Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a competitive game played in a team versus team format. There are five players on each side, and you cannot win without good communication.
CS:GO is also a mechanically intensive game requiring players to develop various CS:GO skills. You need to know how to aim, position yourself in key situations, use grenades, retake a bomb site, and much more.
Even though you can’t read highly detailed CS:GO books the same way you can read chess books, there’s an enormous amount of theory to be learned and assimilated.
The most important CS:GO skills are good aiming, map knowledge, and communication. If you have these three skills, you have a solid foundation on which you can build your competence.
Developing Good Aiming Skills
Having a good aim in CS:GO is harder than it seems. And that’s because you need to master around a dozen different weapons. Each has a different spray pattern, and your ability to control it requires many hours of practice. Spray control must be practiced even beyond mastery to be effective in games.
There’s a reason why very few players specialize in using the AWP. Learning how to shoot with a weapon like this requires, without exaggeration, more than 1000 hours of practice.
Professional players train on special maps that allow them to improve their aim, reaction, wrist movements etc. Nowadays, every aspect of your play can be improved, and you can learn how to aim without playing ranked games.
However, ranked games are still the main source of many players’ CS:GO experience. That’s where they practice and improve most of their skills.
The difference between a good aim and a great aim is huge. At the highest competitive level, players react in hundreds of a second and can hit headshots from any distance.
If you’ve ever played against Global Elites, you probably that they can kill you really fast, with almost any weapon, even from far away. And if they have an AK-47 or a Desert Eagle, duels can take less than a second.
To compete at that level, you need to have both low reaction times and excellent aim. Fortunately, both of these skills can be learned.
Developing Map Knowledge
If you want to win games on a map, make sure you learn every aspect of that map. Your whole team should understand the map perfectly and have the ability to use all of its callouts.
Playing CS:GO in competitive matches is doomed to fail without this element. In the absence of map knowledge, you’ll have no game sense and will not know what the opponent might do next.
You cannot learn all maps, so you need to specialize. It’s a great idea to start with one map and ignore the other options. At the same time, it’s a good idea to start with half a dozen weapons and ignore the rest.
Anyone who gets good fast follows this principle: master one tiny part of the game and make sure you play that part. In doing so, youre level of mastery will skyrocket.
There’s a huge difference between CS:GO’s maps and each of them must be studied carefully.
Communication Skills
Playing CS:GO without a headset with a microphone is guaranteed to fail if your rank is high enough. This game cannot be won without communication. But despite that fact, many players either refuse to talk or mute others. Or they have a toxic attitude that forces teammates to mute them.
Regardless of the cause of poor communication, it always leads to defeat. Because if the opposing team cooperates and yours doesn’t, your ability to win the game plummets. Team chemistry is relatively important online, but it’s even more important on LAN.
People who don’t enjoy being part of a roster will not even bother to try to help. And in some cases, they will deliberately ruin the match for everyone.
No matter how much mechanical skill you have, how good you are on long-range aim maps, or how many hours you’ve spent in aim training simulations, you can’t win the game on your own.
Invest in a decent microphone if you plan on talking for more than a few minutes per game.
