Setup

Your setup at a LAN can dramatically alter your play. By setup, I am referring to your chair, keyboard, mouse, mouse pad, monitor, body, and headphones positioning. Watching some of the major tournament videos should give you plenty of examples of how professional players will recreate their home setup on LAN. Some players make sure that they have their exact chair height that they do at home (i.e. stacking chairs). Although most professional players realize the importance of keeping your setup consistent, most new LAN players do not. However, I greatly recommend that you copy your exact home setup despite how unusual it may look to other people (hey, you may even start a new trend!).

Using a different setup than the one you use at home will be detrimental to your performance, as you will not feel completely comfortable and you will not feel in your element. For example, I had been notorious for forgetting my mouse pad at home. Although people were kind enough to let me borrow their mouse pad, which was exactly like mine, the ‘feel’ of my movement felt different because pads go through different stages of wear. Counter-Strike is a game of mind over matter so I didn’t let it get to me, but I wonder how well I would have done if I had my entire setup recreated.

Tips to recreate your home setup on LAN:

- Make your setup exactly like your home setup.

- Pay attention to the distances between your peripherals, i.e. how many inches is it from the corner of your keyboard to the corner of your mouse pad?

- Discover how you feel most comfortable at home playing and follow it on LAN. Maybe you need to take your shoes off or cross your legs? Also make sure your feet are positioned how you position them at home.

- Make sure your peripherals all line up like they do at home. Use guiding points. For example, the left edge of my monitor is directly above the left edge of my F4 button.

- Realize how you position your body in front of your monitor – are you directly in front of your monitor or off to one side?


Using these tips you should be able to adapt from online to LAN play a lot more easily. I cannot reiterate enough that consistency is an absolute necessity in adapting from online to LAN play. It is a common misconception to believe that you will be able to attend a LAN and ‘prove yourself’ without first being educated on which settings are most important to check before going to a tournament. In this article, I hope you gained some insight into the professional Counter-Strike scene and realize that performing well on LAN is not as easy as many people believe it is. This is mostly because they do not realize how important some settings are in recreating your setup or they don’t even know which settings are different. Using the knowledge from this article combined with my previous one, you should be both mentally and physically prepared to perform well on LAN.