In this guide, I'm going to give you specific instructions to follow, based on what rank you are and I will explain how these tasks will improve your game. Some of these instructions will seem hard and unnecessary but if you do them you will find that your rank rapidly increases.

In game, as in real life, your attitude is going to be the primary factor in determining your success or lack thereof.

Firstly, do not think you know everything. If you did, your rank would reflect it. Aim to learn every time you play. Yes, you are silver right now but it is up to you what that means. Does it mean that you are terrible? Or does it just mean that you have a great potential for improvement? Only you can decide.

It is easy to blame your team for causing you to lose but this is not the right attitude to have. Sometimes you have good teammates, other times you have bad teammates. The only constant in each game that you play is yourself. If you improved your skills, you would be able to kill more opponents. Even if your team is terrible, if you've killed 4 guys before you go down and the rest of your team is alive, they are more than likely to win the round. Heck, if you got good enough you would be able to single handedly kill the enemy team and you will move up in the rankings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you need to be able to ace every round to get out of silver. All I am saying is that your team isn't the reason that you are in silver right now.

With that said, let us move on.

While you can do the tasks in the other sections of this guide and get out of silver, if you do not have these items, you will find it much harder in the higher levels.

You will need:

• A decent mouse. It doesn't need to be a gaming mouse but something that is comfortable, is reliable and is ideally wired.
  
• A mousepad. You don't need to have one but it is easier to keep clean and free of debris so your aiming will be better.
  
• Headphones and microphone. You can play with speakers but you will not be able to hear as clearly or pinpoint as accurately as you can with headphones. As with the mouse, there is no need to go overboard. You can pick up a fairly decent pair of headphones with a mic for about $30.
  
• A comfortable chair, one with good back support and ideally tall enough so that you are not reaching up too high to place your hands on the mouse and keyboard.

CSGO is not a simple game and there are many things that you need to learn. Instead of trying to learn them all at once, we will choose one or two items to work on so that you can develop the skills that you need and once you have ranked up we will add more things into the mix.

Here are the things that you will need to do:

• Go to Options -> Game Options then do the following:
  
  
  • Change Enable Developer Console to Yes // Input commands into the game directly without needing to use the options menu. There are a whole heap of commands that you can find online but the more common ones include adding/changing keybinds, connecting/disconnecting to servers and quitting the game. The quickest way to quit from CSGO is to bring up the console, type Q, press TAB and then enter. This will auto-populate and carry out the command quit which returns you to desktop.
    
    
  • Change Switch Weapon on Pickup to No // Keeps the weapon that you have selected out. Stops those awkward moments when you are shooting someone with a pistol, pick up a gun and automatically switch to it only to find that it is empty.
    
    
  • Change Viewmodel Position to Classic // Lots of guides use this particular viewmodel in order to explain where to aim. Makes it easier to learn grenades.
    
    
  • Change Radar Map Zoom to 0.3 // Allows you to see the whole map on the radar. Once you learn to use the radar more it will allow you to develop a clearer picture of where things are happening on the map.
  
  
• Then go to Options -> Keyboard/Mouse
  
  
  • Change Raw Input to On // Uses your exact mouse input to move your cursor.
    
    
  • Change Mouse Acceleration to Disabled // Removes mouse acceleration. In a nutshell, mouse acceleration means the faster you move your mouse, the further your cursor moves. Imagine you move your mouse from A to B. Your cursor will move from A to B on the screen. If you move your mouse from A to B at twice the speed to flick to the guy who suddenly turned up on your screen, your cursor will actually move further than it did before which makes aiming way harder than it should be.
    
    
  • Go to keybinds which is below the mouse options and make the following changes:
    
    
    • Select your duck key and press choose clear from the bottom right. // This stops you from being able to crouch. Crouching does not affect your aim enough to warrant using it. Crouching does make you a lot slower and an easier target though. By removing the ability to crouch when you panic you now have to move out of the way by pressing left and right. This will teach you to dodge bullets better and be a much harder target to hit.
      
      
    • Select your reload key and clear that as well. // This is another controversial instruction but it will stop you from reloading after every kill. The reload reflex is very strong and it is quite unnecessary. Even at higher levels, I've seen people in 1v1 situations reloading AKs that have 26 bullets in them or other weapons that similarly don't need reloading. This way, you will have a rough idea of how many bullets you have left and if you need to reload you will need to shoot the remaining bullets in a safe place so that the auto-reload happens.
      
      
    • Change your Use Mic key to ALT (the one next to the spacebar). // This just makes it easier to communicate with your left hand.

The biggest problem in the lower levels is poor aim. Even at gold nova, improving your aim can see you increase in rank so the first thing to do is going to be getting lots of practice in to improve your aim.

The way to do this will be through lots of deathmatch. Turn off random weapons in deathmatch and every match buy a MP5-SD. Just work on getting more kills. What you are going to need to focus on is your crosshair placement. Don't aim at the ground or randomly at a wall. You want to aim where you expect the next enemy to come from.

There is a good guide from adreN which explains the basics.


The quickest way to improve your crosshair placement is to just stare at your crosshair. Don't look at any other part of your screen other than the crosshair itself. If you want to look up some stairs or around a corner, you will have to move your crosshair to the right place first before you can see what is there. What you should be aiming for is the chest area of your enemy. If you do this, you will quickly start getting more kills.

The other aspect of your game that you should work on at this point is your movement. If you are moving, your bullets are not going to be accurate. If you are stood still, you are an easier target to hit.

What you should try and do is fire a short burst by holding down the mouse button for about half a second to a second. Then stop firing and press a movement key either to the left or the right making sure that your crosshair is still on the enemy that you are fighting while you are moving. After you have moved a couple of steps in one direction, tap the opposite direction so that you come to a complete stop and start shooting at your target. This will seem hard to begin with but you will start to get better at it very soon. You will find that you are starting to live longer because people are not hitting you as often as they used to.

Once you start getting a K:D ratio of above 0.5 (that means for every two deaths you get at least one kill) then you should move to the next task.

The purpose of this section is not so much to increase the number of kills that you get but to reduce the number of deaths that you have in a round of deathmatch.

There will be times when you cannot avoid dying because someone spawns behind you or peeks out while you are shooting at another enemy. However, if you pay attention to the things here you will find that you die less.

To do this, you should stick with your MP5-SD for now.

Firstly, you are always going to be moving quickly from cover to cover. No standing around in wide open areas and especially no standing around in doorways.

These are the sorts of things that you will need to run through in your head before you engage an enemy.

• Is there more than one enemy? Avoid starting the fight.
  
  
• Is the enemy at a longer range than you can shoot and kill at? Avoid the fight.
  
  
• Do you have enough ammo to kill the enemy? If not, move away and shoot off your remaining ammo. Since you cannot reload at will, you will need to spray off the bullets that you have remaining to initiate a reload.

During the fight, you should now try and aim for the upper chest/neck area of your enemy. Eventually you want to be aiming for headshots most of the time but for now this gives you a larger target and gives you a good chance of getting a headshot because of the recoil of your gun.

Another skill to gain is being able to quick switch to pistol. This is when you use the pistol instead of completing the reload on your MP5. If you run out bullets in the middle of a fight, dodge, press 2 and start shooting with your pistol. Another way that you can practice this is on an empty server while you are running around the map, just keeping switching between your primary and your pistol.

Once your K:D is above 0.8, move to the next step.

Now that you have the basics of aiming and moving as well as deciding whether you should take a fight on or not, you should start playing some deathmatch with different weapons.

Only use SMGs or shotguns for now. Play a full match with each weapon so that you can figure out how each one differs from the MP5 that you are used to.

Also start playing arms race matches so that you do gain some exposure to the rifles as well but don't focus too much on the rifles just yet.

Pay attention to the radar in the top left from now on. You will be able to see where all your teammates are as well as any enemies that they see. Crosses on the radar means that a player died at that location, either a friendly or an enemy. A cross that turns into a question mark means that the player has respawned.

Your score is going to suffer with all these additional things you are paying attention to but once you start getting your K:D back around the 0.8 mark consistently, then you should be ready to move on to the next step.

Keep playing deathmatch while trying to get more headshots and start playing casual games as well. By playing casual, you will start to learn how far you can get on a map before you are likely to meet an enemy.

It also gives you the chance to practice using the grenades, as well as dealing with them. In general, if a grenade has been thrown at you, either move backwards so it doesn't hit you or move forwards so that it explodes behind you. If the grenade isn't going to hit you, then turn away from it because it might be a flash and that will blind you.

When throwing the different grenades, throw explosive grenades at enemies who are around corners. If you are throwing a flash, make sure that you push out to where it exploded so that you can kill anyone who is blind.

Another thing to add to your play in this step is paying attention to the sounds that you hear and that you make. Apart from the obvious sound of gunfire that you will hear, the other main sound that you should be listening for are footsteps.

If someone is running, you will hear them make footsteps and you should be able to figure out where they are coming from before you even see them. The same applies when you are running; your enemy can hear you and figure out where you are. You can mask your footsteps by walking. You move slower but you don't make any sound so people cannot tell you are coming until they see you.

If you haven't played any game like CS before, you are going to be quite frustrated when you die and you have to wait until the next round before you are able to play again. When you die, make sure that you are spectating the guy with the highest score on your team. You will learn little tricks like where you can run with a knife or where you can throw a grenade to achieve a certain effect. This means that even though you are not playing, you are still learning.

Once you are certain that you know all the maps, not just so that you don't get lost but to the point that you know where the first contacts are going to happen on the map if you start from spawn at the same time, you are ready to move into competitive play. Keep deathmatching still but make sure that you play at least one competitive game every couple of days as well. This is the bare minimum that you should be playing competitive; the more you play, the better you will get and the faster that it will happen.

When you are playing competitive, you can rebind your reload key and your crouch key. Remember that in competitive you will need to buy armour as well as your weapon every round that you respawn. At the start of every round, you are going to check your money. If you have $2,500 or more, then you will buy a MP5 and armour. Otherwise you will buy nothing.

The times when you don't have enough money and you are not buying anything is called an eco. What you are doing is saving this round's money to use next round so that you will be able to buy both a weapon and armour. If you don't have armour, people will be able to kill you very easily. When you are on eco, your only goal is to try and kill one enemy and take his weapon.

How you communicate to your teammates is also very important. Always provide as much accurate information as possible. If you see 1 guy at B with an AK, you should call '1 at B with AK'. This lets your team know what is happening. If you saw the same guy at B but just simply yelled 'B! B! B!' into the mic, your team would think that all 5 people are there with the bomb and they will leave the areas that they are guarding.

Key details to call out are:

• Number of enemies - either spotted or heard
  
• Any extremely dangerous weapons like an AWP or Auto-sniper
  
• The bomb
  
• Where you got killed from

Finally, once you are dead, report where the person who killed you was and then make sure that you shut up. There's nothing more annoying than a backseat player. Apart from being annoying, there's a couple of problems with talking while you are dead. First, you make it harder for the person who is alive to hear an enemy. Second, you make him doubt himself, which means that he's not going to be as focused on what he is doing as he was if you had just shut up. Remember: Once you die, shut your pie.

One other aspect of communication that is overlooked is watching the 'body language' of your teammates. The most obvious of this is when they are shooting in a particular direction. When this happens, you can assume that there is an enemy in that direction. Another way to use this is that if your teammate is running backwards away from the objective, it's because he's spotted something that made him decide to back off. At that point, blocking him or trying to run forwards past him is not a good idea. Fall back together and make a plan, either to ambush whoever is coming or to go somewhere else.

The two different sides have different objectives and two different styles of play.

As CT, your goal is to stay alive until the bomb has been planted. No rushing the terrorists. Try and kill any that come to your bombsite but more importantly, try and stay alive. If you see anything, tell your teammates. Be accurate and clear about what you have seen.

Make sure that you call the bomb if you see it as this is the most important thing that your team needs to know in order to be able to position themselves properly.

Once the bomb has either been spotted or planted, if you're still alive, you need to make it to the right spot, quickly and safely. This will come with experience but there here are a few tips on how to rotate:

• Rotating through CT is generally going to be safe, unless you're playing something like Cobblestone where the bombsite is really close to CT spawn.
  
• Do NOT rotate through T spawn because even though it is safe, it takes too long to move around the map.
  
• Generally, believe that it is safe to rotate through CT spawn with your knife out, until you see a friendly. // At this level, it is rare to find a good lurker that you will play against, although if you do die while rotating, you should be careful next time. As for switching to your main weapon when you see a friendly, you don't know what he's facing but you do know that he's still in that spot for some reason and it's better to be safe than sorry.

At this stage, once the bomb has been planted, no matter how bad the odds are you are still going to attempt the retake. As you move up in ranks, you will be able to assess whether it is better to save, but right now, there are too many factors to consider that you don't have the experience to judge accurately. Instead of hesitating while trying to figure out if you should save or not, just be clear that you are going to defuse the bomb or die in the attempt.

A few things that you should not do as CT:

• Rush without your team doing the same. And if you have decided as a team to rush, make sure that you rush the same place as the rest of your team. Let's face it, at this level unless you have the rest of the team as backup, there is no way that you are going to be able to take on multiple enemies. If all of your team rushed in different directions, you are all going to get picked off one by one very easily. The other problem with rushing is that even if only one of you does it, when you die you've suddenly given up a lot of map control. A player who is supposed to be watching one area has to watch two, another needs to move to a non-optimal spot to be able to rotate and all in all you end up just screwing up your teams plans. Even if you manage to get a kill before you die, it still works out better for the Terrorists than it does for you. Your single death will cost your team the round.
  
• Keep playing the same position over and over. It may work the first couple of times but if you consistently play the same spot again and again, pretty soon the smart opposition are going to either prefire you or nade you to death. Get comforatble with playing a few different positions from the same site.
  
• Switching the sites that you are playing without letting your teammates know. This leads to people being unsure of where to go and taking the extra couple of seconds at the start of the round to go to the right site. This could lead to them being out of position by the time the terrorsits get there.

As terrorist, your objective is to get the bomb planted and to defend it until it blows up. The most crucial round to having a good terrorist side is the pistol round. Even if you lose the pistol round, if you can get the bomb planted, with the bomb plant bonus you actually get enough money that you can buy smgs and armour and be on level footing with the CTs. If you saved for the first two rounds and managed to plant the bomb both rounds, you'd actually be able to afford an AWP third round. So getting that bomb planted is really important.

Here are a few tips to win as terrorists:

• Make sure that everyone is on the same page as to what the plan is. On the pistol round, everyone needs to go to the same spot together. The number of times that I see someone who decides to lurk and he gets a friend to follow him. Pretty soon both of them get killed doing no damage to the CTs resulting in a round loss.
  
• If no one is calling any strats, make a call yourself. If your teammates keep ignoring you, don't get frustrated. Stop calling the strats and just follow the bomb.
  
• Have some guts. You must have had this experience already; you make a plan, the first person dies and then everyone just sits around and then get swarmed and mowed down where they are. The CTs are always going to be better positioned than you. Sometimes you will die. But you still need to make the attempt.
  
• As a follow on to the point above, do what you can to get the trade kill. If a CT kills a terrorist, do your best to get that kill back. So long as you can keep the number of CTs the same or fewer than the number of Ts, you actually have the advantage.
  
• Do NOT leave the bombsite after you've planted hunting for kills.
  
• Do NOT run off on your own thinking that you are going to be useful somewhere else. You may get a kill or two but if your team loses the round, YOU lose.

If you keep doing these things, eventually you will get better. You'll start to get more kills and you'll start to win more games. So long as you are winning more games than you are losing, you will keep ranking up. It may take a little bit of time, but keep playing and you'll be sure to get out of silver.

One final point: Solo-queueing is a bit of a lottery. Sometimes you get good teammates and sometimes you get not so good teammates. Any time that you play with someone that played well, ie. communicated well, was friendly and was fun to play with, add them to your friends list. Party up with them when you can. Pretty soon you'll be rocking full 5-mans and you will find it even easier to win games because you will all work well together.

Most importantly have fun. If you ever feel stressed or bummed out by a loss, take a break. Even after a win, make sure you take a short break so that you stay fresh.

GL HF.

Comments and feedback appreciated.

Learn how to Rush
https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=289120627

Learn how to Eco
https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=294252154