This article is part of our CS:GO series.
On April 21, in a surprise game update, Valve announced that de_Nuke will be put into the Active Duty map group and de_Inferno will be cast aside from the competition map rotation and be relegated to Reserves. Nuke, as the map is referred to, will make its competition debut as one of the seven playable maps at the CS:GO Major Championship at ESL One Cologne 2016.
According to HLTV.org, Inferno was a Counter-Terrorist sided map with the CT's winning just over 56 percent of the time, leaving the Terrorists with a 44 percent win percentage. What is strange about the addition of Nuke is that the map is even more slanted towards the CT side with a whopping 64 percent CT win percentage! The two maps with the most even CT/T win percentage are Dust 2 with a 49/51 split and Cache with a 48/52 split favoring the Terrorist side of the map.
Another issue that has been brought up by numerous players, professional and amateurs alike, is the fact that Nuke is a very graphic intensive map and framerates drop, sometimes significantly, making gameplay different from the other six maps.
There are conspiracy theorists all over Reddit and other sites that are convinced that this update was done to help elevate Ninjas in Pyjamas back to where they once were. NiP has one of the biggest fan bases in CS:GO and people watch streams and go to their matches just to see them. But does this map change in competition maps really help NiP? Let's take a look at the numbers according to HLTV.org 
For all matches that have been recorded, Ninjas in Pyjamas have won 1761 of 3325 rounds (53 percent) and have a match record of 72-60 while playing Inferno. While playing Nuke, NiP has won 926 of 1512 rounds (61 percent), recording an astounding 49-10 match record when on the newly introduced competitive map. This is an eight percent jump in winning percentage. Eight percent does appear to be a significant jump in terms of round wins, but was this done solely as an attempt to push NiP back to their former glory? I don't think so.
The one thing I do know is that teams that are better on the Counter-Terrorist side of a round will likely be much better, which should send people running to their keyboards to get in the practice time they need to even the playing field.
