or: How I spent my sunday afternoon

After reading a comment today which mentioned the country with the most CS:GO players being Russia, I had to laugh. Coming from Austria i naturally have the best ping to the EU-East servers located in Vienna. Due to this circumstance I can confirm that there are A LOT of russians playing this game. But I wanted to dig deeper and find out what the actual numbers were, out of simple curiosity - and my obsession with statistics.I started ingame and wanted to see if there were any graphics or other stuff helping me but unfortunately it was only a dead end. The only 'useful' statistic I was able to get was the number of accounts online during the last month.Quick Googling - Thank Mr.Google - got me back on track. I found SteamSpy and on it statistics for this latest iteration of Counter-Strike ( http://steamspy.com/app/730 ).Interestingly, SteamSpy only uses stats for players of the last two weeks, so it varied from the ingame number for a month. After not being able to get all the graphics I had to make an account, have fun with an E-Mail adress I do not check, and finally reached my goal. Or so I thought.The general trend featured here is that a lot of western countries like the USA and Germany have a bigger share of overall Accounts that possess CS but: Those are accounts which lie dead in the dirt. Smurfes not touched for a longer period of time. Countries like Turkey on the other hand have an overall lower share of accounts with CS:GO in the Library but those accounts are used more.As mentioned above I love statistics, one of the reasons reddit will never be as good as HLTV, and wanted to see how many actual players were those percentage numbers. To start my calculations i took roughly the middle of the accounts used in the last two weeks from SteamSpy and the ingame number from Valve and came to nine million players. The website 'only' lists the Top 29 Nations which have users playing CS:GO, the rest being featured in other.From there on i broke the numbers down per country. It is true, there are over one million russians playing CS:GO on a regular basis and they are the biggest group out of one country, followed by the USA. Roughly half of russian active users count for the nation with the third highest playercount: Poland. Followed by Germany and with a little gap Brazil.But the nerd in me was not satisfied yet. I looked up the populations of all countries featured in this list and through my advanced skills in mathematics ( Kappa) I was able to see just how many percent of the population play CS:GO on a regular basis. Not really surprisingly the swedes lead with a staggering 3% of the population playing CS:GO in the last few weeks. Their southern neighbours of Denmark follow by a margin of 0,67 % and are the second highest ranked country of CS:GO players per capita. The bronze medal goes to norway with 2,1 % of the population playing. Bear in mind that this still means that one out of fifty plays CS there. Finland just comes short of the 2 % by 2 permille. The full results can be found in this last picture.Lastly i want to thank YOU for reading. I hope you find it as interesting as I do and did making this blog.Have a good evening.Edit as of 12:10 on Monday: Seems like the only one that can view these pics enlargened is me so there you go:SteamSpy on: Audience in 2 weeksSteamSpy on: Geography of the Accounts by Copies ownedSteamSpy on: Geography of the Accounts by usage in the last 2 weeksMy OpenOffice calculations regarding total player numbers and % of the population playing