Read any esports coverage and you'll see it: "an S-tier event", "a tier 2 team", "B-tier results don't count for much". Tiers are a shorthand for how important a tournament is. But who decides them, and what do they actually mean?
There's no single official list
The first thing to know is that most games have no official tier system. Publishers like Valve and Riot run or license their own top events, but they don't publish a list ranking everything else.
Instead, tiers come from the people who track esports:
- Wikis like Liquipedia, which document tournaments for most major games and assign each one a tier.
- Stats sites that rank teams and players, and need to decide which results count for more.
- Data providers like PandaScore (which powers the match data on our Esports page), which label tournaments so apps and sites can filter them.
Their criteria overlap: prize pool, the strength of the teams taking part, whether the event is played on LAN, and how much it matters to the competitive season. So the tiers usually agree, but not always.
What each tier means
S-tier is the very top. In CS2, that's the two Majors each year and the biggest events from organisers like ESL and BLAST. In League of Legends, it's Worlds and MSI. In Valorant, it's Champions and the Masters events. These are the tournaments that define a team's legacy.
A-tier covers strong events just below that level: big international tournaments without quite the full set of top teams, or the most important regional events.
B-tier and below cover regional leagues, smaller international events, online cups and qualifiers. Some leagues and wikis use numbers instead (tier 1, tier 2, tier 3), but the idea is the same.
You'll also hear people talk about "tier 1 teams" and "tier 2 teams". That usually means teams that regularly play at the top events, versus teams that mostly play below them.
Why tiers matter
Rankings. Ranking systems weigh results by event importance. Winning an S-tier event is worth far more than winning a small online cup. In CS2, Valve's Regional Standings don't use tiers directly, but they reward the same things: beating strong teams and winning on LAN. We explain how in How Valve's Regional Standings work.
Context for results. A team that dominates B-tier events may still struggle at the top. A 10-match winning streak means more if it came against top teams.
Careers. Players are judged by how they perform at the biggest events. A player who shines in tier 2 gets a chance at tier 1. A player who struggles at S-tier events gets questioned, no matter their numbers elsewhere.
Prize money and sponsors. Higher-tier events have bigger prize pools and more viewers, which makes them central to how teams fund themselves.
How we use tiers on FragZone
The Recent Form table on our Esports page uses finished matches from S-tier and A-tier tournaments only, as tagged by PandaScore. That keeps the table focused on the top level of competition, so a team can't climb it just by winning small events. The Tournaments section lists the same S-tier and A-tier events.
A healthy second tier matters too
It's easy to only watch the top events. But tier 2 is where new teams form, young players develop, and future stars get noticed. Several games have changed their systems recently to give tier 2 teams a real path up, like CS2's open circuit and Valorant's move to open qualifiers in 2027. If you want to see who'll be winning S-tier events in two years, tier 2 is where to look.
Follow the latest results on the Esports page.