CS2 Trading Glossary
Trading has its own vocabulary, and most of it is never explained. People learn it by being confused for a few weeks and then pretending they always knew. This glossary is the shortcut: every term you are likely to meet in a listing, a trade comment or a Discord server, grouped by what it describes, with a link to the full guide where one exists.
Listing shorthand
What you will see in listing titles, Discord posts and trade comments. Most of it comes from forum trading a decade ago and never left.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| B/O (buyout) | The price at which the seller will hand the item over immediately, no further negotiation. If a listing says B/O $300, offering $300 ends the auction. |
| C/O (current offer) | The best offer the seller has received so far. Anything below it is ignored. Treat an unverifiable C/O with suspicion; inflating it is a common tactic. |
| QS (quicksell) | Selling below reference price for a fast, liquid exchange. A QS listing is asking for cash-like items (keys, liquid skins) and will not entertain overpay. |
| H / W (have / want) | The two halves of a trade listing. On P2Trades these are the Offering and Wanting columns of every card. |
| LF / WTB / WTS / WTT | Looking for, want to buy, want to sell, want to trade. WTT is the P2P one; WTB and WTS usually mean cash or Market, not items. |
| Overpay | Value added on top of a nominally even swap, usually demanded by the side giving the more liquid or more desirable item. |
| Upgrade / downgrade | Trading several cheaper items for one more expensive one, or the reverse. Upgrades almost always cost overpay because the person with the single item is taking on the work of selling several. |
| Bump | Pushing a listing back to the top of a feed. On P2Trades this is a button with a cooldown rather than a reply saying 'bump'. |
Condition and identity
The numbers behind a skin's market name, and the words traders use for them.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Float | The wear value between 0 and 1 assigned when an item is created. Lower is cleaner. Decides the wear tier and, within a tier, a lot of the price. |
| FN / MW / FT / WW / BS | Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn, Battle-Scarred. The five wear tiers, cut at floats 0.07, 0.15, 0.38 and 0.45. |
| Pattern / seed | The paint seed, an integer from 0 to 1000 that decides how the finish is laid over the model. Irrelevant on most skins; everything on a few. |
| Phase | The named variants of Doppler and Gamma Doppler (Phase 1-4, Ruby, Sapphire, Black Pearl, Emerald). Same market name, very different prices. |
| Blue gem / BG | A Case Hardened pattern where the blue covers most of the visible surface. The top tier of the most pattern-driven finish in the game. |
| FFI (Fire & Ice) | A Marble Fade pattern with no yellow in the gradient, only red and blue. 'Fake FFI' has a sliver of yellow and is worth far less. |
| Max fade / full fade | A Fade pattern whose gradient covers the whole model; 100% in the community percentage system. |
| Vanilla | A knife with no finish at all, the plain metal model. Traded as its own item and priced by model rather than by pattern. |
| ST / StatTrak | A version of the skin with a kill counter. Priced at a premium that varies enormously by item. |
| Souvenir | A version dropped during a Major, with tournament stickers applied. Cannot be StatTrak. |
| Craft | A skin with stickers deliberately applied for effect, priced as a combination rather than as skin plus stickers. |
| Scraped | A sticker that has been partially removed by scratching. Almost always reduces value unless the scrape is part of a known craft style. |
| Kato 14 / iBP | Katowice 2014 stickers, the most valuable in the game, and the iBuyPower holo specifically, the most valuable single sticker. Used as shorthand for 'absurdly expensive craft'. |
Rarity and sources
The colour system and the words for where items come from.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Consumer / Industrial / Mil-Spec / Restricted / Classified / Covert | The six skin rarities, white through red. Covert is the top tier a case can give apart from the gold item. |
| Gold / rare special item | The knife or gloves slot in a case, with roughly a 0.26% drop chance. 'Gold' because of the colour of the unboxing reveal. |
| Contraband | A rarity that exists for exactly one skin, the M4A4 Howl, after its artwork was found to be stolen and it was removed from cases. |
| Discontinued | A case that no longer drops from the active pool and can only be earned from the rare drop pool. |
| Trade up | Turning ten skins of one rarity into one skin of the next rarity up. |
| Collection | The set a skin belongs to, either a case's contents or a map collection. Decides what trade ups it can feed into. |
Money and markets
How traders talk about prices, and where those prices come from.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Buff price | The price on Buff163, the deepest CS2 market and the reference most traders quote. P2Trades uses it as its reference price too. |
| Steam price / SCM | The Steam Community Market price, usually higher than Buff because Steam wallet funds cannot be withdrawn. |
| Cash trade | Selling an item for real money outside Steam. Not something P2Trades supports and the setting for most large scams. |
| Liquid | An item that sells quickly at close to its reference price. Popular AK-47 and AWP skins in FT, keys, common knives. The opposite is 'illiquid' or 'a hold'. |
| Middleman | A third person who holds items during a trade. In a Steam trade offer there is nothing for a middleman to do, which is why almost every middleman offer is a scam. |
| Trade hold / trade lock | The seven days after an item is bought or traded during which it cannot move again. |
| Trade URL / trade link | The address a stranger needs to open a trade offer with you. |
| API scam | Phishing for your Steam Web API key so a bot can swap a legitimate offer for a fake one after you have agreed to it. |
Two terms to be careful with
"Worth" in a listing means the reference price, and the reference price is what a patient seller gets from a deep market. It is not what you would get for the item today. Our guide on valuing an inventory explains the gap and how to price around it.
"Even trade" almost never is. Two items at the same reference price differ in liquidity, in float, and in how many people want them this month. The side holding the item that sells faster is entitled to ask for something for the convenience; whether the amount is fair is the whole art of trading.
Missing a term? Tell us and we will add it.