MANAGING THE PEOPLE

Different people react to different things. Learning who responds to what is crucial to becoming a respected IGL. Some players will shut down if they're criticized too harshly. Some will need a drill sergeant to make information stick. Recognizing what you have is the first step needed before anything else can happen. All calls must consider the personnel.

DEVELOPING STRATEGIES

Okay, so you have your people. You have your ideas. Now it's time to see what you can do. Put some music on, get into your own personal server, and get to work! First thing you'll need to do is know the commands. Copy and paste this into the console without quotations: "mp_freezetime 0; mp_roundtime_defuse 60; mp_restartgame 1; sv_cheats 1; sv_showimpacts 1; sv_grenade_trajectory 1; god". Freezetime eliminates the waiting, Roundtime gives you an hour before the round restarts, and the rest give you information. Cheats allows the rest of the commands to work. Impacts helps you find better spams, grenade trajectory shows you where your smoke hit/missed and what you can adjust. And god mode is there to keep you from dying from fall damage or molotovs that you check on.

Now that the server is set, you can go to the first step. I'm going to use Dust 2 as an example. Look at the map below. Notice the layout. 2 ways to hit B, 2 ways to hit A. Nothing can get from one side of the map to the other without giving the other team a chance to have some information from the move. This screams 2-2 split with a lurk. Keeping someone back to cut off rotates is absolutely devastating on a map like this. Even if you're unsuccessful in fragging, you waste their time and let the bomb tick down even more than it already was.

Understand 3 things when creating strategies: 1. You must look at your plans from an opponents' POV. Find holes in your own game and see what you could do to fix them. Ask yourself what they so, what they would call, and how they should react. 2. The best strats are simple strats. Overloading your players with obligations and objectives in a given play creates more moving parts. More moving parts create more room for a strategy to collapse. I'm not saying you should PUG rush, but don't think you can come up with a super complex strat to execute. One random push will ruin it. 3. Cover your bases. Is everything watched? Does everyone have a specific role? Are you overloading someone and letting another guy go too light? If one person is throwing all your grenades, you have a bad strat. If one guy is crucial, the strategy falls apart very easily in the chaos of an actual game.

Alright, so we'll start on T side. Understand that information (how much you give/receive) is the most crucial point of any map. You have to avoid and exploit predictability. Starting every round the same way as a T side (2 tuns, 1 mid calling the count, 2 A side) gives you some help in that regard. Starting every round the same way limits the useful information CTs gain at the beginning of a round. If they call that they hear someone in B-Tuns every round, then it loses its worth. "I hear people tuns" so what? That call losing its worth opens up more possibilities. The Mid Guy is the info guy in terms of what the CTs are doing. Are they playing a 2-1-2? or a 3-1-1? Are they pushing lower? This is absolutely crucial info to have. I'll get into that later. The A guys are more for counting long grenades and setting up to react.

You can get a general sense of how CTs play just by how they use their nades and how many people they put on certain spots. From this 2-1-2 T side set up, you can design any take you want to. Until the take happens, the CTs get the same info they always do. This helps slow down rotates and force communication errors. If I had to guess, 60 to 70% of rounds don't even get to the execute. Putting yourself in an initially identical set up

On CT side, you have a few more things to do with pre-round. CT side calling is much more about money management and studying your own spawn. On D2, if your CT spawn point is closer to mid, don't try to get into pit. You don't have the spawn for it and you'll die anytime they try to come long. The little things win CT rounds. Another thing to keep in mind - If you decide that the 2-1-2 is the way to go, play the 2 A players together, regardless of the spot you choose to watch. If you want long control, play both players by long. If you want cat control, double up cat. Splitting these two players up creates easy isolation for the other team. Two players that have a crossfire set up are much harder to deal with than one guy. If you manage to get someone in pit, then the other guy can absolutely play by the car and still have a solid crossfire setup. But that's something for another day.

PRESENTING STRATEGIES TO THE TEAM

You have your gameplan decided. It's time to share it with the rest of the team. Best advice I can give you is to write down each role beforehand. Make sure you have a deliberate thing to say to each person about what they're expected to do in a certain strategy. This allows you to save time and keep people's attention. If you consistently backtrack and forget to tell someone something, then you lose their attention. They'll forget their responsibility and you'll be the one to blame.

PRACTICE

This is where most mistakes are made on a team level. Practices are not meant to be won. If you win a scrim, neat. But who cares? You need to practice your own game, and see where you have weaknesses. If you can't hold a site, if you can't execute because X, Y, and Z happened. This is where you find out what you can before it's time to put up or shut up. I'll say it again, WINNING A SCRIM MEANS NOTHING, AND IT DOES NOT INDICATE SKILL. Proper team practice is simple. You go over the gameplan, execute some dry runs to make sure everyone knows their role, then scrim against someone else to see if your theories work in reality. The end result of a scrim does not matter even a little bit. Scrims are meant to fix mistakes. Period. At the end of the day nothing that transpires in a scrim will matter unless it translates into match time improvements.

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