Counter Strike guide BATING+money chart

Counter Strike guideBAITING

One of the hardest things to do when leaving the primordial ooze of the pub, is to leave behind the emphasis placed on personal score. Like it or not, competitive CS players are obsessed with their frag to death numbers. When you are playing in a pub, winning is when you have a great ratio, and the only reason to look at the team scores is to determine when the next map will be played.

The scoreboard obsession can be linked to some of the biggest mistakes that players can make. Let me give you an example. Say you are on the offensive side of de_nuke. Your team sets up a strat of rushing the upper site, assigning you to watch the ramp room flank. Your team rushes upper every single round, and gets shut down completely, leaving you by yourself in the lobby area. Now you proceed in the upper site, trying to clutch the round 1 on 3/4.

While you are able to pick up a few frags a round on the weakened upper site players, you aren't able to get the bomb planted, and don't win any of the rounds. After the scrim, you look at the scoreboard, happy to see that although your team lost the half 15-0, you had more than twice as many frags as your closest teammate.

After the scrim, you head back into vent, and are shocked to hear everyone ragging on you, calling you a baiter. You thought you were going to be praised for being the only one who could get any frags, but instead you receive criticism. Here is why:

One of the jobs of watching the flank is to support your teammates when things get rough and they need help executing on the bombsite. What you could have done was smoke and flash ramp in the beginning of the round and at least delay the flank for a little while, and help your team get entry frags on inner. Your score might not have been as high as it was but you would have won more rounds and possibly the scrim.


That is what separates a good player from an average player: the ability to sacrifice personal glory for the good of the team. A perfect example of this would be a ramp rush on nuke. You have the best spawn and are leading the rush. You throw your flashes and get blinded while running up towards the ramp room. It is your job to keep running forward and use any kind of trick you can do, to draw fire for your teammates behind you who aren't blind. If you stop running forward because you are scared and let other teammates go first, you just baited your team and made a very poor play. Fear should not exist in the offense when you are rushing. A lot of players have the mentality of staying alive as long as possible, regardless of the situation. If there is one thing you get out of this article let it be this: if you die in Counter-Strike you will not die in real life. I'm going to repeat that because it seems like a lot of players play as if they will. If you die in Counter-Strike you will not die in real life!

When your numbers are even, trading deaths with the defense heavily favors the offense in Counter-Strike. When you turn a 5v5 into a 4v4 or a 3v3, you can see how the balance of power shifts to the offense. The defense will have to be spread thin and certain spots will become vulnerable to an offensive attack. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there so a teammate can pick up an easy frag. The worst that can happen is you die and your team will have an advantage to win the round. The best that can happen is you will not die and your team will have an advantage to win the round. I have seen teams fail on the Dust2 catwalk time and time again. Your team inches up and gets to the stairs on cat, you throw your flashes and take the stairs. Then what happens? Everyone is too scared to make a charge to the bomb site and is grouping up around that tall box taking strafing pot shots trying to make a pick. At least 80% of the time this round ends in disaster for the offense. If someone had taken charge and rushed toward the site the offense would have had a very decent chance at winning that round. Sure he may have died but his team would have gained all that territory and be in a great position to take out those defenders.

Another thing to keep in mind is that in counter-strike there are passive players and aggressive players. This is needed and if the team leader doesn't realize the difference between his players it is also going to be disastrous because the passive players are going to wind up negatively baiting the aggressive players just based on their play styles. One of the best traits you can find in a cs player is the ability to make that switch from passive to aggressive at key moments.

Not all baiting is negative. Turning negative baiting into positive baiting will lead to a huge performance increase for your team. The difference between the two is what you do when your teammate puts his life on the line. If your teammate is taking a bombsite or taking a corner so he can draw fire and you are not there to capitalize on the opening they are giving you, you are doing the wrong thing. A positive action on that same situation would be if your teammate ran across or jumped across a crossfire giving you an opening to make that entry frag and you took it. That is an example of positive baiting.

Here is something that you can try if your team is really showing signs of fear on the offensive. The object is to get your team comfortable with dying and take the fear out of them, and making sure everyone is playing with the same level of aggression. What you want to do is have every single person go wherever they want but they can never stop running forward for the entire round until the bomb is planted. Basically they have to keep rushing as hard as they can every single round of the half.

At the beginning they are going to get dominated because they don't really know how to rush. If they did know how, then they wouldn't be afraid of going first. Second, they will see the worst thing that happens is they will die but this can kind of be fun if you treat it like a game. As the rounds go on they will get a feel for the timing and learn some good flashes to throw and possibly even start getting some entry frags. You will still lose the round because this is the most ludicrous offensive strat I can imagine, but your players will genuinely start to lose some of their fear. I recommend staying at this stage of the exercise until you can see everyone is comfortable with leading a rush.

Stage 2 of this exercise is to take that new found aggression and try to incorporate some team work. Continue to treat this like a game, only this time you are 5 men rushing whichever way you spawn. Use the same rules as before: everyone runs the whole way, no stopping for anything, even if you're blind. Spend as much time as you need until you can see that everyone is really rushing their hearts out.

Stage 3 of this exercise is to take your new rushing ability and apply it to situations. This is how your team will learn to sneak rush. Still part of the rushing game, all you are going to do this time is start your all out mega rush from a lot closer to the bombsites. For example, walk all the way into B tunnels on dust2. When everyone is ready start the rushing game, same rules as before. You can do this anywhere on any map.

The final stage of this exercise is to take step 3 and develop it into an effective sneak rush. Have everyone walk B tunnel again, but this time you are going to walk into the site until someone on defense spots you. Then it’s your green light again for the all out super rush, same rules as before. It’s amazing how fearless people can become when they are just playing a game like the rush game. Guess what? Counter-Strike is also just a game and you should have that same mentality all the time. The best trait you can have in CS is to be a passive and careful player but to know when it is time to turn on the switch inside you and become an animal and let out that aggression.

If you find that no matter what you say and do, your teammates still refuse to change, and would rather bait you than work as a team, it may be best to move on. Some people can readily pick up the concept of baiting, and adjust their play accordingly to fix the problem and make sure their actions represent what is best for the team, rather than for themselves. Others, however, will never be able to shed the pressure of having to have the best score in the server, worried that anyone watching will think they are a bad player. They will need to be replaced or you may need to change teams.

CS BE Random :)Interacting in a society where self-admiration grows by the frag and benevolence needs to be accompanied by Wikipedia links can be a sm

Interacting in a society where self-admiration grows by the frag and benevolence needs to be accompanied by Wikipedia links can be a smidge overwhelming at times. A culture such as ours, as unfortunate as it may be, has always manifested a few lackluster qualities. For many, the need to shelter something as paltry as an ego has become so oppressive that their own in-game ability is essentially as stagnant as the monitor before them. Stagnant, now there's an interesting word - Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines it as “not advancing or developing,” further realized as a lack of progression. Though that's exactly the position aspiring players are unknowingly thrusting themselves into.

Everyone has had one of those moments: He wasn't supposed to be there, you had just looked away, he came from behind or they peeked from opposite angles at the same time. Sometimes it just seems as if the gaming gods are out to get you and every move you make results in one seemingly random situation after another. This is also about the time where you begin to fall to pieces and spit out words both exaggerated and foul in any half-assed attempt to rationalize the events at hand. And it's all too common.

Phrases like “He's lucky he's so dumb” are formulated to help protect the fragile psyche, and at first glance it seems like the logical thing to do. After all, for years qualities such as confidence have been preached as the marquee trait of competitive stars across the world. And what better way to justify your latest failures than by suggesting uncontrollable intervention – as if that's the only way you can lose? Such a thought process is almost always unconscious, even bordering that of the instinctive. But there is a dangerous fallacy in its logic, one that if is not tended to properly could very likely hold you back from everything you know you're capable of accomplishing.

Confidence is a big part of gaming, obviously because nearly all of it is mental. There is however such a thing as cancerous confidence. Cancerous confidence is more commonly known as an ego trip, which is basically what players put themselves through every single time they explain their latest discomforts with screams of “random” or “lucky.” The issue with over confidence however is actually a very minute part of the real problem. The only thing over confidence does is play host to the actual performance menace. If this is starting to sound like a game of connect the dots, well, it is. You see the menace is much less apparent without its host to foster it and make it feel like a safe, somewhat instinctive response. But, what is this so called menace?

The menace is loss of control. To reiterate, players commonly invoke excuses whenever they can in what they unconsciously assume keeps their confidence up, sort of like a defense mechanism for the ego. By doing so however, a new beast is unleashed that is much nastier and immediately damaging than a mere decline in confidence. That beast is a loss of grip on the situation. You see, when you start to call things “random” you're conceding that what happened was out of your control. You set yourself up in a position that is impossible to overcome. Continually, frag after frag you tell yourself it couldn't be helped and you wonder why you can't turn things around. It's simple though, you can't turn things around because you're not putting anything in your hands. You end up relying on the other player or team to do all of the playing for you. And thinking logically, it's much easier to control something with your hands than with hope now isn't it? But how can we take control of the situation?

There are various different techniques one can align oneself with to cleanse the plague of uncontrollability, so I will stick with my own personal favorites here. First of all, you need to get it in your head that there is nothing to take back; in fact, you never lost control in the first place. Instead of complaining about the poor registry on the three dollar server and that shot that clearly hit, sit back and ask yourself if you did the absolute most to increase your chances in the situation. Now when I say absolute most I don't necessarily mean how good was your aim, I mean was there anything you did before the confrontation that lead to your arrival at that specific time? Unless you're Mr. Perfect, there is likely a whole series of events prior to the event at hand, which, if optimized slightly could have altered or even won you the battle before it even began. This sort of approach has always worked for me, as I have yet to play a perfect game and find nothing wrong with the way I performed.

There are cases however where you do your job pre-confrontation very well and yet someone “lucks out” to take you down. You know what I like to do in these situations? Demand more of myself. If I took five shots on my opponent and got him down to one hit point and he knocks me out with his last bullet, which also happens to be the only one he connects with, instead of complaining about luck I'll sit back for a second and speak critically of myself “I should have got him with my first two [bullets].” This is another way to take a seemingly out of control event and put it solely at your discretion. Becoming more demanding of your own actions is a great start, but some may have difficulty knowing what to demand, so I'll share another little trick I utilize from time to time called reverse role playing.

For those that don't know, role playing in such a context is when you put yourself in someone else's shoes and imagine what it's like to be them for a moment. One of my favorite things to do when I start to feel as if the game is out of reach and hopelessly out of my control is to do the reverse and ask myself if there would be a chance at success if my most admired player was in my position. No matter how hopeless the situation seems, something about envisioning one of the best players in the world taking charge of the very same hopeless situation that I have gotten myself into inspires and motivates me to play better. I think this is because I become one hundred percent unflinchingly convinced that one player can have enough impact on a game to make anything happen.

If instead of listening to all that was just said you are trying to come up with ways in which to break these methods, then you're already on the wrong path. Nothing works unless you believe it, so you have to push aside your ego in situations and honestly recognize that the outcome of the game is up to you. Without mistakes there would be little to improve upon, so the next time someone takes you down in a critical situation don't reach for excuses, look for reasons. It's ok to feed your ego from time to time though, as there is such thing as being overly critical of oneself. When you're feeling such self-induced pressure and another lame scenario passes you by, try to smirk at what happened. Go ahead, laugh just a tiny bit and bask in the realization that little does he know, there's no way you're going to let it happen again. Because unlike him, you never say "random."