Counter Strike: Global Offensive Pro Guide

How do we get to Global?

At this point we are trying to break into the upper echelon of players. We have been LE for awhile but can’t seem to break into the LEM level or climb any higher. Counter Strike: Global offensive is a very competitive game that requires a lot more attention than some other FPS games we have played before. Part of the beauty of all of it is being able to say we dominate the rankings and can go toe to toe with the pros. Before we can reach that level though, we really have to refine a lot of our skills and hit our damn shots.

How do I work on Accuracy?

When I say we need to hit our shots I’m not trolling you it is just a fact of the matter. Whether it is due to being a pixel off someone’s head, the inability to control a spray pattern, or just overall their ping is better than our ping, we have to hit our shots every single time. As long as we can reliably hit our shots then it really just comes down to our skill versus their skill and a little bit of luck along the way. It does become a little unfortunate when we lose games because the other team made slightly fewer errors, but we have to remember that at this point, it is on all of us if we can pull out the win. There are many unspoken positions in the Pro community that somewhat begin to transfer into these upper echelon ranks of LEM Supreme and Global. Entry Fraggers, Riflers, AWPers and Lurkers. Each has a specific set of skills required to preform that roll but in solo que or team play we need to be flexible every round and be whatever our team needs us to be.

These positions all do something a little differently and some of them are specifically for Tside or when retaking a site. But each one is important in team play and beginning to learn them all now isn’t late, it just helps set you up to be a great player. Entry Fraggers are responsible for obtaining information and hopefully setting your team up to win a trade when taking or retaking a site. The information gained by potential human sacrifice can often outweigh the actual life of the player that obtained the information for their team. This isn’t to say that the position itself is a suicide mission, in certain scenarios when the sacrifice is actually called for, the player is reliably one of the most accurate shots on the team and knows the normal positions their opponents should be at.

Riflers and AWPers are pretty obvious, some people shouldn’t use an AWP and so they get stuck on Rifle duty. They buy an AK or M4 or Aug and hit those half map one shots and spray downs. While some people should have an AWP and are arguably even more efficient close range with an AWP even against multiple enemies. Some people train specifically to be able to do this and shouldn’t be disrespected by the enemy team. That being said, these are interchangeable roles and as a game progresses different strategy allow multiple of both, Fnatic even had a famous round where they had five players with AWPs and decimated the enemy team with relative ease. This was long ago and sometimes people will meme about it but never in pro play, nobody else has so far earned the right to play that cocky.

Lurkers are primarily Tside players that are actually not very common in Pro play, but in solo que can be pretty deadly forces. Their job is to hang back from the rest of their team to try and catch rotating players from the CT side off guard and thin out their numbers or at the very least stall so your team can capture site, get the bomb down and set up their cross fires safely. They can be present on CT side when retaking a site or when it is unknown how many Ts are on site versus how many are lurking, but on CT side you’re more or less rotating late rather than Lurking as you want to defuse the bomb as quickly as you can.

There is an IGL role or In Game Leader, but this is more strictly for Professional play or five que squads who really want to win. When solo queuing you should all equally communicate with one another to ensure victory. Of course, if you or someone else on your team is able to calmly orchestrate strategies and positively impact your team by doing so then perhaps it is best to follow their lead.

Your internet is going to affect you so much more at this part of your climb than any other part. It may be impossible to fix and while that sucks it is just another mountain to climb. If you are in power to change this than I would suggest that if you are experiencing consistently high ping but want to reach the top, you have to be able to compensate everything you possibly can to get there.

Play FaceIt and ESEA servers especially if you haven’t already. These servers are a little cheaper than changing your entire ISP and offer a little bit of meeting in the middle to achieve the best possible internet connection to the game. Not even considering the 128-tick servers each service provides or the fact that they are more or less more competitive atmosphere than what Valve offers.Perfecting your aim is the most basic aspect of any of this. Controlling you spray patterns and honing your reaction times via community mods or third-party sites is a necessity to increasing your personal capabilities. Any downtime you have to practice should be focused on your aim and spray control until your flicks are seamless and you hit those headshots so hard you get reported every game. You could also use the casual modes but then you have to consider the internet connection and have a lot of weird delays that end up wasting more time than you’d probably like to so proceed with caution either way.

How do I work on my Game Sense?

Nobody can know everything going on in game without cheating, and there’s a reason for that. However, we can make assumptions based on the thousands of hours we have put into this game already as to what is going on. The way competitive video games work is that there is always one optimal way to play the game. One can remember what the most optimal way to play is and take advantage of that knowledge when forced onto the backfoot. In CSGO that means being able to have a good idea of where the enemy team is after taking a site or defending a site. Being aware of places they could be makes peeking and trying to find picks a little easier on the player. So how do we effectively remember all of the possible positions? It is a little less daunting than one may think.

The first step is to memorize all the maps in a competitive season. The map pool will change a few times every now and again but realistically speaking you haven’t gotten this far without playing countless hours on all of the maps. Every time you peek a site and die, you remember next time you peek where they’re sitting. This goes even further game to game. Places people sit are common enough that we know to look at those places, but we don’t always proceed with caution or we underestimate our opponents and even though we know where they are or could be, we lose the fight. Always take the extra step to make sure you come out on top more often than not.

This is something we tend to forget when we are solo queuing, we often look for the hero play or let the idea of outperforming everyone else overtake the safe thought process that can help ensure an easy victory. With proper communication even when we make mistakes, we allow our teammates to gain an advantage, which makes playing optimally that much easier. The fewer mistakes we make and the more we emphasize knowledge as a team the more wins we can get under our belts.

Forcing ourselves to play smart (yes, we know how to play smart) is not only a benefit to our gameplay. It helps to keep our mentale in check, rushing in unnecessarily thinking we can take a site with just our trusty AK every single round is only going to make us tilt ourselves into the ground and make it harder for our team to win. It also makes it harder for us to continue grinding out games when we either have to deal with angry teammates or our own self-doubts. It isn’t that you’re playing the game incorrectly per se, one day you’ll be able to get a few rounds in where you completely destroyed your opponents. The problem is for the most part that everyone you are playing with and against are just about the same skill level as yourself. Trust in them and let them trust you when the time comes.

Overperforming and underperforming are both as likely to occur in any given game. The only way to ensure the prior is to work together with your team, and understand that you can’t win em all, because no one can.No one can know everything, but we all know something and bringing that knowledge with us into each game is one of our strengths as players. Making sure our team knows what we are thinking at any moment and retaining that information ourselves is going to give us an advantage over the enemy team. It isn’t always going to workout but even in completely one-sided matches the losing team won a couple of rounds by capitalizing on the mistakes their enemies made and playing smarter than their opponents on an individual scale and team scale.

Winning a few rounds is a good confidence booster but losing even just one can be disheartening. There is no reason to let yourself or your teammates feel at a loss over one or even a few rounds. Regroup, rethink, and know what you have to do to get back into a game. Of course, there’s always losing 3-16, like proper derankers.

Focusing on Tilt in CSGO.

One thing the esports community often struggles with, but now has had much better success with, is creating a healthy atmosphere for the players physically as well as mentally. Even if we aren’t on the pro stage, we play worse when we are sick, or when we are mad at something outside of the game. This isn’t always the case, but it can be often times a huge barrier for us when we are trying to climb. Even traditional athletes have regimes to keep their mind and body sharp. Doing the same thing every day can be tiresome, and without a proper way to manage your physical and mental health, climbing quite literally could be too big of a task for anyone.

Most of this is section is going to be outside of the game atmosphere, but a lot of us need to be reminded that no matter how important something may be to us, we need to consider ourselves first. Here is the main reminder, you should be more important to yourself than anything else, dedication to something is a noteworthy trait, but sacrificing your own wellbeing for anything should never be acceptable to you.When it comes to the game, outside barriers are an important thing to consider, whether it’s something as simple as putting in the work to pass a class or if it’s something serious that is taking a toll on our physical or mental health. These things should be dealt with appropriately. I don’t mean to speak about crisis, because video games can be a great stress reliever. However, when we are trying to play something at a competitive level it could do more harm than good to put our focus on improving at a game. Do what is necessary for yourself to be in a better mindset or you risk making yourself even more upset.

Physically there isn’t much else to explain. I know now that recently gamers have been able to shirk the stigma that we are an unhealthy, meme worthy internet troll community. The point still stands that we could all do a little more to improve our physical health. Go on some more walks, eat a few healthier snacks now and again. The reason this is so important to bring up even though it isn’t a part of the actual game itself is because there is a lot of things that can impact us outside of the game that immediately affect our ability to play. With that comes a lot of extra work involved in bettering ourselves as players.

When everything outside of the game is taken care of, we can take more time to improve on our game and do so in a healthy environment. When the only thing bringing us down is the actual game itself, we can easily bounce back in the next one and get back into the swing of things. On the other side of things however, if we aren’t in a good place then losing and perpetually tilting is going to set us back even further than we would have intended.Take some time to relax if you’re stressed out. Make sure your homework is completed before you get on and practice with your team. Your teammates will all thank you later for being able to be with them in the moment and help take home the dub. If you’re sick and have a headache, you are more than likely going to miss more shots than you normally would, and bottom fragging on the losing team is always a mental bust.

Take the time you need outside of the game. Take care of yourself as much as you deem necessary in order to play at your best every time you accept a que pop. We won’t have any new rookie players taking the scene by storm if they all give up because the only thing, they devoted themselves to was the game. Take your time, you’ll get there when you get there.

Watching Streamers and the Pro matches.

A great way to practice anything, as I’ve mentioned before, is to watch the pro scene and watch your own games back again. The pros as of right now are better than you and can you show you the game in a new way you’ve not known possible before. Looking for your own mistakes in previous matches will help to ensure you don’t repeat those mistakes in the future. Above all else this is one of the things that I personally believe sets players apart from one another. Coaches and analysts often rewatch games over and over with their pro players and dissect scrimmage matches that are played to help prepare their players for the matches set up on stage. There are a great many reasons for this, the main one is that they can literally look at what they did and did not do and can rectify their mistakes quickly, win or lose.

The main reason for watching the pro scene is to identify your personal difference in play when compared to the way pros play. Yes, one should not emulate the pros to a t because your normal pug matches aren’t nearly as important. Being able to put their level of play into perspective, especially in an FPS game like CSGO, will help you improve more than some would like to believe. Positioning, timings, movement under pressure, and sit lines are only a few of the things we can learn when watching from the pro player’s perspective. We can make small adjustments to our own playstyles and learn the most optimal way to play the game during any given patch (always read the patch notes by the way).

Rewatching your own games is, if nothing else, character building. You can see your relative position to anyone else and if you treat it as a learning opportunity then you will be able to achieve new heights with your own constructive criticism. Don’t be reluctantly watching your losses if it isn’t going to help. I would suggest watching them with a grain of salt but alternatively you can just go back and watch your won games and dissect those, what could you have done better? There’s always something. Some games yes, we have that one teammate or friend that just carried the living crap out of our team and dropped a thirty bomb. Well instead of critiquing yourself, watch them, what did they do to achieve that feat? Learn from others success as well as your own shortcomings. In the end it is always going to assist you in bettering your gameplay.

Being Global.

Reaching the title of the best in the game isn’t just about playing the game and practicing a lot. No matter what game it is you need to do things outside of competitive atmosphere in order to improve. Whether that is watching the pro scene or eating a salad or both that day, it’s all going to help. Do whatever you are able to do in order to set yourself up for success, if you’re goal is just to hit Global or if you want to be the next Cold, there are plenty of things to do before you can get there. This is the end of the general Counter Strike: Global Offensive Guides. Please take care of yourself and accomplish everything you want to in life. Putting in all that extra time will be worth it somehow, some day.