CS2 is alive with excitement for young players; prospects, talents, and academies are all the rage. But how can anybody know which youngsters will be great? Or even good? Let’s discuss the dark art of scouting.

I, KingT, am often portrayed as a scout. Not because I want to be, but rather thanks to having slumped into that role over the past 5 years. I started watching tier two/three CS out of boredom, anchored to my bedroom desk during COVID, and quickly discovered a world of players I’d never heard of or seen discussed by anyone else.

Of course I could have been working hard towards my apprenticeship, but why do that when there are Snow Sweet Snows and European Development Championships to watch?

My interest grew, evolving from watching streams to downloading demos and scouring them for anything that stood out. I started making videos on the players I was watching, under the name “Prospects”, revealing the work I was doing to the public.

Of course, they didn’t give a sh-t.

Sure, the odd episode would perform nicely, but that wasn’t the norm. The people (derogatory) were not interested in being ahead of the curve. I grew frustrated with the performance of the videos, putting in more and more effort into them for little to no improvement.

The saving grace were the few interactions I had with other creators, talent, and the occasional member of the pro scene - my videos were being noticed and actually had some value.

I kept digging, trying to add more value, talking IGLs for insight, reaching out to coaches for information on their scouting process, garnering a greater understanding for the totality of the scouting process in Professional Counter-Strike.

Now I’m going to share it with you.

A lot of this is going to seem like common sense. ”Of course a team will watch a player’s demo before signing him” you’ll think as I tell you about eye-testing. The reality is, however, that not every team does bother with every step - I’ve heard of players being signed purely on word of mouth or the right endorsement.

Instead of putting forth every possibility, telling you every horror story shared with me, I’m going to talk you through my steps for finding a player and relate them to the pro scene. I’ll explain what makes a player stand out, show you where it can all go wrong, and what teams do (or should do) to confirm the player is right for them.

The demo review pt.1: roleplay

Not every player plays the same role. This is an accepted truth. Whilst some people argue that players can, and should, play every role, it’s simply unreasonable to expect a human to be that kind of multi-tool. Beyond just the positions and roles we assign to a player in-game, they also have personal tendencies, shaped by higher powers and an incomprehensible set of life experiences.

Some players are slow, never releasing shift, preferring to amble their way to objectives and picking off opponents along the way. Others play at a furious tempo, leading the charge on the offense or refusing to sit still on defense.

I have found that changes to these preferences are far harder to hammer home than apparently simple positional changes, leading to funky mismatches.

This is why kyousuke HAS to steal some of NiKo’s roles and positions. In the academy, he couldn’t sit still if his life depended on it, which it often did, leading to his POV resembling that of a little boy desperate for the toilet.

Gathering a good understanding of what a player’s responsibilities are helps to determine what the expectations are. A player playing supportive roles should not be expected to drop a 0.7 KPR, immediately reframing the stats that were previously out of context.

In the same way, a player who is given a starring role should be expected to reach a certain level of performance and cannot get away with subpar fragging.

The demo review pt.2: eye-testing

Eye-testing is often referred to as some kind of superpower. It’s really not. It’s about understanding what to look for and diligently watching for it. Let me elaborate.

Instead of simply watching a demo just to see the aesthetic of the frags, answer a simple question in your mind at each kill and each death: “Why?”. Using this approach, I remove a great deal of noise surrounding a player’s quality, seeing where deaths were caused by teammates’ failing, or kills were created by perfect team coordination and utility.

This is the next level of context being added to a player’s stats. A player who opens up rounds with great support from his teammates should be expected to win these fights. A player who entries without a flash and has two defenders in front of him should be expected to fall.

A great dichotomy in this sense is MATYS and FASHR. Whilst playing in tier two, these guys both managed to put up fantastic numbers. The difference came in the setup. MATYS was often a hard entry on fnatic, hitting crazy first bullet entries to get sites open. FASHR played with far more support, with a lot of the team’s utility and pathing designed to get him frags.

One has been a star in tier one, capable of fragging with the best on the way to winning an elite tournament. The other has a name that sounds like a far-right newsletter.

But he’s toxic(!!)

The final step in determining a player’s potential is the hardest for me to verify. I don’t have access to players in the way teams do. I don’t even have access to coaches in the way teams do. This makes it almost impossible for me to verify if a player has the mental faculties required to be a successful player.

This is what has led to some of the players I have praised heavily in the past failing. There is nothing in a demo that dictates how a player behaves in a Teamspeak server.

Directly interviewing is a part of the process. It may even reveal some things that couldn’t be seen on a demo. A player might feel he’s being forced out of position, or could be more involved in the calling, or even thinks he could be an AWPer. The player isn’t always right - and I think senzu may end up being a great example - but it can be revealing to find out how they see themselves.

The other part of the puzzle is to check the references. What do the coaches say? Are there any former teammates with stories to tell? These are the kinds of conversations I think teams can sometimes miss.

This is also something that can rarely be overlooked. If a player fails in tier one, no matter how promising, I look for these kinds of quotes. They often come out after the fact, but it makes you wonder why nobody asked these questions ahead of time. It’s another form of due diligence that simply gets overlooked when a player has gaudy numbers and a great eye-test.

There are players who have overcome these issues. I remember s1mple being the talk of the town in 2015/16, both for his impressive play and his inability to be a tolerable teammate. The reality is that he had the ability to overcome the negative press, which makes him an exception to the rule. For most players, those without title-winning power, being a nuisance isn’t an option.

So those are the steps. I think they’re pretty easy to follow. Use them and you’ll more likely than not end up with a decent player. They do require a hefty time investment, however, and that’s where things get awkward.

A difficult process concludes

I can nitpick some more examples, players like Kursy never had a great eye-test and the Swedish scene has a long history of confusing promotions, but AN1MO gave me a word limit, and I would hate to have to cut any of my brilliant jokes.

The reality is that most top teams don’t need to go scouting deep, whilst the teams that do need to sign tier two names don’t have the resources to scout everyone properly. I used to eviscerate every roster move that didn’t match my expectations, but with age comes wisdom, and an acute awareness of how my negative tweets make me sound like an old fart.

Next time you see a team sign a player you’ve never heard of, take a minute. Watch a demo. Or check my channel for a video doing the work for you. In any case, understand that selecting that player (hopefully) took a lot of work, sorting through dozens of options to figure out the right match, just for that player to decide he’s going to leave when his countryman gets sold on.