Valve weighs when it answers. The clause describes no appeal against the Banned Team status, against a forfeit of winnings or against a disqualification ordered by Valve. It does not say which payments count as event winnings, or who receives what is forfeited. It does not say how a place left by a Banned Team or a disqualified team is filled; the operation requirements speak only of rosters that cannot accept or decline an invitation.

The Major clause names VAC bans only. A ban from a third-party anti-cheat system, or a sanction from the Esports Integrity Commission, the independent body that investigates cheating and match-fixing in esports, falls outside its wording; whether it bars a player from a Major then depends on the organizer's own rules and on Valve's general power to disqualify. In the Major rulebook, that power is the one provision of the clause that is tied to no stated ground.

The Major's VAC rule closes every door but one, and Valve alone holds it: the organizer carries out what Valve decides.

The .esports registry publishes Esports Observer, so the whole scene can read its news for free.