You may have been playing a ton of PUG's or a ton of matchmaking lately, or just watched a huge major or Counter Strike event that's happened recently and thought about getting into a team. Better communication and teamwork, planned out strategies, developing a bunch of different skills together and taking other peoples advice and feedback on your playstyle. It's all part of working within a team, but if you've even touched the surface of playing within a team, you will notice that every player has an individual role.

Within this I'm not only going to introduce the rolls, but go over some more details about them, and some tips within working in a team. So if you just play matchmaking and don't really know where you fit in within a team, read on and find out about what kind of team member you are, what you think would be the best role to show off your abilities and help a team, and what you're going to need to be willing to improve on. Without further ado, lets introduce the roles and their descriptions!

The Shot Caller / Strat Caller / In Game Leader

This is going to be your player in the team who knows exactly what they're doing, how to do it, and have probably ran over strategies in their head again and again. Being an in game leader requires you to work tirelessly on improving things such as set out strategies, calling for certain players and being able to control the team mid game, having a good sense of economy and knowing how to handle it perfectly, there's plenty of other things that the IGL does. However, reading that, you should know this is probably one of the hardest roles of all the different ones within a team, as you need to manage a lot of things in your head, including maths and statistics, planning things out quickly within a short time, focusing on what's going wrong and what's working, all within a short period of time.

You'll need to be quick on your feet, fast thinking and positive all around. Remember that if you're working overtime in game and not focusing too much on yourself, as an IGL you will end up leaving out yourself, and making it detrimental to some plays as you could end up missing a lot of shots since your focus is elsewhere within the game. It's not suggested to play as an IGL without a ton of practice, game sense, experience and if you can't multitask, it's worth a shot but it most likely wont end well.

So, what are some tips as an IGL to make the most out of my roll? Just like Counter Strike itself, this is situational, but you can cover a lot of aspects by spending personal time with certain members of your team helping them improve where they need to, and bringing people together for a ton of practice for things such as setups, fast fluid pushes, e.t.c. If you improve on every ones personal aspects, you should end up making everyone more confident, bringing a good vibe to the team and a better attitude for making more impressive plays!

The Rifler

This is your player who runs out there and just frags and frags and frags. Being a rifler, you should have common knowledge gamesense, be able to communicate extremely well with your IGL, spotting out players and informing everyone, and should have good aim and good spraydown abilities. Usually you will take over as a subrole, being either an Entry Fragger or a Playmaker. The Entry Fragger will be flashed out or helped out to the site by the support role (check that out further in the post) and will usually pick a player and try to take out as many players before being shut down.

Quick, efficient, and having effective communication is key as an entry fragger, if anything more so than a playmaker. So what does the playmaker do? The playmaker moves out with the entry fragger, getting a trade kill on anyone who kills the entry fragger or who the entry fragger has damaged, relaying back any information of players around or on the site depending on the situation to the team for any further mid game strategies that can be played out. The con about playing as a rifler is that you have to be a very consistent player, otherwise you will be damaging your team, not just your own plays. An entry fragger is relied on just as much as the IGL. The playmaker needs to clear out the site and make sure he's not baiting the entry fragger. If any of this happens, it can almost always lead to a bad start, leading to a bad morale and another round possibly going to the enemy if you give them the upper hand.

How can you improve as a rifler? Easier said than done, but stay consistent, stay focused, stay calm. That way you can trade or pick as easy as need be and help make the round play out as smoothly as possible. Finally, my personal suggestion from what I've seen at pro level play is that somebody like the playmaker is also able to AWP extremely well if not as efficiently as the main AWPer (check below). The reason for this is so that double AWP setups aren't a complete flop and play out nicely.

The AWPer / Sniper

As an AWPer you can have two different playstyles that will benefit you and your team depending on the situation. The first kind of playstyle is the aggressive playstyle, which a lot of professional players are renowned for having. As an aggressive AWPer, your job is to use the AWP like you would more or less likely like a normal automatic rifle. You must be quick round corners, have amazingly precise and quick aim, be able to take the offensive, maybe even on the CT side too. It's a risky style to play, so it's only recommended if you're ahead or you know how to play this style very well.

The other style is pretty easy to guess and is the polar opposite; the defensive playstyle. Usually more of a CT side playstyle, you hold angles which you know the enemy is going to walk into, and just wait for the enemy to walk into your crosshair, knocking them back. In a team, as an AWPer, your job is to get easy picks or trades to help the team advance forward or keep a push back depending on your teams side.

Lurker

Whenever you get a jump on a team that's rotating or you catch players off by surprise landing that easy frag, it's extremely satisfying isn't it? How about taking that up as your main job in a team? Going really "sneaky beaky like" huh? That's the role of a lurker / flanker in a team. This players job is to get intel on the enemy team and sticking behind them to work out where players are and give a good insight of how congregated certain sites are. You will also be jumping areas that some players wouldn't ever expect to find someone, playing off angles and getting players by surprise. However, don't be mistaken that you should just play the opposite side of the map and call it a "lurk", actually as a lurker you shouldn't really be calling where you're going, you should actually be playing more within the flow of the round, break off from your team, try not to get spotted, then when you catch a player rotating to a site once the bomb is down or some other situation, pop em' down.

The good thing about playing as a lurker is that you don't need to be the best aimer in the world, you just need to be patient and playing this roll will if anything be a giant showoff of your gamesense, knowing when enemies are gonna rotate, where they're going to go, when to jump in case they have more weapons then you, where to be quiet, e.t.c. However, that's also the con of playing as a lurker, you need a ton of gamesense. You need to be able to not get caught and must be able to flank the enemy at the right time. Too fast, they're going to notice you and shut you down before you can do any damage to them. Too slow, they've already cleared off the site of your teammates, and before you know it it's a 1v5 on the site and it's all up to you. In summary, the lurker needs to play the right cards and play them at the right time.

Please don't forget that having a solid strategy as a team is an essential to guaranteeing rounds, however no team has ever had a plan be executed 100% as it was done in practice, and things are usually more adapted to the situation, or might get changed up mid strategy. That's the beauty of Counter Strike, it's situational, the entire game! Make sure that you remember this when something goes wrong, strats WILL have to change mid round. As a final notice, make sure that you follow these roles more in scrims than in PUG's. In a PUG or Valve's own matchmaking, these roles don't really apply too much, as a PUG is more something you see to show independent skills, hence why you have some players who are renowned as "PUG Stars" who can't do as well in a team environment other than to frag. Scrims will bring you into a more team based competitive environment, leading you on to leagues, ladders and tournaments. Don't forget to have fun too! Drilling strats into your teams head is good, but too much leads to the opposite result. People become bored and tired, ending up with a lot more mess ups than needed.

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