Valve’s switch from bans to picks has cut the two most popular maps to 40% of Premier matches, while Cache and Anubis have doubled their games.
Mirage and Dust II are still the most played maps in Counter-Strike 2 Premier, but they no longer take up half of the queue. New figures from Leetify, based on 12.7 million Premier matches played between 29 July and 20 October, show Mirage falling from about 25% of all matches to 20.3% after Valve’s update on 22 September. Dust II, which sat just behind Mirage before the change, is down to 19.8%.
Together, the two maps went from close to half of all Premier games to 40.1%.
How the new map selection works
The September update replaced the old ban phase, where teams struck maps until one was left, with a pick phase that builds a pool of four:
- Team 1 picks one map.
- Team 2 picks two maps.
- Team 1 picks the last map.
- The game draws one of the four at random.
Under bans, the most popular maps rarely got removed, so they kept surviving to the end. Now a map can be picked by both teams’ favourites and still lose the draw. For Mirage to land 20.3% of matches with a one-in-four draw, it has to be among the four picks in roughly four out of five games.
Cache and Anubis are the winners
Leetify’s chart says the change “doubled the amount of Cache & Anubis matches”. Cache, which came back to the Active Duty pool in place of Overpass this year, had dropped as low as 6.6% of Premier matches before the update. It now sits at 11.2%.
| Map | Just before the update | Since the update |
|---|---|---|
| Mirage | about 25% | 20.3% |
| Dust II | about 24% | 19.8% |
| Inferno | about 13% | 13.9% |
| Nuke | about 11.5% | 11.9% |
| Anubis | about 8% | 11.9% |
| Cache | 6.6% | 11.2% |
| Ancient | about 11.5% | 10.9% |
The odd one out is Ancient. It is the only map that is played less than before, and it is now last of the seven. Leetify could not explain it either.
There’s more opportunity to play every map after Valve’s update to the map selection process. Fascinating that Ancient somehow decreased through this change.
Not everyone likes the draw
The numbers say the queue is more varied, but the reaction under Leetify’s post was mixed. One player whose group sits above 25,000 rating wrote that their lobbies still end up with Dust II, Mirage, Cache and one random map, with Cache drawn in seven of their last 14 games. Others complained that the draw can hand them the same map three times in a row. The most common wish was for each team to get one ban before the picks start.
Valve has not said whether the pick phase will be tweaked. For the full map pool and how each map has been played this season, see our guide to the most played CS2 maps.
