Mind Games: A Guide to Outsmarting Your Opponents
The ABCs of out-thinking your opponents.
Outright outsmarting your opponents is hands down the most satisfying feeling you can get in CS:GO. Seeing or hearing your opponents grenade stack the position they think you are in when you are not is great. For one, you make them waste their grenades as well as getting under their skin if they are already on tilt or leaning towards that mental state.
First things first is that you have to understand that each player has a different mentality, each player has had a good or bad day and, once they sit down to play some CS:GO, their mentality in combination with the how their day went will affect their, as well as your, play style. Some days, the exact same player will keep calm and not push mindlessly through smokes and on other days he will challenge your AWPer over and over, thinking he can beat them. Now that we have laid out the basic idea that some people will go on tilt while others will not we can go into the actual strategy of out-thinking your opponent.
1. Analyse Your Opponents' Play Style
This is your stepping stone to out-thinking your opponent. Notice patterns in their play. Do they always play passive? Do they always play passive on one of the sites? Do they over-rotate? Do they waste grenades? Do they keep track of your team's economy and try to counter it? You should keep these questions in mind when playing. This will both help you determine how you can counter their strategies and make your life easier as you will have with some certainty an idea what they will be doing next.
As an example we can take a map like de_inferno and a few players (CT's) that over-rotate. For instance, if you have noticed that some players over-rotate as well as they play aggressive on banana, you can play a round where you run into banana with at least three players making it seem like it is a rush towards B. This will trigger the players that over-rotate to, well, rotate leaving A site either completely defenseless or with few players defending it. You can set-up a person on second mid or underpass to cover your team's back while they fake rush B. Alternatively, if your team does actually rush towards B and you sit in underpass and either let the players pass, sneak up on them and knife them (which is a very effective way to trigger a player) or shoot them from behind. Either is a good way to spark a reaction. The goal of a rush is to surprise and overwhelm your opponents which is why having a lurker and keeping a player behind is generally effective against players and/or teams that react to rushes hectically as they normally try get to the other site as quickly as possible, resulting in poor checks of some corners giving you an advantage over them.
2. Figure Out Their Weakness
Once you have figured out their play style and possibly noticed patterns, you need to figure out what weaknesses your opponents have. Do they hold bad angles? Are their reaction times slower than yours? Are the players weaker on one site than the other? Are they overthinking everything? This will allow you and the team to exploit and use their weakness to your advantage. In many cases, you applying pressure on the weak link in the opponent's team can cause that link to crack. Once that player starts cracking he starts overreacting and making irrational decisions. This is now what you should exploit. Once the player starts going on tilt, the emotionality can and normally does spread across the rest of the team lowering their performance overall.
3. Maintaining the Pressure
The crucial bit is maintaining the pressure. When you notice that the other team is slowly going into tilt, you naturally feel better and start abusing the circumstance. Do not get carried away, though. In this state a few mistakes in a row can shift the momentum fully into the others favour and in many cases, unless you play for a team and have specifically trained to calm down, you will not recover from this momentum change. Keep in mind it is alright to lose one round, it does not allow the opponents to recover. The opponents start recovering when they start stringing rounds together and consistently outplaying you.
So what can you do to maintain the pressure? Here is a list of a few things you can do to maintain the pressure as well as keep yourself falling into tilt:
- Against AWPers bait shots and shoulder peek. Do not let AWPers get kills onto you - many AWPers play on momentum and if they get comfortable and get their shots off, they can single handedly turn the tides against your team.
- Play safe on anti-ecos. A on-tilt team commits to five man rushes often and site stack strategies. For example, on Inferno, a two man rush down banana making it seem like nobody is on B and then actually having the rest of the team hide on B site with cross-fires and tight angles set up. You have the range advantage versus pistols, use it.
- Play positions your opponents would not expect. Also having a teammate bait the opponents' attention away from your position allowing you to stay undetected is a magnificent way to get a bunch of free kills, although it is risky.
- Pre-fire. Pre-fire commonly used angles/corners, unless you try to purposefully sneak. No better way to tilt your opponents than to pre-fire and make them check your profile to see how many hours you have on the game/if you have any VAC-bans.
- Do not be rude and overconfident and type silly things into all chat to taunt your opponents. In many cases, it comes back and bites you hard.
- Stay a step ahead of your opponents. Listen, count, relax. It cannot be overstated that there is no need to panic. Listen to your surroundings and count footsteps and grenades to figure out the locations of your opponents. Knowing how many grenades your opponents have used can let you adjust your grenade usage and positioning to counter theirs. On the topic of counting, if you play with an AWP and you are holding an angle and an opponent smokes you off, do not fire off a shot straight away. Delay it, count in your head to two or three and then shoot. If you hit the shot that has the same effect as pre-firing. Players do not normally insta-peek corners when a smoke is deployed.
- Do not force battles that you cannot win. Do not keep challenging angles you consistently lose, that gets you on tilt. The game has grenades, use them wisely. Smoke of key crossovers, pop-flash yourself into locations, molotov common sitting spots and do not waste grenades in the beginning. You might be surprised how useful a HE might be when entering a site.
- Last, but definitely not least. Do not force like a lunatic. Force buying every round is dumb and it lets your opponents build up and economy while keeping your buys weak and grenade light. Keep the team's economy balanced and if you know that next round you will not be able to buy regardless of the outcome of the round, then force. Otherwise one saved round and those extra grenades might be the winning factor in your next round.
If there is something you should remember, it is that people have different days and sometimes you will succeed tilting a player or a team and sometimes you will not. If you do succeed then do not get carried away, keep your self level-headed, as it can be a one-way ticket to losing a game if the opponents manage to turn it around.
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