Adding three extra days to a Major tournament is undeniably costly—often running into hundreds of thousands of euros. Yet, this investment is necessary to achieve the ultimate form of competition: a Major without Best-of-One (Bo1) matches. Here are the reasons why Valve must urgently retire a format that has become obsolete in professional Counter-Strike.
The End of Bo1 in Competitive CS
Over the years, in the quest for the best possible tournament format among different organizers (EFG, BLAST, PGL, and StarLadder), Bo1 has become completely obsolete. The last Bo1 played at Cologne (IEM) was during the 2023 Play-Ins. For several years, IEM had adopted a Group Stage in Bo3 format. Just before the 2024 IEM Cologne edition, ESL announced the end of the Bo1 format for its first competition phase.
#IEM Cologne 2024 Tournament Update:
After taking in player & community feedback in to account we have made the decision to remove the BO1 format from #IEM Cologne 2024.
All BO1 games will now be replaced by BO3 series.
Stay tuned for info regarding scheduling. pic.twitter.com/SEGvW5CpoU
— ESL Counter-Strike (@ESLCS) July 25, 2024
To find the last Bo1 played in an IEM competition, you have to go back to Rio in October 2024. Since then, ESL has dropped its bad habit of starting these tournaments with a Bo1—more than a year after BLAST did.
BLAST abandoned Bo1 in 2023 during the resumption of its BLAST Premier circuit. The last Bo1 was played at the Fall Groups in August 2022. This is no coincidence: organizers are seeking the best format for both competition and entertainment. Clearly, they have all concluded that Bo1 fails to check all the boxes and makes the competition less representative of the true level of teams.
In 2025, PGL, BLAST, and EFG have played no matches in their competitions as Bo1.
Best-of-Three: The Fair Format
For over five years, the world’s top Counter-Strike teams have largely abandoned Bo1. This begs the question: why is this format still imposed, especially at the highest levels? Bo1 inherently introduces excessive variance—one bad map, or even one bad side, can end the tournament hopes of a team that is objectively better. Bo3 matches dramatically reduce this randomness by:
- Allowing teams to recover from a poor map performance
- Rewarding teams with deeper map pools and better veto strategies
- Preserving the possibility of upsets while making them more remarkable
Aligning Format with Tournament Prestige
Eliminating Bo1 from Majors would require extending the event by three days—one extra day for matches decided at 1-0 or 0-1 in each stage of the tournament. While this increase in days raises production, accommodation, and staffing costs, it would enhance the prestige and competitive integrity of the event. Running Bo1 matches at this level is increasingly seen as unbefitting the top tier of esports, a view widely shared among pro players.
Maciej “F1KU” Miklas (OG) voiced this sentiment as early as 2022:
I think having Best-of-one matches in tournaments like this is full bullshit… It’s just really hard to recover even though you are the better team.
More recently, Dan “apEX” Madesclaire (Vitality) bluntly criticized the Bo1 format during the BLAST Major in Austin:
Best-of-one… that’s just so fucking boring. It scares you to make mistakes… It’s the most prestigious event, and Bo1 is a bit random… I hope it’s going to be the last Major with Bo1s.
Adding to the argument is the transition to the MR12 format. The shorter rounds magnify the impact of pistol rounds, economic cycles, clutches, and map side starts—further increasing variance and making Bo1 even less suitable.
Conclusion
Abandoning Bo1 matches is crucial to uphold the legitimacy of Counter-Strike’s Majors. Though more costly and time-consuming, removing Bo1 reduces randomness and rewards consistent skill and strategy. The industry’s leading organizers have already moved away from Bo1, and professional players overwhelmingly support this shift. Valve must embrace this evolution and say goodbye to Bo1 once and for all to preserve the integrity and prestige of its most important tournaments.
Next: the Final in Bo5.
