StarLadder Budapest Major 2025: Pick'Ems supercomputer

With the advent of the StarLadder Major in Budapest, a new set of 32 teams will battle through three Swiss stages and a single-elimination playoff bracket in the hopes of claiming one of Counter-Strike's most illustrious trophies.

For the pros, this is a shot at one of the greatest titles a career can boast: Major Winner. It's a staple in the résumé of nearly every hall-of-famer and often the deciding factor in what makes a team elite. Majors sit alongside Cologne and Katowice in the pantheon of prestige events, and completing the collection marks a team's dynasty. Raising a Major trophy is a dream of all players, but very few come close to achieving it. For the rest of us, the Major teases a different prize—a Diamond Pick'Em coin. Unfortunately, that might be just as difficult.

According to data from Leetify, the percentage of Diamond Coin holders per Major averages around 0.22%. That’s roughly the same percentage of FACEIT players who are 3000+ ELO. So, if players in that ELO bracket are considered expert-level at playing the game, Diamond Coin owners must have expert-level knowledge about it, right? Well... yes and no...

Luck is inarguably a feature of the Pick'Em challenge, and unforeseeable upsets do happen. Acquiring fully upgraded silverware was harder in Austin than any Major before it—only 0.01% of players were successful. And that's despite having one of the clearest favorites in modern Major history: a Vitality that now appear eerily mortal. With the rest of the field remaining turbulent, it could be even tougher in Budapest. Luckily for us, we have a machine learning model that has earned at least a gold coin (and three diamond coins) for the past eight Majors in a row.

The model uses a Bayesian Bradley–Terry approach, factoring in a plethora of data for all teams in the Swiss bracket, including their match history, the tournaments they play in, the relative strengths of their opponents, and various in-game performance metrics. It then runs them through a Monte Carlo simulation for 20,000 iterations to see how many times each outcome occurs, giving us probabilities for every possible result. We can also see the model's computed marginals—each team's individual odds of going 3-0, 0-3, etc. But you’re not here for a lecture in statistics; let’s get straight to the predictions. For now, we'll stick to just the first stage.

Stage 1 - Best Predictions

There are over ten million possible unique Pick'Ems combinations, but the model only gives one of them more than a 50% chance of passing the stage. Naturally, that's the one we recommend if you're going for a Diamond Coin. Here are the top ten most promising combinations:

Stage 1 - Worst Predictions

While not quite as useful, it's certainly funnier to think about the worst possible options. These are the Pick'Ems that your Discord's resident contrarian chooses based off of "vibes." Here are the top five least promising picks:

Stage 1 - Marginals

Finally, the raw predictions for where each team will land. Legacy and FaZe are clear favourites to graduate from this stage with a clean sheet, while the majority of EU teams are preparing for a mid-table brawl, and it might a non-starter for the lower ranked Asian and South American squads.

That's all for now folks, but we'll be running predictions for every stage of the Major, so be sure to check back in here for more suggestions. Good luck!