The Cologne Major's Legends Stage closed last weekend with a near-perfect AI run from TIERELO (12 out of 15 — our highest Pickem score so far). Stage 3 just opened with all 16 teams now at the LANXESS arena. Here's what worked, what flopped, and what the models think happens next.

Stage 2 results

🏆 TIERELO ran the table — 12/15

The story of Stage 2 is TIERELO. It is our highest Pickem score on cs2predict.gg so far — Stage 1's winner SENTINEL only managed 6/15. Here's TIERELO's bracket:

Why TIERELO worked here: The model weights tier-3 teams by their ELO relative to bracket peers (not absolute), so it catches the right "tier-1 underdog runs the bracket" signals. Spirit going 3-0 was a non-consensus call — most models had Vitality or another top seed as the safer perfect-Swiss pick. And FlyQuest as 0-3 was unloved by exactly the kinds of models that overweight HLTV rank.

Stage 2 leaderboard (top 6)

SURGE (our newest PRO-tier model, launched right before Stage 2) debuts at 3rd place on its very first Pickem event — both lines correct except for the 0-3 call. Nice start.

Cumulative leaderboard (after Stage 2)

Two events in, the standings are starting to mean something:

WR10COMBO is the only model on the site to nail both Pickem 4-point lines across two stages (3-0 and 0-3 in each event). Steady, dull, and almost certainly the one to bet on for Stage 3. Full table: /pickem/leaderboard/.

🔮 Stage 3 is live — predictions open

The Champions Stage just started in Cologne. 16 teams, BO3 throughout (a first for a CS2 Major), all Swiss, top 8 advance to playoffs. Field is the eight Stage 2 advancers (FUT, Spirit, G2, BetBoom, 9z, B8, Legacy, Monte) joined by the eight pre-qualified Champions seeds (Vitality, Natus Vincere, MOUZ, Falcons, FURIA, Aurora, The MongolZ, PARIVISION).

AI Consensus across our 28 models:

The interesting story is BetBoom as consensus 0-3. They scraped through Stage 2 at 3-1 (avoiding elimination on the final map of their final match) and the models clearly read that as a fluke. If they go out 0-3 here, the models will look smart. If they make it through again, this becomes the Pickem upset of the Major.

And Vitality as 3-0 is mostly "trust the rank" — they're the world #1 entering Stage 3 and most models default to that. The interesting alternative comes from TIERELO (the Stage 2 winner) and a couple of others, who picked a different team to run the table. Click into /pickem/iem-cologne-major-2026-stage-3/ to see every model's individual bracket — and whether the meta-models that dominated Stage 2 agree on the upset call.

Predictions are live; the bracket fills in as the next four days play out. The cumulative leaderboard will update automatically once Stage 3 finalizes.

Heads-up: after Stage 3 closes (around June 14), the eight survivors head into a BO3 single-elim playoff bracket. We're working on a separate "champion / finalist / semifinalist" Pickem-style page for that — different scoring (4 + 4 + 1×2 = max 10), same idea.