A category is drawn — every CoD pro, one organisation’s players, an era, a role, and sometimes the organisations or single seasons themselves — and six of them are dealt to you one at a time. Put each one in a tier before the next is shown: one slot in S, two in A, three in B.

That is the whole game and the whole difficulty. You cannot move a name once it is placed and you cannot see what is coming, so an S spent on the second card is a bet, not a judgement. When all ten are down, the verdicts turn over one by one.

Each player carries one career score, built from their record at major events: Champs rings weigh most, then tournament wins, then top-three finishes, longevity and their average finishing position across every major they played.

A ring is worth roughly three tournament wins. That is a claim you can argue with, which is the point — it is stated rather than hidden so that a tier you disagree with is a disagreement about weighting rather than a mystery.

On an organisation or a game board, the score is the record inside that scope and nothing else. “FaZe Clan players” asks how they did at FaZe: the majors they played there, what they won there and how they finished there. Scump tops the OpTic board on 56 majors for the org even though Crimsix outranks him across a whole career.

An organisation means the whole lineage on those boards, so OpTic Gaming, OpTic Gaming Los Angeles and OpTic Texas count as one club, as do FaZe Clan and Atlanta FaZe. A season does not: the team that won in 2020 was called Dallas Empire and the seasons board says so.

One consequence is worth knowing, because it looks like a bug. Team-mates who played a whole era together have the same record by definition, so on those boards they score identically and the game will never split them across a tier line. A scope that cannot produce ten distinct scores is dropped rather than shipped.

Organisations and seasons are scored the same way on their own record, with one difference that matters: a season is three to nine events, so totals separate almost nothing and where the team finished carries most of the weight. That is why 2020 Dallas Empire tops the seasons — nine majors, nine podiums — rather than a team that won more trophies over a longer year.

They are not allowed to be too close. Before a board is dealt, the gap at each tier boundary is checked against the spread of the ten, and a deal that would split two effectively equal careers across a line is thrown away and redrawn.

Without that rule the game would mark you wrong for a distinction the record cannot actually support — there are pairs in the data separated by four hundredths of a point, and no honest board puts one of those in S and the other in A.