So you've decided to play some CSGO with us. That's great! But you suck at the game and the high skill players keep killing you. That's not so great. It might take quite awhile to get to the point where you dominate the scoreboard, but until then, here's a few tips.
Step 1) Pistol round
This is the most important round of the game. If you're a CT, you should get a p250, it'll put you on even footing against glocks. If you're a T, you can safely save up and use only your spawn pistol as the glock is extremely powerful, especially if you can land the initial burstfire. To mix it up a bit, you can buy body armor with your starting $800, or splurge on one of the second tier pistols (Tec-9 for terrorists or Five-seveN for counter-terrorists) but I find these don't help you as much. Frag grenades are very powerful in the pistol round, as most people will not buy armor, and the explosions will wreck shop if placed well. Avoid the mighty deagle especially as a T, as it's accuracy is currently rather shit when on the move, its recoil is hard to manage, and the p250 or better should oneshot in the head in this round anyway.
For pistols, put your crosshairs right over an enemy and click like mad. It takes several shots to kill someone with your lowly sidearm, and there's not much you can do to manage recoil, so keep firing.
2) Second round
If you win the pistol round, the next 2 rounds are much easier, as your team will have a money advantage over your opponents, you'll likely be able to buy a rifle right away. In this round, I prefer to use SMGs if my team has won the pistol round. SMGs do light damage but are easily fired on the move, and many players will save up by not buying armor in the second round, making weapons that have trouble penetrating flak vests more viable, like the Bizon (The Bizon does a piddling 11 damage per hit to the body if your target has armor)
DO NOT OVERSPEND. Even if you've racked up the kills and can afford one, there's no reason to buy something like an AWP in the second round. In fact you'll be shooting yourself in the foot, as those lapua magnum rounds will only earn you a $100 bounty per kill against your underequipped opponents.
If your team lost the pistol round, pretend you're taking a second pistol round and buy another p250. Saving your money is key, you're not likely to win right after a loss on the pistol round. Don't worry if you get destroyed by a well-equipped opponent, it's all part of the game and you'll be on equal footing soon enough.
3) First buy round
By the third or fourth round, you should have enough money for your team's rifle of choice if you've saved properly, sooner if you've got some kills or your team won the early rounds (See above). This is called the 'buy round' or 'gun round' and this is where things start to get interesting. If you're a bit low on cash, go ahead and get the first tier rifle, the FAMAS G1 for CT or the Galil Assault Rifle for T. These have similar recoil patterns as their bigger brothers, but do less damage. If you can afford it, go ahead and purchase your second tier rifle by this point, the M4 for CT or the AK-47 for T.
For the CT rifles, the first three bullets will land right where your crosshairs are. After that, they'll start to rise and go inaccurate. To compensate, start pulling your mouse downwards slowly as you start firing to keep the bullets on-target. Strafe, hold still for a brief instant, let off your 3 round burst, then strafe again to make yourself a more difficult target and to keep your shots as accurate as possible. The FAMAS has a built in 3 round burst mode that will automatically do this for you and cluster your shots perfectly, use this often for long ranged shooting until you're comfortable with full auto. CT's are often on defense, so you can easily find a good 'camping' spot. Watch where your teammates hide, as the more experienced players on your team will often know the best positions.
For the T rifles, the first 2 bullets will be right on target, and after that they'll rise and start to go inaccurate. The AK is notorious for this, and at full recoil you'll be firing several feet over everyone's head if you're still holding the crosshairs right on an opponent. You'll have to pull the mouse down strongly if you intend on keeping up sustained fire. Another technique if you're intending on ambushing an overly aggressive CT team is to aim low and let the recoil pull your shots up into an unlucky CT's head. The Galil's 5.56mm rounds are a lot more accurate than the mighty AK's, but less damaging, however it has almost the same recoil pattern, just less pronounced. As a Terrorist, you're more often on offense, so the rifles can be used on the move at an exaggerated recoil pattern. A technique I use with the AK is to start pressing the trigger and aiming very low just before I come around a corner I expect defenders to be waiting for me. You can get kills this way, but the strafe-shoot-strafe method described above is going to be the more reliable choice by far.
CTs should get themselves some armor and a defuse kit every round once the buy rounds begin. A defuse kit can mean the difference between a round won and a round lost, and even if you die a teammate might pick it up to use on the bomb later. It's only $400 and if at least half your team doesn't have one, you might just be in trouble. Consider buying only the kevlar vest, as the commonly used terrorist's hot dog the AK-47 will kill you if you're headshot even if you bought a helmet.
T's should get a full set of armor every round once the buy rounds begin. A helmet will keep you alive with a small amount of health if you're headshot by a CT's M4 carbine. The various grenades are very useful to a T, especially the smoke grenade, but be wary of using these until you know what you're doing. A mis-placed frag grenade can lay waste to your own team, or a poorly thrown smoke can obscure a vital point from your own allies. Practice your throws with a harmless decoy grenade, they're only $50 and they are certainly not a make-or-break if you toss one poorly. They make the same noise and look a lot like a flash grenade, so sometimes you can fool your enemies into looking away from it as your team is storming in. Once they land, they'll make a sound like your primary weapon, and will pop up as an enemy on your opponent's radar. This rarely fools anyone, but throw a bunch of them at one place behind some smoke and you might trick the opponent into thinking you are where you're not.
4) The later game
Sometimes you'll do well and you'll have plenty of cash to splash around with, sometimes you'll get rolled and you'll have to go back to saving up. Counter Strike has always been a very 'momentum' based game, once you're winning it's easier to keep winning. The p250 is your best friend, when you're running too low on funds due to a losing streak to get your rifle, a mere $300 investment can pay for itself when you land your first headshot and even if your team loses a round, you'll end up making money via the small stipend given to the losing team at the end of the round. Don't bother with getting the high cost weapons just yet. You'll be much more useful to your team to keep with your plain old AK or M4, as they are versatile and can be used well in every situation you could come across in the game. They're the most important weapons to master, as they're the most common and the most useful.
5) Entering a match late
You have to wait in the queue for a good ten minutes to get into the server, so there's a good chance you'll join the game once it's already underway. Don't just join the team you see with the best players on it, hit auto-join and see where you end up. You can't even see the scores before you pick a team, so there's no point in trying to join the winning team. Players like Yadigg will often change teams if they see one side is too 'stacked' anyway. Either quietly start with a save round like you would in step 1, or politely ask over voice chat if someone can buy you a weapon. Say that you just joined and you don't have anything, and if someone has money to spare before the round starts, they'll often toss you something. Ask for one of the rifles mentioned above (Start low, ask for the first-tier rifle) if they ask what weapon you'd like. As the round plays out, you'll notice most people will be better armed than you, friend and foe alike. You can quickly pick up a dropped weapon if you survive to the halfway point or better in the round anyway. If you have auto-pickup enabled in options, you can quickly pick up a new primary (or pistol, if you see a good one lying around, though this is more rare to see) by pressing g to throw down your currently equipped weapon and walking over the new one. The alternative is to look down at a weapon and hold E until you swap out, though this is much slower and requires you to take your eyes off of vulnerable spots on the map.
General tips:
PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE. The professional CS players will often play 4 or more hours a day, training with pistols or the rifle weapons, and spend half the time on tactics with their teammates. The normal CS player can't be expected to do all this, but you can do things like learning muscle memory and learning maps, callouts, and tactics from experience. Try to play some sort of FPS a little bit each day to keep your skills from rusting
Set your mouse sensitivity and don't change it across any shooter-style games you play. For source games, this just means you can set it back to how you had it, but if you play other things too (Call of Duty, Battlefield, CRYSIS) you don't want to lose your muscle memory when you return to CSGO. It's a bit goofy, but try putting a bit of tape with measured notches on your mouse pad. Find a mouse sensitivity setting that is comfortable for you and measure how far you have to move your mouse to make a 180 degree turn. Fire up another game and change the sensitivity until you can move your mouse the same distance to get the 180 turn again. This is the biggest non-hardware related change you can make to improve your aim across FPS games.
Use your mic. Don't overdo it, don't call it every time you see an enemy, but most people don't even look down at the text chat until they're dead, and most people ignore radio commands as they're commonly spammed. If you see the bomb, say where it is. If you see a large group of enemies, try to say where they are before it's too late and you're overrun - Cain's Lair has deadchat on, which means you won't be able to report to your teammates after you've been killed. DON'T spam up the voice channel with trash talk, boasting, or reports on every little footstep and gunshot you hear. Idle chit-chat is fine for a few seconds at the beginning and end of the round, or to talk about that sweet frag you made with your dead teammates in deadchat, but otherwise try to leave the voice channel open for important calls and updates.
Be a team player. CS is a heavily team based game, going all Quake style solo will often get you killed and contribute nothing to the team. A unified push is much stronger than trickling into the bomb site one by one to get killed. If you've got $14000 and someone asks you to buy them a gun, you should toss one over to them (use the G key to throw down your currently equipped weapon). As a newbie, you can often watch your teammates to see where the right places to grenade, rush, and camp for an ambush are.
Don't get greedy! So you just saw a teammate get sniped and drop his sweet weapon. What you SHOULD NOT do is run over to his ragdoll and try to snag it. You'll only get yourself killed and then neither of you will have a weapon. At the end of the round, you can walk around and try to grab a dropped weapon off the ground just before the next round begins. If you find a negev or awp, go ahead and pick it up and announce 'free awp' at the beginning of the next round and then throw it down for a teammate to pick up. Chances are that an extra awp in the hands of a skilled teammate will do a lot more for your team than the ~$3000 it costs to re-buy your primary. Don't chase an enemy around corners either in hopes of finishing him off. More than likely he's waiting for you to do just that so that his friends can ambush you.
Listen to calls: If someone says 'bomb down A' and you're derping around on B, for god's sakes, run over to A! Having the enemy retake the site and plant while you camp watching an empty doorway for 30 seconds isn't helping anybody. If your teammates are any good and use their microphones, you can learn a lot about what's happening in the game just by listening to your team report in now and again.
Cain's Lair is very welcoming and playing against some of the highly skilled players that are regulars here will improve your skills even if you do have to get killed by them a lot in the first place.
The rest can only be learned by practice and experience, so get in there and have some fun!
Step 1) Pistol round
This is the most important round of the game. If you're a CT, you should get a p250, it'll put you on even footing against glocks. If you're a T, you can safely save up and use only your spawn pistol as the glock is extremely powerful, especially if you can land the initial burstfire. To mix it up a bit, you can buy body armor with your starting $800, or splurge on one of the second tier pistols (Tec-9 for terrorists or Five-seveN for counter-terrorists) but I find these don't help you as much. Frag grenades are very powerful in the pistol round, as most people will not buy armor, and the explosions will wreck shop if placed well. Avoid the mighty deagle especially as a T, as it's accuracy is currently rather shit when on the move, its recoil is hard to manage, and the p250 or better should oneshot in the head in this round anyway.
For pistols, put your crosshairs right over an enemy and click like mad. It takes several shots to kill someone with your lowly sidearm, and there's not much you can do to manage recoil, so keep firing.
2) Second round
If you win the pistol round, the next 2 rounds are much easier, as your team will have a money advantage over your opponents, you'll likely be able to buy a rifle right away. In this round, I prefer to use SMGs if my team has won the pistol round. SMGs do light damage but are easily fired on the move, and many players will save up by not buying armor in the second round, making weapons that have trouble penetrating flak vests more viable, like the Bizon (The Bizon does a piddling 11 damage per hit to the body if your target has armor)
DO NOT OVERSPEND. Even if you've racked up the kills and can afford one, there's no reason to buy something like an AWP in the second round. In fact you'll be shooting yourself in the foot, as those lapua magnum rounds will only earn you a $100 bounty per kill against your underequipped opponents.
If your team lost the pistol round, pretend you're taking a second pistol round and buy another p250. Saving your money is key, you're not likely to win right after a loss on the pistol round. Don't worry if you get destroyed by a well-equipped opponent, it's all part of the game and you'll be on equal footing soon enough.
3) First buy round
By the third or fourth round, you should have enough money for your team's rifle of choice if you've saved properly, sooner if you've got some kills or your team won the early rounds (See above). This is called the 'buy round' or 'gun round' and this is where things start to get interesting. If you're a bit low on cash, go ahead and get the first tier rifle, the FAMAS G1 for CT or the Galil Assault Rifle for T. These have similar recoil patterns as their bigger brothers, but do less damage. If you can afford it, go ahead and purchase your second tier rifle by this point, the M4 for CT or the AK-47 for T.
For the CT rifles, the first three bullets will land right where your crosshairs are. After that, they'll start to rise and go inaccurate. To compensate, start pulling your mouse downwards slowly as you start firing to keep the bullets on-target. Strafe, hold still for a brief instant, let off your 3 round burst, then strafe again to make yourself a more difficult target and to keep your shots as accurate as possible. The FAMAS has a built in 3 round burst mode that will automatically do this for you and cluster your shots perfectly, use this often for long ranged shooting until you're comfortable with full auto. CT's are often on defense, so you can easily find a good 'camping' spot. Watch where your teammates hide, as the more experienced players on your team will often know the best positions.
For the T rifles, the first 2 bullets will be right on target, and after that they'll rise and start to go inaccurate. The AK is notorious for this, and at full recoil you'll be firing several feet over everyone's head if you're still holding the crosshairs right on an opponent. You'll have to pull the mouse down strongly if you intend on keeping up sustained fire. Another technique if you're intending on ambushing an overly aggressive CT team is to aim low and let the recoil pull your shots up into an unlucky CT's head. The Galil's 5.56mm rounds are a lot more accurate than the mighty AK's, but less damaging, however it has almost the same recoil pattern, just less pronounced. As a Terrorist, you're more often on offense, so the rifles can be used on the move at an exaggerated recoil pattern. A technique I use with the AK is to start pressing the trigger and aiming very low just before I come around a corner I expect defenders to be waiting for me. You can get kills this way, but the strafe-shoot-strafe method described above is going to be the more reliable choice by far.
CTs should get themselves some armor and a defuse kit every round once the buy rounds begin. A defuse kit can mean the difference between a round won and a round lost, and even if you die a teammate might pick it up to use on the bomb later. It's only $400 and if at least half your team doesn't have one, you might just be in trouble. Consider buying only the kevlar vest, as the commonly used terrorist's hot dog the AK-47 will kill you if you're headshot even if you bought a helmet.
T's should get a full set of armor every round once the buy rounds begin. A helmet will keep you alive with a small amount of health if you're headshot by a CT's M4 carbine. The various grenades are very useful to a T, especially the smoke grenade, but be wary of using these until you know what you're doing. A mis-placed frag grenade can lay waste to your own team, or a poorly thrown smoke can obscure a vital point from your own allies. Practice your throws with a harmless decoy grenade, they're only $50 and they are certainly not a make-or-break if you toss one poorly. They make the same noise and look a lot like a flash grenade, so sometimes you can fool your enemies into looking away from it as your team is storming in. Once they land, they'll make a sound like your primary weapon, and will pop up as an enemy on your opponent's radar. This rarely fools anyone, but throw a bunch of them at one place behind some smoke and you might trick the opponent into thinking you are where you're not.
4) The later game
Sometimes you'll do well and you'll have plenty of cash to splash around with, sometimes you'll get rolled and you'll have to go back to saving up. Counter Strike has always been a very 'momentum' based game, once you're winning it's easier to keep winning. The p250 is your best friend, when you're running too low on funds due to a losing streak to get your rifle, a mere $300 investment can pay for itself when you land your first headshot and even if your team loses a round, you'll end up making money via the small stipend given to the losing team at the end of the round. Don't bother with getting the high cost weapons just yet. You'll be much more useful to your team to keep with your plain old AK or M4, as they are versatile and can be used well in every situation you could come across in the game. They're the most important weapons to master, as they're the most common and the most useful.
5) Entering a match late
You have to wait in the queue for a good ten minutes to get into the server, so there's a good chance you'll join the game once it's already underway. Don't just join the team you see with the best players on it, hit auto-join and see where you end up. You can't even see the scores before you pick a team, so there's no point in trying to join the winning team. Players like Yadigg will often change teams if they see one side is too 'stacked' anyway. Either quietly start with a save round like you would in step 1, or politely ask over voice chat if someone can buy you a weapon. Say that you just joined and you don't have anything, and if someone has money to spare before the round starts, they'll often toss you something. Ask for one of the rifles mentioned above (Start low, ask for the first-tier rifle) if they ask what weapon you'd like. As the round plays out, you'll notice most people will be better armed than you, friend and foe alike. You can quickly pick up a dropped weapon if you survive to the halfway point or better in the round anyway. If you have auto-pickup enabled in options, you can quickly pick up a new primary (or pistol, if you see a good one lying around, though this is more rare to see) by pressing g to throw down your currently equipped weapon and walking over the new one. The alternative is to look down at a weapon and hold E until you swap out, though this is much slower and requires you to take your eyes off of vulnerable spots on the map.
General tips:
PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE. The professional CS players will often play 4 or more hours a day, training with pistols or the rifle weapons, and spend half the time on tactics with their teammates. The normal CS player can't be expected to do all this, but you can do things like learning muscle memory and learning maps, callouts, and tactics from experience. Try to play some sort of FPS a little bit each day to keep your skills from rusting
Set your mouse sensitivity and don't change it across any shooter-style games you play. For source games, this just means you can set it back to how you had it, but if you play other things too (Call of Duty, Battlefield, CRYSIS) you don't want to lose your muscle memory when you return to CSGO. It's a bit goofy, but try putting a bit of tape with measured notches on your mouse pad. Find a mouse sensitivity setting that is comfortable for you and measure how far you have to move your mouse to make a 180 degree turn. Fire up another game and change the sensitivity until you can move your mouse the same distance to get the 180 turn again. This is the biggest non-hardware related change you can make to improve your aim across FPS games.
Use your mic. Don't overdo it, don't call it every time you see an enemy, but most people don't even look down at the text chat until they're dead, and most people ignore radio commands as they're commonly spammed. If you see the bomb, say where it is. If you see a large group of enemies, try to say where they are before it's too late and you're overrun - Cain's Lair has deadchat on, which means you won't be able to report to your teammates after you've been killed. DON'T spam up the voice channel with trash talk, boasting, or reports on every little footstep and gunshot you hear. Idle chit-chat is fine for a few seconds at the beginning and end of the round, or to talk about that sweet frag you made with your dead teammates in deadchat, but otherwise try to leave the voice channel open for important calls and updates.
Be a team player. CS is a heavily team based game, going all Quake style solo will often get you killed and contribute nothing to the team. A unified push is much stronger than trickling into the bomb site one by one to get killed. If you've got $14000 and someone asks you to buy them a gun, you should toss one over to them (use the G key to throw down your currently equipped weapon). As a newbie, you can often watch your teammates to see where the right places to grenade, rush, and camp for an ambush are.
Don't get greedy! So you just saw a teammate get sniped and drop his sweet weapon. What you SHOULD NOT do is run over to his ragdoll and try to snag it. You'll only get yourself killed and then neither of you will have a weapon. At the end of the round, you can walk around and try to grab a dropped weapon off the ground just before the next round begins. If you find a negev or awp, go ahead and pick it up and announce 'free awp' at the beginning of the next round and then throw it down for a teammate to pick up. Chances are that an extra awp in the hands of a skilled teammate will do a lot more for your team than the ~$3000 it costs to re-buy your primary. Don't chase an enemy around corners either in hopes of finishing him off. More than likely he's waiting for you to do just that so that his friends can ambush you.
Listen to calls: If someone says 'bomb down A' and you're derping around on B, for god's sakes, run over to A! Having the enemy retake the site and plant while you camp watching an empty doorway for 30 seconds isn't helping anybody. If your teammates are any good and use their microphones, you can learn a lot about what's happening in the game just by listening to your team report in now and again.
Cain's Lair is very welcoming and playing against some of the highly skilled players that are regulars here will improve your skills even if you do have to get killed by them a lot in the first place.
The rest can only be learned by practice and experience, so get in there and have some fun!
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