CS:GO for beginners
Counter-Strike can be an intimidating game at first. You join a match and everyone seems to know the names of all these nifty little hidey-holes that you would never notice at first glance. Your teammates manage to run to the bomb site in less than ten seconds, but you get lost in an air duct and your life is swiftly snuffed out when, emerging on the other side, you find five enemies. To top it off, you had the bomb, and you didn’t even realise. Welcome.
My very first tip is: Don’t worry about what happens in casual matches. It’s called ‘casual’ for a reason and most players don’t play this mode to win. I’m pretty sure no one will really mind whether you do a silly thing or not. You’re here to learn, and this is the best place for you to do it. So chill out, enjoy, molotov yourself, whatever.
The first few skills you need to learn in Counter-Strike are relatively straight forward but not necessarily intuitive if you haven’t played a CS game before. An easy one is to always keep your reticule at head height. But you also need to stand still when shooting to be accurate; you can’t just run and gun like in Call Of Duty. As you improve, you’ll start to get the hang of strafing, stopping, shooting and strafing again. You’ll do this faster and faster, be more and more accurate, and eventually you’ll be doing the CSGO wiggle better than anyone.
Your bullets won’t go in a constant line to wherever your crosshairs are pointing in CS, they move with the recoil of the gun. So new players will want to practice burst fire (shooting a few bullets at a time) to keep recoil low. ‘Spraying’ – that is, just holding the trigger down – is normally reserved for close-quarters combat or submachineguns. When spraying, pull your aim down to compensate for the recoil. If you’ve only spent a few bullets, don’t automatically reload. It’s better to make sure you’re ready for another enemy to pop out. Find a safe place to reload, don’t do it willy nilly.