Anubis Breaks Trend After Valve Adds it to CS:GO Map Pool

The community-created CS:GO map Anubis was recently added to the active map pool, replacing the classic map Dust II, and it already is making a name for itself before it has even been introduced to competitive tournament play. The map was created in 2020 but really only started to gain traction recently, and now it has blown up due to Valve’s move to add it to the map pool, and it begins competitive play in a week.

The map was added on November 18th, and since that point it has been the only map in the entire game that has a better win rate for the terrorists. The win rate of approximately 51.5% is a marginal difference in comparison to other maps such as Overpass, Mirage, Vertigo, Inferno, Nuke and Ancient. These maps have a terrorist win rate of slightly below 50% on average since November 18th. Considering that a lot of matches have been played by then, it’s a reasonable sample size but still fairly small given the time interval.

What this does show us, however, is that there may be some sort of strategic element to Anubis that favors the terrorists in terms of spawn locations, bomb sites and more. Throughout the history of CS:GO, counter-terrorists have always had a slight advantage and the data backs this up, and there has yet to be a map that really breaks this trend. CT positions are historically easier to hold than terrorist positions, which contributes to this statistic.

Perhaps the community knew about this and had this in mind when Anubis was created. Let’s be honest, it’s still very early on for Anubis, being in the active map pool for just 3 weeks, so we can’t really jump to any serious conclusions quite yet, but it’s a very interesting start because this is new territory here. A larger sample size over time will tell a better story, but it will be interesting to see how the pros take this data and use it to adjust their strategies when playing competitive tournaments on Anubis.

There’s no doubt that it’s a well-designed map, and both the community and Valve would agree since it was added to the pool. This could actually be a very good thing for CS:GO because it would break up the consistency of slightly favoring CTs in basically every other map, and could start a trend where other maps similar to Anubis are designed to give the terrorists a couple percentage point advantage. The margins are slim here as the numbers always usually vary between 48-52%, but if you look at the amount of games played considering that CS:GO is one of the most played shooters, 2% is very significant.

The BLAST Premier World Final starts in a week on December 14th, and that’s the first real tournament that will feature Anubis, so more information will be generated about Anubis once true competitive play starts for Esports. Whether or not Anubis was designed intentionally to favor terrorists more than the other maps is unknown up to this point, but there’s clearly an element about the map that does slightly favor them a bit more compared to CTs. In the meantime, let’s wait a couple months and then compare numbers again to see if this surprising trend continues.