The Future of Professional Female Counter-Strike

Lately, many esports organisations have closed down their female teams because of their bad performance and low viewership count, but something has happened recently that could change all of that: on the 18th of January, a very interesting Counter-Strike 2 match took place. One of the matches in the first round of the online tournament, BLAST Bounty, included a bout between the #1 female team (ranked #129 worldwide before this match took place), Imperial Fe, and the #3 ranked team in the world, Natus Vincere. Usually, female teams are considered way worse than open (almost always fully male) teams, because of various reasons. It was a given that NaVi wouldn’t break a sweat in order to beat Imperial Fe, except… they were very close to losing both maps played in reality.

To start off, why is Imperial Fe even playing in this tournament? The #129 team would never be reserved a spot in such a tournament — they would have to play in ESEA and PUGs in order to secure participation in more serious events. Well, recently, Valve introduced some very controversial changes to how CS2 events need to be organised: no longer does the well-established HLTV ranking matter for tournament invites, only the new Valve ranking system does. In this system, female-only events gain a team the same amount of points any open event would, making Imperial Fe actually the #24 team in the world based on this system. Obviously, they are not even close to this actual ranking, but this is how Valve decided to do things, so female teams have very inflated rankings right now.

So Imperial Fe was given a spot on the BLAST Bounty tournament, and as the lowest-ranking team there, were given the choice of who to go up against. Out of everyone there, they picked one of the least sensical options — Natus Vincere. Considered one of the best teams both now and in the last few years, NaVi seemed like a suicide pick for Imperial Fe — no one thought they’d win more than a round in this matchup. Surprisingly, not only did this female team manage to get 6:13 and 7:13 in the two maps in the matchup — it was a lot closer than the score makes it seem. According to some experts, Imperial Fe was just three anti-ecos away from securing a win on the second map they played, Mirage.

Obviously, Imperial Fe doing so well was a surprise to everyone watching, even to the players themselves. The official NaVi Twitter account itself has posted about how well Imperial Fe did and how much harder than expected it was for its players to win. In an interview with famous Counter-Strike 2 content creator OhnePixel, jL (a player for NaVi), has said that on the 10th round of Ancient (the first map they played) his hands started shaking. Some of the plays by the girls were absolutely amazing, with Kat’s one-deag during the special animation taking the spotlight. And all of that was with one player on their team, the best player on their team, the #1 female player in the world,  ANa, performing terribly compared to how she usually does. After the match, she admitted to being so stressed she could barely function in the game — and yet her team almost won. Everyone was so stunned by their amazing performance and this match sent shockwaves throughout the Counter-Strike competitive community, with one burning question: can a female team compete alongside the best of the best? 

Well, that seems more and more likely with each passing day. Since the match on the 16th of January, HLTV has updated Imperial Fe’s ranking, and even though they lost to NaVi, their ranking went up by five spots — from #129 to #124. Whilst this match could be an outlier, I really don’t think that’s the case. Imperial Fe genuinely played well with their higher-ranked opponents genuinely sweating in order to beat them. Honestly, Imperial Fe might be my new favourite team (and they could probably beat my other favourite team: Ninjas In Pyjama), especially the absolute GOAT Kat, she is so fun on the screen and has such insane moments. 

So now what we need to prove female teams can compete is just one big win. Something that will show how even Tier-1 events are not too hard for Imperial Fe if female Counter-Strike is to be saved. There is an opportunity to do just that coming up for them, starting in about a week: the IEM Katowice Play-in. Unlike the online BLAST Bounty, this event is on LAN, which usually means it’ll be much harder for the underdogs, who are the girls in this case, but could they do it? This time, their opponent is FURIA, still one of the best teams in the world. Unlike NaVi, though, FURIA’s performance is much less consistent, and overall poorer. To be completely honest, I don’t believe Imperial Fe can win this, but I can see a surprise happening. Maybe they just win one map in this match, or maybe they force overtime at least once — we just need to see an even better performance out of them than the NaVi match. If the girls can do it, female Counter-Strike might make a big comeback, but this time with female teams competing against everyone.