Natus Vincere’s win at IEM Katowice has brought them within a literal striking distance of Astralis on the HLTV rankings for the beginning of March 2020.

Only four points separate them from being ranked the best team in the world on the leaderboards. Their complete destruction of Astralis, the #1 ranked team in the world since October 2019, catapulted them nearly 400 points on the leaderboard, along with beating out G2 Esports in the finals, and their other victories at IEM Katowice.

The HLTV rankings are widely acknowledged as the best way to see which teams are performing the best, by aggregate, as each tournament does not necessarily have every best team in attendance.

This is the closest that roster has been to HLTV rank #1 in the world since April 8 of last year when they won the StarSeries/i League Season 7 finals. Since the HLTV rankings began, Na’vi have only achieved the #1 ranking once, back in April of 2016 when Guardian, Zeus, and Edward were still on the roster.

While the rankings are widely acknowledged as the de facto leaderboard for CS:GO in the absence of a developer run league, there remain some issues with it. Namely, that some famous teams receive more invites to events than others, leading to many of the same teams remaining on the leaderboards far longer than they deserve, simply because they manage to luck into a win at an event their skill level has no business at.

While these invites eventually fade away for teams that fail to perform at a top-level, it does lead to a situation where they take longer to decay off of the leaderboards.

The next edition of the HLTV rankings is expected on March 9, and is published every Monday. It's possible that Na'vi could snag the number one slot then as there are no upcoming events where either team will play until the ESL Pro League kicks off on March 16, and decay could make previous victories for Astralis fall off.