"The non-lethal flashbang grenade temporarily blinds anybody within its concussive blast, making it perfect for flushing out closed-in areas. It’s loud explosion also temporarily masks the sound of footsteps" - Official Description

Flashbangs are one of the five different grenades available in CS:GO Classic mode. Anybody with even a few minutes of gameplay in Global Offensive should understand the blinding nature they have. However, it takes hundreds of hours to get a sense of the grenade trajectories, and even more practice to time your flashes to catch the opponent off-guard with that perfect popflash.

In this article, I’m going to teach you how to flash like a professional. I’m going to tell you what you’re doing wrong, what you’re doing right, and what you’re not doing at all. Never again will you slam your keyboard in frustration, asking yourself ‘how is he not flashed??’, and force-buying next round out of anger.

First thing’s first - forget everything you thought you knew about when to use flashbangs. Flashes are a situational, vital, and valuable resource to any Terrorist or Counter-Terrorist team. Personally, I’d rank them as the second most valuable grenade overall, right after the crucial smoke. The problem is that people assume that flashbangs are to be used for the individual, for whoever bought them. This is completely wrong. Flashes are a piece of utility that, before thrown, should always have the team in mind. When you’re about to release your mouse button, always think, ‘Will my teammates care if I throw this?’. If the answer is ‘No’, then you should not be throwing it.

At high levels of Counter-Strike play, 95% of flashes thrown will not result in a direct kill. At these levels, flashes are less about gunfights, and more about map control. Pushing your opponent back, getting him out of his posted position so you can quickly move onto the next chunk of land, whether that’s a bombsite, mid, or any other area you want to capture before doing a full execute.

Take, for example, banana on de_inferno. As a Terrorist side, control of banana is crucial and generally a deciding factor on the winner of the round. Most CT sides tend to give up the actual banana part by default, smoking off car instead (circled green). Some teams, like the old Fnatic under Markus "pronax" Wallsten's leadership or the current EnVyUs lineup when Vincent "Happy" Schopenhauer is in charge, like to smoke off banana from the top of T Ramp (circled red). In a scenario where car is smoked off, eventually it smoke will clear. CTs (if they know what they are doing) will then wait until some noise is made before throwing another smoke down. At this exact moment, before the T-side peeks, a CT can be positioned at the sandbags (yellow) or watching from the corner (blue). As a team, you should organise one person to throw a molotov at sandbags, and another to throw a flashbang around the corner.

This is the perfect use of a flashbang. Once it pops and your team rounds the corner, a CT should have fallen back by then and probably thrown a smoke (pink) as they did so. For added perfection, someone other than the thrower of the flash should peek just as it pops, and should peek wide. Keep in mind, the chances that you actually blinded the CT are probably not something you should bet on. In most scenarios, the CT will have looked away, told his team that there is noise at banana, and ran back. Let’s call a scenario like this scenario 1. This scenario is abundant among many maps and many points of interest. Drop on de_cbble, catwalk/short on de_dust2 and water on de_overpass are a few areas where it is common, but to get good with flashbangs you need to be malleable. Apply the principles seen in the banana scenario to everywhere and see what works. There can be no rigid guide for every possibility of scenario 1 due to the flexible nature of the CS:GO meta and the impossibility to predict how your opponents will play with 100% reliability.

You’re right there are more scenarios than just this one. The first scenario was the use of a flashbang in relation to map control, a key to winning round in CS:GO. Another key to winning rounds is information, usually shortened to ‘info’. As a CT, knowing if there are 5 men with Kalashnikovs running toward you or not is extremely important. Based on info, smart rotations can be made to each bombsite in preparation for the Terrorists' execution.

A map like de_cache is a great example, because of how little info CTs can garner during a round, compared to say de_overpass, which, due to the nature of its layout and meta, can give CTs a lot of info about where the Ts are during a round. On de_cache there is little to contest before the Terrorists execute other than mid (and occassionally sunroom near B, which FaZe's Ricardo "fox" Pacheco likes to push). Information, therefore, is worth its weight in gold. A decoy grenade should be analyzed if you see it as a CT on de_cache.

This is where flashes come in. In a standard setup, 2 people should be playing A at the start of the round. If both of you have thrown your smokes at A main, and the rest of your team hasn’t called anything major yet, now is an optimal time to use a flash. Have one person throw a popflash for A main (shown on the left), and the other should do a little peek right when it pops. Just a little peek. In, a shot or two, and out again. If nobody is seen, there’s a good chance the Ts are headed to the B site. If 5 angry Terrorists are standing there, holding smoke grenades and ready to execute, there’s a good chance the Ts are about to mangle you. If you’re the person peeking, and you see more than 1 Terrorist, you should never, ever commit to the battle. You need to just get away and relay the info as quickly as possible because you will get traded in a heartbeat if you stick around and by then, the Terrorist have planted the bomb, boosted at quad, gone hunting for your teammates and started a family. This risky, surprising tactic using the almighty flash is scenario 2, and pro teams do it all the time. Luminosity and Na’Vi will be seen doing it the most, since their playstyles are based around predicting an opponent's plan and shutting it down before they even have time to think of it.

Scenario 3 is probably the one most often scene in matchmaking or PUGs. This is simply any flash thrown before executing a site on T-side. You shouldn’t need an example, but throwing a flash out the windows in apartments (aps) on B-site de_mirage is a prime one. These flashes can be completely improvised and thought of in the moment, or a practiced maneuver done over-and-over on a private server until perfection is achieved. Scenario 1 and 3 can often be one and the same. If we go back to our example on de_inferno, throwing a flash over the rooftop into the fountain-centric B-site will often push back an awper at spools (if you didn’t smoke it off, which you should!), or our de_mirage example, a flash thrown out either window can push back the awper in kitchen, or a rifler playing GeT_RiGhT (the area under the arch on short).

Let me reiterate what I said at the start of the article, the odds of you running into a site and finding a blind CT wandering out in the open like some sort of zombie are slim to nil. All these scenario 3 flashes are going to do is make sure the CTs aren’t peeking as you run onto the site. On de_cbble, the B-site has lots of awkward and strange angles the CTs can peek from. Too many, in fact, to molotov or deal with in an aim battle on platform. Throwing flashes will make sure you can get up close and personal, rendering whatever clever positioning they had prepared as useless. These flashes can even be a Jake "Stewie2k" Yip type situation, where you flash yourself through some smoke before running out. This type of gameplay is not advised, unless you really want to surprise your opponent and put them on maximum tilt.

Scenario 4 is relatively easy to understand. These are flashes you throw as a CT to delay an incoming stampede of Terrorists because you don’t have any other grenades left. You shouldn’t need any help to know when to throw them if you’re higher than Gold Nova. All you have to do is throw the flash at where you think the Terrorists are. Remember, you need to still think about if the flash is useful or not. If you have 3 players on the site ready and waiting for those pesky terrorists to come, save the flashbang for a possible clutch situation. However, if you’re playing a site alone and you need just a few seconds for your teammate to rotate over, throwing this flash can be the difference between a sick site hold or a bomb plant with eventual eruption.

The final scenario, number 5, I will not elaborate on. These are the flashes you use in 1vX situations to get an advantage over your opponent in a gun battle. Learning how to throw good popflashes that you thought of in your head half-a-second ago comes with experience and gameplay.

As someone reading this far into the article, I assume that you want to actually improve at the game. A great way to get a sense for when to throw a perfect flash, as described earlier, is to just think before you throw anything. We all go through a stage when we first start playing when we throw smokes and HE's for no reason, just to feel good about throwing them. Weirdly, when you outgrow this habit for other grenades, people seem to never outgrow it for flashbangs, and continue to throw useless projectiles around the map likes it's a game of dodgeball.

To really improve your flashbang game, all you need to do is this: tell your teammates when you throw a flash. Whenever. Every single flash you throw (maybe not for scenario 5), tell your team in voice chat, ‘‘I’m flashing X’’. This one simple trick will force you to think about a flash before you throw it. It will make you really consider the value of your flash. Are you throwing away $200, or are you making an investment of $200 into info, map control or execution. After about 2 weeks of doing this, you’ll not only have lightning fast game sense when it comes to flashbangs, but you’ll also be much better at communicating and decision making under pressure.

Other than that, booting up a private game, turning on ‘sv_grenade_trajectory 1’ and finding some sick flashbangs for all your favourite positions in the map pool is also something you can do. You can always check YouTube for some videos if you’re lazy and don’t want to spend hours experimenting. All-in-all, however, these flashes are limited to scenarios 2 and sometimes 3. Even then, you can eyeball them most of the time. If you watch a pro demo, set flashes are rarely used, with people like Robin ''flusha'' Rönnquist and Freddy "KRiMZ" Johansson from Fnatic favouring to implement flashes that have never been seen before in order to always keep their opponent on edge.

Hopefully in this tutorial I’ve help you think more about our $200 friends that many people forego putting thought into. My goal was to limit the amount of examples I give in order to help you develop the flashbang sense of a god. I just hope I won’t have to play against anyone who reads this article and puts it into practice.

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