Not Completely Rubbish: My System of playing CS

Introduction

Whenever I find time to play Counter-Strike, I usually play at the lower end of the official matchmaking servers. In the old ranking system my peak was Supreme, and I usually played around LE / LEM. Nowadays, I don't get much time to play consistently, and I don't really care about climbing the ranks.

What’s fun about the game then? For me, it’s pretending to be knowledgeable enough to be the IGL for the teams I play with. This is where you get to play CS on a higher level than clicking heads and making decent individual decisions.

Over the many years I’ve played and watched professional play, I’ve come up with a rough and basic idea of how the game works and what you should do in order to win consistently. Hopefully these ramblings might help someone form a framework around a good team and strategies that involve actually learning some grenades.

The Rules of the Game

CS is a 5v5 game. The competitive game mode is known as Demolition mode.

• Demolition mode:
  • The terrorists have to plant the bomb and blow it up to win the round
  • The counter-terrorists have to defuse it to win the round
  • If a team kills all the enemies, they win
  • If the time runs out, the counter-terrorists win
• CS has an MR12 system:
  • You play 12 rounds per half
  • You win the game if you get 13 rounds
  • You play overtime halves of MR3 until someone wins with a 2 round gap (only in tournament play to be fair, not in regular MM)
• CS is played on maps:
  • There are 8 maps in the “active duty pool”, i.e. 8 maps you can choose from to play a competitive game in
  • Each map has two bombsites which the CTs need to defend from the Ts

If you didn’t already know the above, then this article isn’t for you. Go play some more practice games.

Fundamental Ideas

Reactive play

This is the most basic level of play. Each round is kind of like an independent statistical event. You don’t adjust your strategy based on what the opponent did. Maybe you don’t even remember what they did.

You want to be able to withstand rushes onto the map whilst making sure as much as possible is defended, so you can actually put up a fight. This is where a 2:1:2¹ makes the most sense. You’ve got enough to defend against bombsite rushes and delay enough to let your team help out, and 1 player who can rotate quickly to help sooner (and put up a fight in the middle of the map if necessary).

This is reactive. You’re relying on the opponent making mistakes and capitalising off them. You’re basically relying on out-aiming your opponents every single fight. You’re also assuming your opponents are going to play without adjusting to counter you.

Each individual needs to be really good at reacting to anything that comes their way. You want your team members to be self-reliant. Sometimes, shit really hits the fan, and you want someone who can think on their feet, and try to take heads instead of being totally useless.

This doesn’t work as your entire approach to the game at a higher level though. At some point, you’re going to find someone who’s as good as, or better than, you at clicking heads. What’s more, the opponent usually isn’t completely brain-dead, and will begin to do what I recommend you should do below.

Proactive play

You start to wonder whether you can prepare better for a team that constantly rushes A bombsite. As of yet, there’s no reason for the Ts not to constantly rush, as they can see you’re not putting more than 2 players on the bombsites.

You could decide to throw molotovs in the early round at the main bombsite entrance. If you’re really brave, you could follow up with a flash behind a teammate who could try and get a couple of kills against enemies running with their knives out, not pre-aiming you. Meanwhile, you deal with the uncontested parts of the map: you could tell the mid player to play with the A site players, and tell the B defenders to push the bombsite immediately and try to get behind the rushing Ts.

These are examples of 1 of 2 fundamental proactive playstyles: CT-side aggression.

It has a counter-part. Imagine you’re on the T-side now. You were heavily punished for your predictable rush last round by the CTs molotovs, flash-peek, and extremely fast rear push. You might try rushing the other bombsite, or even mid, but this doesn’t work - a simple molotov pushes you back and gives the CTs time to prep. So, you could slow things down, and spread your resources across the map to try to find a weakness in the CT armour, and exploit it. You could hold bombsites, wait for the early utility, and hang around in off-angles waiting for a CT push, and punish it. If the CTs don’t do that rush counter, then you can just try and take measured fights, use utility sparingly to give yourself advantages in the fights, and simply build up map control.

This is the other proactive playstyle: T-side loitering. (I can’t think of a good enough word for this, I wanted to use T-side lurking, but lurk refers to a specific role.)

Two Sides of the Same Coin

CT aggression is the counterpart to T passivity. A balanced game will feature both. If the CTs are aggressive and the Ts don’t punish it, they’ll lose. If the Ts loiter and the CTs don’t punish it, they’ll just wait to get naded out and headshot by the Ts every round.

Everything in Moderation

Being both reactive and proactive is necessary. Whilst being sometimes proactive is generally better than always being reactive, being constantly proactive will also lead to bad results. This is because you will end up overthinking a simple situation - and this will happen, since CS is an imperfect information game, and you don’t 100% always know everything based on the available evidence.

The key to being a strong team is to identify how you’re going to be aggressive and passive, and when you’re going to rely on being purely reactive. This depends hugely on who’s in your team, what roles each person fulfils, which maps you play, how you like to play generally… there’s so many variables that go into this. The job of the IGL is to try to find a rhythm that everyone can get behind.

Example

Here’s a classic round of CS, Cloud9 v FaZe, 2018 Boston major. I think it showcases what I’m trying to say with my ramblings above quite well.

At the round start, FaZe makes a lot of noise towards banana, and they get control of it using nades. They also show some presence towards A, but make it look like most are around B. They loiter around the map and are looking for weaknesses. Cloud9 do not overreact. They actually choose to play kind of reactively, waiting to see the bomb and not letting themselves fall into any traps. FaZe leave olofmeister lurking on banana.

As the round goes on, FaZe start building up towards an A hit. They really run the clock down, trying to find any weakness, which is difficult given their lack of money for good weapons across the board and plentiful nades. Eventually, they either show the bomb or throw all their nades such that it’s obvious the bomb is on A (I can’t quite tell from the radar) - either way, Cloud9 correctly assume that it’s going to be an A hit. autimatic rotates from B, proactively, to help bolster the A defence.

karrigan now makes a huge call (and this shows why he’s one of the best IGLs in the scene). With 19 seconds remaining, he tells the team to rotate immediately to B, correctly assuming that a rotate will be in progress on A. olofmeister’s death is actually sort of good in this situation, as it really sells the potential that he was the only one lurking on banana and that Cloud9 are actually pushing on A. You can even see autimatic start running back as soon as olof gets killed, concerned that there might be more players, but stewie2k must’ve communicated that only one player was there, so he continues going A.

The rest of FaZe arrive to B in a 3v1 situation. karrigan makes another great play and runs (with his knife out) through arches to B, to try and catch the rotating player. This is really favourable for the T side, generally - GuardianN, NiKo, and rain (the 3 best players) are fighting against stewie2k, and karrigan (mechanically the weakest in the team) basically has a free frag onto autimatic.

FaZe really should have won this round. I think if they had just a little more utility, they really could’ve done it, even with 7 second left by the time they actually walk onto B. Maybe even just one good shot from a rifler onto stewie2k would’ve been possible. However, stewie2k exemplified why it’s really important to be extremely good at reactive play as an individual: he isolates favourable 1v1s against each FaZe player with his AWP.

Maybe if karrigan made his call just a couple seconds earlier, FaZe could have had more time to enter B in a more coordinated manner, and reacted to stewie’s position better. They needed more tools most likely, in the form of nades.

This whole sequence highlights the key interplay between proactive and reactive play:

The mantra to live (play) by

Being proactive puts your team into great positions, but you need to have individuals who can react really well to capitalise from these positions.

Footnotes

1. 2 CTs on bombsite A, 1 CT in the middle of the map, and 2 CTs in B. ↩