This is a community submitted article.

My name is Justin “bair” Kohlhepp. I have been playing competitive Counter-Strike for several years now and am currently on Team X3O, a team local to Maryland currently competing in CEVO-Professional and GGL Americup. This guide is my attempt to teach you and your team how to become a better CS player(s); I know I’m not the best, but I like to think I know what I’m talking about.

Playing Smart

Almost 99% of the players who ask professionals for help say, “How do I make my aim better????” That is the wrong question to ask. Aiming is not a hard thing to do, you are just moving a cursor to someone. You’ve been moving cursors all your life, whenever you are on a computer. Aiming is the easy part. Fragging is the hard part. Most articles I’ve read usually say something like your skill is 50% aim and 50% smarts. Wrong - more like 90% smarts and 10% aim.

Angles

Knowing your angles is probably the most important part of CS. I’ve also seen this written in many articles, but none have actually explained what knowing your angles means. You need to know every corner of every map; you need to know how much of each corner you need to peek to be able to spot someone; and you need to know what corners to peek first to avoid being shot from somewhere else. This all obviously comes from experience. One common mistake I see is not knowing the difference between defending and attacking. When defending bombsites, whether you are on the offense or defense, being closer to your opponent is always best. The closer you are to them, the bigger their models appear - just like in art and in real life. The bigger their models are, the earlier they will appear on your screen. If they are further away, then obviously their model will be smaller, which means that their point of view will arrive quicker than if they were at pointblank range. Being close will give them almost no time to react. Now obviously, when attacking bombsites, I think you should always take the far route. What I mean is when you are approaching a site, you should be checking all corners from as far away as possible. This also decreases the chances of you being seen from a player in another position. The closer you are to one angle, the closer you are to every other angle. Being further away allows you to check every angle without fear of being shot from somewhere else. Also it is obvious that the further away you are, the smaller you are, thus making you harder to hit. I will attempt to reiterate this with screenshots.

This is obviously better than the screenshot below because you cannot be seen by anywhere except the particular spot you are checking because you are further away.



In this screenshot, you can be seen from all of the B bombsite because you are close up. Like I said before, when checking and attacking spots, it should always be done from as far away as possible.



Here is another example:



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