There is a big story coming out of the Counter-Strike scene. The CS is trying to organize a tournament that will set up a legendary return for the competition in 2025. StarLadder announced its proposed plans to return to the tournament circuit in 2025 on Monday.
According to StarLadder’s statement, their major consideration was the large number of pro teams and the fact that there will be two seasons in 2025 and two more in 2026.
“We consider a significant increase in the number of professional teams as the criterion for entering a new era. A large number of tournaments, with new CS2 licensing rules, should contribute to this,” StarLadder said.
Here’s the schedule:
Season 19: May 26 – June 1, 2025
Season 20: Sept. 12 – 21, 2025
Season 21: May 25 – 31, 2026
Season 22: Sept. 11 – 20, 2026.
The return of StarLadder is still a chain reaction to the changes made to the CS2 circuit, which effectively ended ESL and BLAST’s monopolization of the scene.
Starting from next year, the participation and invitation teams will be based on Valve rankings instead of organizers having a unique relationship with participating teams. This will not allow exclusive access to tier-one tournaments to just a select number of teams.
Over the weekend, PGL revealed that it had plans for the years 2025 and 2026, with eleven events. This was against the backdrop of NAVI being crowned the champions of the first CS2 Major in Denmark after beating the FaZe clan.
With StarLadder and PGL returning, CS2 fans will be delighted as they are now spoilt for choice, but there will be concerns for the teams who will dread the match schedule that it will birth, and it won’t be surprising to see some teams skip events during the busy schedule, making room for other tournaments.
