After reading countless guides telling you how to get that perfect smoke grenade line-up, you set up together with your team to throw the wall of smoke grenades. Flashes are thrown, the ‘go’-signal is given. You run onto the site, duck behind the first wall you find, and… nothing. You panic, go full choke, and your teammates are dropping like flies as they enter the site behind you. Your knees are weak, arms are heavy, and, before you know it, there’s blood all over the wall behind you already.

Finding your way onto a site can be an incredibly daunting task, as you are putting yourself right in the middle of the action, acting as the first line of defense for your teammates. In this guide, we explore all the traits you must possess to avoid being reduced to mere cannon fodder at the start of every round.

Accuracy

While you might have heard this a thousand times by this point, there is no denying it, when you are the soldier on the frontline tearing away at the fabric of your enemy’s defense, you must be able to hit your shots. As an entry-fragger, you enter all fights at a disadvantage, as your opponents will be able to pre-emptively hold the angle from which you will be coming. At the same time, timing is on your side and can be used to surprise a careless enemy. All it comes down to then is to be able to eliminate your target before he gets the chance to react to your presence.

These shots are all about killing your enemies as fast as possible, which will generally translate to being able to consistently hit your one-taps. A good way of training your head-popping skills is by massacring a hundred bots with one-taps first on a Workshop map of your choice. Personally, I recommend the CSGOHUB.COM Skills Training Map. Before getting started on those one-taps though, I would recommend starting with training your sprays and bursts. Doing it the other way around may muddy the cleanliness of your headshots.

To start, go to the Workshop map and start bursting and spraying your way to about one hundred kills for each method, netting you a total of two hundred kills on the counter. Once you’re done, join an FFA DM server of your choice and get one hundred kills. Once you’re done, go back to the workshop map and this time, get a hundred kills exclusively by one tapping. Practice different skills, including flicks towards singular enemies, rhythmic tapping, and flicking between enemies. After getting another one hundred kills, join an FFA DM server of your choice that has the ‘headshot only’ mode enabled. Once again, practice your aim against real-life opponents for another one hundred eliminations.

Confidence Is Key

The mental aspect in these engagements cannot be underestimated and is rather closely linked to how good your aim will be. If you are scared to throw yourself into the fight and go into an engagement thinking your enemy is going to win, there is a high chance this prophecy will fulfill itself.

Entry-fraggers must possess a certain level of cold-bloodedness, selflessness, and confidence. They should care more about opening up a round for their team than surviving the round and boosting their statistics. When the entry fragger starts blasting, every bullet that leaves that barrel must be fired with absolute confidence that it’s going to find its target. In any given engagement, the entry fragger does not even consider the possibility he might miss his shots, it’s all or nothing in every fight. Even when that prediction inevitably fails at one point, this cannot emotionally weigh down the entry fragger. He just waits until the next round, and then tries again with the same level of confidence.

How to Take a Site

Everything said up to this point has been quite abstract, so let’s get into some concrete things you should do as an entry-fragger. As the first person on the site, you will be the one that enters it with little to no information at hand. All actions you take must take this fact into account, and it will be up to you to gain the information for your teammates while trying to maximize your damage. Every situation you face will be unexpected and it's only be training your game sense and playing smart that you might live to tell the tale.

Check Angles

Let’s take the A-site of Overpass as an example. Assume for a moment that the Bank and Dumpster positions are smoked off and you have pushed up all the way into Toilets, with one or two people pushing the Long position. There are several common positions to check as you enter the A-site on Overpass. From left to right: left corner of Long, Sign, Default Left, Van, left corner of Toilets, Default Right, Truck, on top of the Truck, and the right corner next to the Truck. All of these are possible hiding spots for your enemies, and you will have to clear them all to secure the site. Usually, enemies will try to spot you before you enter the site, falling back or hiding once they spot you, awaiting reinforcements. This also means that they will be visible to you while they’re (jump)spotting. By determining the position of one enemy you can try and predict the position of the other defender, based on your game sense. For example, if you spot someone jumping behind Default, there’s a high chance the other defender will be in the left corner on Long or near the Truck area.

Use Utility

Secondly, while the previously thrown utility will prevent rotations and passive players, you can use the utility you’ve kept to temporarily obstruct certain angles while you clear other ones. For example, if you throw a smoke to the left of the Default Box, next to the Sign, you can put a well between you and any player from that side while you focus on clearing the Default and Truck positions. You can even throw a flashbang in the opposite direction to distract your opponents, just be careful not to flash yourself or your teammates. Moreover, if you know an enemy is hiding in a position with only one way out, such as the right corner on Truck, you can throw an incendiary in there to force him out of the position or lob a grenade in there to deal some free early damage.

It's Okay to Die

Even if you perfect all of the things mentioned in this guide, inevitably, you will die sometimes, and that’s okay. Of course, making it out of any engagement alive is the preferred outcome, but dying does not necessarily mean you failed in your role. CS:GO can be a strategic game where pawns are sacrificed to get closer to the end goal. As an entry-fragger, there is a good chance you will end up as one of those sacrificial lambs.

Whether your death can be capitalized on will depend on a couple of things. First of all, did you have at least some impact on the round? Worst case scenario is that you die without having inflicted a single point of damage, all utility still hanging from your belt, and no information to help your teammates.

Secondly, did you push all by yourself or is there a teammate to trade? This is extremely important: suffering one death doesn’t really matter as long as your team can get a kill in return, as it opens up the site and forces the remaining player to fall back or face four enemies at the same time. However, if you die while pushing onto a site all by yourself you will just have given your opponents a free kill with nothing to show for it.

Go Together

A useful concept that can massively increase the chances of refrags is something called the ‘buddy buddy’-system. Basically, you assign one of your teammates as a co-entry fragger or ‘buddy’ to your main entry-fragger. These two buddies should always remain together on the map, going wherever the other one goes. This also means that these two should focus heavily on communication and synergy. By sticking together at all times, you will always be ready to refrag, to flash in for your teammate, and, generally, to react to any other unexpected event. Moreover, the goal of focusing on this seemingly paternalistic playstyle is to instill in yourself a specific type of game sense. By actively applying this concept, you will subconsciously learn to read the events of a game better, and, consequently, your takes will be better too.

Demo Review

If you apply the advice given in this guide, you will very quickly notice an improvement in your site takes. However, it is probably a little overwhelming to try and put all of this into practice at the same time. In fact, by trying to do so you risk spending a lot of time and effort improving on skills that are not exactly in urgent need of honing compared to other gameplay aspects that might be holding you back more.

One of the best ways to see what is going wrong is by reviewing your demos. While reviewing the demo, really focus on what happens up until you take the site or die. Pay particular attention to the events happening during the five seconds leading up to your death. Once you died, pause the demo and consider for a second what went wrong. Maybe you got caught with your knife out by a surprise push. Maybe you pushed too early when your teammates are still a long way from your position. Or, another possibility is that you ran onto the site without checking important angles.

These are just a few examples of the many different things that you might be doing wrong. Whatever it is, the important thing is that you pay good attention to what exactly it is you did which resulted in your death and see if there are any patterns in the mistakes you make. Once you have determined your weak areas, direct your attention in-game accordingly. Try to focus on improving this specific area during your site takes.

Two weeks later, you can review your demos again, doing the same thing you did the first time. Verify whether you have improved on your weak areas and see whether you should keep practicing on this gameplay aspect or whether your attention is better focused elsewhere. If you want to read more about improving your demo reviews, you can read this guide I wrote earlier this year that goes into the finer details of demo reviewing!

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