My friend and I want to each host a gaming server. One for Counterstrike, and one for Battlefield: 1942. I need to know what distros would best for this. I was thinking Redhat but I'm not 100% sure.

As the following forum rule exists:

(8) No BSD vs. Linux vs. Windows or similar threads.

I think it will be wise for me not to name names. I am personally not inclined towards any particular distribution. I would rather think in this way: I can keep server performance at the maximum by trimming unnecessary services running at the background, excluding unnecessary drivers in the kernel and probably recompile it to get some compiler-specific optimizations. If so the choice of distribution may not necessarily matter, though from my past experience Red Hat/Fedora seems to install many packages by default (and thus starting them by default) and many of which can only be "forcefully" removed by "rpm -e" instead of from its package management frontend, so personally I am not quite convinced that it is a lightweight distribution for heavy server use unless you are prepared to perform some trimming after the installation.

I may be wrong. If so, correct me.

No distro is universally acknowledged as the best for a server. There is only a variety of opinions. Considering the rule that cbkihong mentioned I think this thread should be closed.