CS2
Glossary

The player who uses the AWP as their primary weapon. The AWP is a bolt-action sniper rifle that kills in one shot to most of the body. AWPers are usually a team's highest-impact individual and the one opponents most want to take off the map early. When an AWPer dies on a risky play, the team loses their best weapon for the rest of that round. For kill props, AWPers tend to have the highest ceilings and also the most volatile floors.

In-game leader. The player calling strategy and coordinating the team during rounds. A good IGL reads the opponent's patterns and adapts through the game. Some IGLs are strong individual fraggers. Others sacrifice personal output to support team structure. When a team loses their IGL or is playing with a stand-in in that role, their decision-making usually gets noticeably worse.

The player who goes first into contested space to open up a site for teammates. They are expected to trade deaths. They may die, but in doing so they create an advantage. Entry fraggers often have high kill counts alongside high death counts. High deaths from an entry fragger are not necessarily a red flag. Context matters more than the raw number.

A player whose primary weapon is an assault rifle rather than the AWP. Most players on any team are riflers. The best riflers are flexible and contribute kills consistently across rounds. Riflers tend to have steadier output than AWPers, which makes them somewhat more reliable for kill prop purposes.

A player focused on using utility to enable teammates rather than getting kills. Support players use smoke grenades, flashbangs, and molotovs to control space and set up plays for the star fraggers. Their raw kill numbers are often low even in winning games. Betting a support player to go over a kill line requires real context about the game situation.

A player who separates from the team to apply pressure from unexpected positions, catch rotating defenders, or create distractions. Lurkers can have high-impact rounds with opportunistic kills, but their output is harder to project consistently because it depends on what the other team does.

Counter-Terrorist side. The defending team. CTs know where they need to hold and can react to the Terrorist attack. CT side is generally considered the easier side on most maps because of that positional advantage. Teams that perform better on CT side tend to be disciplined and patient.

Terrorist side. The attacking team. T side requires coordinated aggression, good utility usage, and an IGL who can read the defense and call audibles. Teams that are strong on T side have usually put a lot of work into their executes and their reading of the opponent's rotations.

The first round of each half. Everyone starts with limited money and is restricted to pistols. Pistol rounds are the highest-variance rounds in the game. An underdog team can win them through aggression or luck. Winning the pistol round sets up two or three rounds of economic advantage, which is why a single round matters so much to the shape of a half.

A round where a team intentionally spends nothing or almost nothing, banking money for a future round where they can buy properly. Teams on eco are expected to lose the round. The value is in the rounds after, when they can afford full weapons again. If you see a team lose three rounds in a row and then suddenly win one, they likely just hit their buy round.

A round where a team can afford something better than pistols but not full rifles and a complete utility set. Half-buys are uncomfortable situations where the team is not fully saving and not fully equipped. Teams forced into repeated half-buys often lose several rounds in a row before they can stabilize.

A round where a team has rifles, armor, and full utility. Full buy rounds are when teams are expected to perform at their actual level. If a team is consistently losing full buy rounds, they have a real problem. If they are winning them, they are competing on merit.

A round where a team buys weapons despite not having enough money for a proper full buy, usually because they feel the game situation requires it. Force buys can work, but they are a gamble. A failed force buy can put a team in a bad economic position for several rounds afterward.

A round where the team with full weapons plays against opponents who are saving. Anti-eco rounds are almost always wins for the team with the better buy, but they are not guaranteed. A team that drops an anti-eco round has usually made a significant mistake or gotten very unlucky.

The set of maps eligible for competitive play at a given time. CS2 usually has seven maps in the pool. Teams develop specific preparations for each one, and pools rotate periodically. Knowing which maps a team is weak on is often as useful as knowing their best map.

The pre-game process where teams alternate banning and picking maps until the series maps are set. In a best-of-three, each team typically bans two maps and picks one, leaving a potential third map decider. Good teams use the veto to avoid their worst maps and steer the series somewhere they are comfortable.

Best-of-one, best-of-three, best-of-five. Format determines how many maps are played. BO1 games are a single map and high variance. Upsets are frequent. BO3 series give better teams more opportunity to correct errors and are more reliable for picking outcomes. BO5 games are rare and only used in major finals.

The third map in a BO3 when each team has won one map. The decider is almost always the map both teams least wanted to play, not anyone's strongest map. Decider games are closer and less predictable than maps one and two. Treat them with appropriate skepticism on both sides.

A round played at the start of each map where players fight only with knives. The winner picks their starting side for that map. On heavily imbalanced maps, winning the knife round and picking CT or T side can be worth a meaningful number of expected rounds over the half.

The standard individual performance metric developed by HLTV. It accounts for kills, deaths, assists, and multi-kill rounds. Above 1.0 is above average. Top performers in a tournament usually sit between 1.1 and 1.3. Above 1.3 over a full event is genuinely elite. One caveat: rating inflates when a team is winning by a lot, because players rack up kills in blowout rounds that would not normally happen in a competitive game.

Kills divided by deaths. A quick baseline. Above 1.0 means getting more kills than deaths. Role context matters a lot here. An entry fragger at 0.95 may be doing their job well. A star AWPer at 0.90 is almost certainly underperforming. A support player at 0.85 might be exactly where they should be.

The difference between rounds won and rounds lost across games or a tournament. A team with a positive round differential is winning by larger margins and losing more narrowly, which is a better quality indicator than win-loss alone. A team that is 3-1 but has a slightly negative round differential has been winning close series and getting blown out in losses. Worth noting.

The first kill of a round, which shifts the game to a 5-on-4. Teams that consistently win opening duels have a significant structural advantage because they force the opponent to play from behind almost every round. Which players are expected to take and win opening duels is one of the more useful things to know about a team's style.

A temporary replacement player filling in for someone unavailable. Stand-in situations meaningfully reduce a team's ceiling because the replacement has not practiced their systems. The market does not always price stand-ins correctly, especially on short notice. Catching a stand-in situation before the odds adjust is one of the most consistent edges in CS2 betting. Always check rosters before a game.

A situation where one player is left alive against multiple opponents, usually late in a round. Clutches are exciting and get a lot of coverage, but they are not a reliable performance signal. They happen infrequently, depend heavily on circumstances, and a player known for clutching is more a story than a betting edge.