It is the seventh round in your match. Your team is up 7-0. Everything seems like it is going great. You are on the strong side of the map, and you know the next half will be difficult for you and your teammates. All you have to do is keep doing what is working, and shut your opponent out. All of a sudden, your opponent adjusts, and runs a tactic that you have never practiced against. They win one round, two rounds, five rounds…and then they have ended the half with an 8-7 lead, and you are now on your weak side.

What went wrong?

The main problem out there with Counter-Strike teams is lack of preparation. No, I do not mean practice, I mean preparation. When I say preparation, I am talking about being prepared. This means being prepared for anything your opponent throws your way, and having something to counter it.

Read the scenario above. Let us say you are on defense, and this happens to you. Defense is the side of the map that can get you the most rounds, if you know how to utilize it. Sure you can have a default setup on dust2 with one watching Long A with an AWP, two doing various stacks at Catwalk, and two whose responsibilities are Middle and B. What happens when the two B players are being attacked by five players every single round? They are in a two versus five situation every round, and if they do not get at least three kills, the chances of you running all the way from bombsite A and retaking it are not likely, if your opponent is good at holding a bombsite.

One of the major problems with 99.9% of the teams out there (yes, I even mean the best teams in the world) is their lack of diversity. Do you not believe me? Go watch the demos of the best teams in the world in the map overview form, and see how many different tactics they actually run on both sides of the map. I guarantee that you will only see two to three, tops.

Why?

It all boils down to laziness: two to three tactics? That is insulting to any sport out there. A football, hockey, or basketball team would kill to be able to only have that many plays and be successful, in any level of play.

My suggestion is to make at least ten tactics on both sides of the map. This game was created years ago, and is still using the same maps, and we are still seeing new setups and tactics in every tournament. It is nowhere near impossible to have this many tactics on each side of the map. It all comes down to whether or not you want to put the time into bettering yourself as a team.

It may seem like a lot of work, but it is really not. Go ahead, run your default tactic round after round in practice, and it can work out great. But, if you do not know anything else, you will not be prepared for the one team that does something you have never seen. All you have to do is make your own playbook. As a leader or strategist for your team, it is your responsibility to do whatever it takes to win, and this is a simple and helpful way of improving any team at any level.

Just make your own personal playbook and save it. Pretty much everyone on the planet has a printer, and if they do not, no big deal. Just have a simple text document saved so each player can review this in his or her spare time. Every team should dedicate one part of practice to dry-runs (this is where you are in a server alone and just reviewing your tactics). Like I said, you may not run nine out of ten tactics in any scrimmage you play, but when it comes down to match time, and you keep losing round after round because you are not prepared, it is going to sting. I am not saying to make ten tactics that are so complicated that when you do not practice them they will just confuse everyone in the match. If everyone on your team is merely familiar with the tactic, although not practiced much, you can run it in the match and do somewhat better than before. Even if you are still dropping a round here and there, but getting a lot more frags, you are now toying with the other team’s money, and this will hurt them in the long run of the game.

On the defensive side, you do not really run tactics as much as you do various setups. Although running actual tactics to toy with your opponents’ defense, it is not a necessity. If you are able to just have one player rotate to a certain position or site to overload it, due to the fact that the offense keeps hitting it with five players, and each player knows their responsibility, you will be much better off.

The offensive side is where more in-depth tactics come into play. Every team out there has a default tactic that they like to run on offense. Think of offense as a spider web with a spider, or default, in the middle and all of the webbing, or tactics, as all of the different things you can run off of it.

Let us move onto a few examples…