Quick story. A couple of weeks ago me and two friends wanted to settle who's actually the best at this game, so we went into Portal looking for a 1v1 server. There are a lot of them, "Duels", "1v1 Arena", "Gunfight"... and pretty much every one is either empty, broken, or just a normal TDM with a smaller player cap. Nothing with a real queue, nothing where you actually get your own fight. And things like hide & seek simply don't exist.
I'm a developer, so I built one. It started as something just for the three of us, but after a couple of weeks of playing it almost every evening we figured there's no reason to keep it private.
What it does: you spawn on a lobby platform. Press E on JOIN DUEL and the moment someone else is queued, both of you get dropped onto a free arena (there are ten floating ones, so several duels run at the same time).
First to 5 wins. F
ull health and ammo after every kill, and if you both queue again within 30 s you get a rematch. There are also KNIFE, PISTOL, SNIPER and GUN GAME variants (8 weapon ladder, knife last).
Hide & seek runs on a fenced city block below the lobby. One seeker with a pistol who loses health on every missed shot, so you can't just spray. Hiders get a knife and 5 smokes, and if you stand still for 20 s you make a noise. 4-minute rounds, starts as soon as 2 people are in.
If nobody is around there's a practice bot(witch is pretty dumb hahaha), a shooting range, and you can spectate running duels through cameras.
There's a session leaderboard on Tab.
It works fine at 2 players, that's the whole point, you don't need a full lobby.
So if you want to try, I left the server as persistent, Code is 155VG (Portal > Community > Search Experiences).
Map is Siege of Cairo, up to 64 players. Custom experience, so XP is reduced.
This is for the duels and overall having fun, not for grinding.