// PC GAMER — GAMING
An ode to the loveable, horrible, wonderful Counter-Strike community and my first tournament experience
My first time seeing a CS2 tournament in-person was wonderful.
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"It sounds like you need to find some sense of belonging, a group you can call your own and feel at home with."
Those words, or words to that effect, are ones my therapist recently spoke to me. I think she probably had in mind something a little more traditional—church, or one of those manly men groups, something like that—but last week I found a glimpse of a solution amidst an industrial estate in Warsaw, Poland.
There, Logitech G Play 2026 was being held, including a Counter-Strike 2 tournament with a $100,000 prize pool. As I sat on a bleacher seat surrounded by Poles, despite not understanding a lick of what was being said around me or by the Polish commentators over the speakers, I felt at home.
The stage housed both teams—the Canadian team Luminosity Gaming and the French team 3DMax—facing each other, and the audience lining all four sides, with big screens above the stage on all four sides.
I had the choice to sit in the area designated for VIP and press, cordoned off and conspicuously lacking bleachers, instead housing chairs firmly planted at floor height. I chose to sit in the bleachers, though, with the hundreds of regular CS2 fans that had come to see the show. No doubt I'd heard one or two of them in my own games before, shouting expletives at me in a foreign tongue. Just how I like it. These are my people.
I've been playing Counter-Strike for well over a decade now, albeit with some breaks away from the game during that period. But apart from when CS:GO first launched, I never really got into the pro scene—I mostly preferred to just play and improve without getting too into teams and tournaments.
Sometimes that would make me feel a little disconnected from the community, when my teammates would reference games and pros that I wasn't too familiar with. I was happy enough, but being at the tournament last week made me realise what I'd been missing out on.
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