Now that the Counter-Strike scene is fully settled into the new system, teams are figuring out how to play the VRS game.

If you’re a tier 2 or even tier 3 team trying to get invites to hang out with the grown-ups, you’ve got to grind every ranked tournament you can find. Just look at NIP - they’re out here playing random $10k LANs in Sweden and the US, doing whatever it takes to squeeze out every last point.

That’s where events like FiReLEAGUE Buenos Aires 2025 and MESA Nomadic Masters Spring 2025 come into play, both gaining a lot more attention due to their beefier prize pools of $100k and $250k, respectively.

But in the jungle of tier 2 CS, you never know what kind of danger’s waiting around the corner…

Take the MESA Nomadic Masters in Mongolia, for example. The team list was mid, to put it nicely. HEROIC, BIG, B8, SAW, and a few other names you’ve probably never heard of.

But for the teams that made the trip to Ulaanbaatar, this tournament was a big deal. Winning it, or even just pulling off an upset, could give you a huge boost in the VRS.

That’s exactly what happened with JiJieHao. They came in, swept their opener against SAW, walked away with 166 points, and shot up 38 spots in the rankings. We’re still trying to figure out how a team that can beat NAVI one week gets rolled by a squad with 0SAMAS the next.

In the end, HEROIC secured one of the best trophies we’ve seen and jumped from 20th to 16th in the ranking. Doesn’t sound like much, but in this system, that small jump could be the difference between playing the IEM Cologne Play-In or watching it from home.

Same thing with FiReLEAGUE Buenos Aires 2025. The tournament you might have heard was played inside a subway station. Side note: sick setting for a CS event, don’t get us wrong, but it’s probably not very fun having a train roll by every 10 minutes and blocking your view.

Anyways, this one was a bit more modest, with Imperial, Sharks, BESTIA, and 9z in the mix. Imperial ended up taking the $50k first-place prize - and more importantly, secured 123 points, jumping from rank 44 to 27. That boost puts them in a great spot heading into the post-Major tournaments.

So, if there’s one good thing to come out of the VRS, it’s that it’s brought a whole new level of relevance to tier 2/3 tournaments, giving smaller TOs the chance to put their product on the map and reach a much wider audience.