O.K. It is your defensive half and you just lost pistol round. Now you tell your team to…well, you don’t tell them anything. They just play their normal spots covering the map, but instead of automatic weapons, they have only pistols and maybe a kit. Maybe a partner or two will do a head stack, but that’s about it.

This is probably the dumbest thing you can do tactically in the game, yet teams from CAL Open to CPL champions do this on their defensive side, and I will never understand it. These two rounds aren’t to just be given up due to the fact that there are no money perks, besides frags, that you can get defensively. These two rounds are for you two do two things. The first priority is try and win, but that’s a given. The second priority – a more realistic approach – is to try to take guns away from the opposing team.

There are a few things you are doing by just trying to out-think the offense and take their guns away. The first thing you are doing, if you take guns second round, is giving yourselves a much better chance at winning the third round if you play it smart. The next reason is to mess with the offense's money. Say you take two or three guns during both of your save rounds, if the people you are killing aren’t getting many frags, their money is very screwed and they will need a drop from teammates, which takes away a lot of nades for their fourth round, as well as restricting their ability to buy armor and AWPs. The last thing is that you are helping your money, as you will not need to buy as many guns fourth round if you have saved a few.

Makes sense don’t it?!

“But bootman, how do I go about making successful eco round tactics?”

The answer is simple. When coming up with these tactics you have to be an artist. I’m not just talking about being extremely creative, I’m talking like crazy, insane, Van Gogh cutting his ear off type artist. If you are just doing normal setups, you are going to get killed one by one and never take back a bombsite if this happens. However, you still have to be smart about how you run these two rounds even though you have gone insane with you tactics – your second round should always set you up for your third round. The key is to do something the same both rounds, but go the opposite direction the second time. Say you successfully take a few guns when they try going A, they’ll think that you’re thinking you can pull it off again and you probably can, so just go the opposite direction and you will most likely run into them there.

Now let’s talk about gun situations. I’ll talk about having different amounts of guns in this part.

One gun: This isn’t much different than not having any guns. You should still do your fake of the second round, but send four in one direction rather than five. Give the gun to your most skilled player and let him hold a site by himself. Make sure you communicate though, because he is going to need backup A.S.A.P. if his site is attacked.

Two guns: You can go one of two ways with this one. You can give the two guns to your best players and pretty much do a 1-3-1 setup with the three saving sticking together in the middle area to back up either gunner if he needs it. The other way you can go is running a third round as normal, but just having a gun with you for a better take of the offense.

Three guns: I suggest that the two saving players buy deagles and weak or strong armor, or maybe even buy as well. If you have three guns, it should be like any other round, just make sure a gun is always partnered with the saving players so they can double team somebody and pick up the gun immediately after the frag.

Next I’ll give a few examples of some eco rounds that I like. You’ll notice that most of them are sandwich tactics to attack a team from both sides.