In two of my more recent articles I brought up my "predictable defense"
theory. It is basically the idea that all Counter-Strike players choose to play a small, select number of setups in defending their bombsites, due to that fact that they have had the most success in the past from playing these spots. Playbooks do the homework for teams, but the reality is that if you understand this theory, you can break down a team's defense in about twenty minutes.

In this first portion of the article, before I begin to go map by map, I will explain some basic styles of defense. Once you understand these different types of defense, the number of possibilities for setups and cross-fires becomes nearly infinite.

Standard setups: These are the easiest and most basic setups - setups that pretty much anybody who plays competitive Counter-Strike knows and understands. We see this mostly with lower tier teams (CAL-O/IM) that don't put too much thought behind their defense.

Some examples are:
de_dust2: 1 B, 1 middle, 2 catwalk, 1 long A.
de_inferno: 2 crossfire middle, 1 hallways, 2 B.
de_nuke: 1 outside, 1 floor in upper bombsite, 1 rafters, 2 ramp room.
de_train: 1 alley, 1 middle, 1 ladder, 1 inner top ramp, 1 inner low ramp.
de_cbble: 1 left halls, 1 middle, 2 close bombsite B, 1 sniper in the back of the site.

These setups areas are most common because they are easiest and most obvious to someone intially surveying the maps.

Aggressive setups: These setups are for teams that have great colt skill (they are rarely played with an AWP) and also have a great flash & peek style of play. These are teams that play in a sort of standard setup, but will continuously pressure attacking offenses. A great example of this style is team Rival.

Defensive setups: First off, I would like to say that this used to be a great tactic before the money system change. However, now that terrorists receive money for just getting the bomb down, a defensive setup is a horrible tactic when played against a decent team. These kinds of setups are all about teamwork. The defensive setup is based off of playing far back or overloading one part of a site (i.e. catwalk on de_dust2 or spawn side on de_inferno). The reason why this is risky is that, obviously, while one side of the map is stacked, another part is severely undermanned (i.e. hallways on de_inferno or outside on de_nuke). The logic behind this tactic is that as the Counter-Terrorist team, you have enough trust in your ability to retake bombsites. More than often, teams give up multiple bomb plants because of this setup, which is why I don't favor defensive setups with the new money system.

Now that we have briefly gone over each of these setups, take a second to imagine if a team used the three of these randomly throughout a match? Can you imagine the number of individual play styles each of the five players could have for all of these setups? It kind of makes you wonder why we don’t see the best of the best doing this more often.

In the rest of this article I will go over several maps and explain how each of these setups can be used.