The latest iteration of the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike (CS:GO) has evolved into a global esport with tournament viewership well over 500.000 viewers and professional players racking up million dollar earnings. I rediscovered the game at the tender age of 30. Unfortunately the 15 year gap from the last time I was wielding the AK47 left me with no chance of reaching the fame and fortune that pro players enjoy today. Bummer!

But hey! I can always aim to improve, right? I’ve found a small group of likeminded 30's-something dads who also likes to enjoy the quiet evenings (with kids asleep) by screaming into a headset to much annoyance of girlfriends and wives. We’re no good, but we have fun!

And maybe…just maybe, we could learn a thing or two by studying other players. I think it’s a pretty well established fact that professional counter strike teams uses analysts and heatmaps to study the behaivour of their opponents. So perhaps we can employ some of the same thoughts to improve our own game. But although you can certainly learn from studying how pro’s play, the meta in pro games are just so different from the random pick-up games that we play through Valve’s matchmaking system. So maybe we should try to derive knowledge from games and players a bit closer to our own level? Luckily this guy have collected data on 32.000 rounds of Counter Strike from competitive matchmaking games. So I thought I would poke around at this data and hopefully learn a thing or two about how other players play the game and what factors seperates the different ingame ranks. The dataset is pretty rich, but it doesn’t include all the events and features that is possible to extract from a CS:GO match. To learn more about the dataset and download it yourself, click here. If you want to see some cool examples of what’s possible within the realm of CS:GO analytics, go follow @SixteenZero on twitter.

Weapon of choice

Let’s start off with investigating the weapons of choice for each rank. The dataset only include ranks from Gold Nova 1 to Legendary Eagle Master so that’s what we are limited to focusing on. In the figure below I have grouped each rank in Gold Nova, Master Guardian and Legendary Eagle ranks into one overlying group. Furthermore, the figure only contain weapon choices from normal buy rounds.