How to Get Noticed by a Professional Team: Tips from hallzerk
Learn some tips on how to improve your odds of succeeding in Counter-Strike and get noticed by a professional organization
Many players are into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to take a break from the daily routines, but there are countless others that are truly dedicated to the game and have the hidden wish to become a successful professional player. Naturally, this is something that only very few can achieve, but that can’t stop you from trying.
Together with Håkon "hallzerk" Fjærli, a professional player from DignitasVIE, I’ve written this article to give you some guidelines and tips on how you can improve your chances of getting noticed by those organizations that could allow you to have your dream job.
Let’s start with a very basic question:
How can you get noticed by a professional team?
Play well. This is it. This is the core answer. Learn to play, grind, improve your game knowledge and become better every day. You need to be really, really good to be able to play side-to-side with other professional players, and the only way to become that player is to put in the hours.
After that, you’ll need to start playing competitively, and I don’t mean playing Matchmaking or FACEIT matches, you need to get into qualifiers and tournaments. That’s the only way you’ll be able to reach tournaments that some people might be watching and maybe start wondering who you are.
You have to get to a stage where you can play games listed on HLTV. If you play well in these official matches, I'm sure some teams will start noticing you like "hmm, who's this guy?"
As hallzerk said, aiming to have your matches listed on HLTV is a good point to start. And, if you’re into the competitive scene, you know that’s a really hard start. But that’s the only way the big organizations will get to know you. Sure, you can start playing in your local scene and that one probably won’t have teams reaching the HLTV page consistently, and that’s a very good place to start - you’ll just need to grind your heart out so that better teams start noticing you and inviting you to play with them.
You just have to believe and look at yourself, try to understand what mistakes you're making, and stop blaming other people for losses. Overall, it's about you getting better and just keep grinding, don't stop it - that's the hard part, always having the motivation to get better, to practice, and to keep going.
“Always have the motivation to get better” - I can’t stress how hard this is. Having motivation when things are going great is easy! Everyone can stay happy while winning. But you’ll have moments when things just aren’t going your way, you’re losing matches, your team has its morale down… it’s up to you to keep grinding if you really want it.
Which is the better way to go - solo, via FACEIT and FPL, or with a team?
This is a question that many players have when starting their journey and I can say that both work nowadays. In the past, the only way for players to get noticed was through a team (or several), but in the past few years, there has been a surge in new players coming out of FACEIT through their FPL ladder, where only the best players manage to qualify for.
You have to become a really good player for people to start noticing you, you're not going to get noticed if you don't outperform yourself. Generally, most players get a team, stay with it for a long time and they'll eventually get noticed if they're good enough, if they have potential. If you trust your team and stay together for a while, you can grind and become better together. The thing is, you're going to get much better at CS:GO by playing with a team and getting used to the way the game works when playing together with people you trust.
hallzerk brings a very good point to the table - you’ll only become a really good team player if you play with a team. Sure, you can play FACEIT with a premade, but that’s somewhat different from a team. Actually, scratch that, it’s very different from a team. You can play FACEIT and eventually get the opportunity to play with good teams, but what good will that bring you if you’ll eventually get kicked due to not knowing some teamplay basics?
Naturally, there have been exceptions, and anyone can be the next one:
I don't think there are many players who become professionals through FPL. Sure, you have ropz, who's one of the best players in the world, but let's be honest - you are not going to find many "ropz" in FPL.
Robin "ropz" Kool is indeed the best example - he was one of the first “unknown” players that managed to qualify for FPL and after a few years, he’s widely considered to be one of the best players in the world, having won several international tournaments and titles, including a 7th place in the best players in the world ranking made by HLTV.
Social Media CAN be important
Social media nowadays have a really strong presence in esports, mainly for being the best way to reach the general public that watches esports and CS:GO. Although having a good presence and following on social media won’t make you a better player, it can make you become more desirable for an organization. More followers mean more reach to their brand and sponsors and an organization is ultimately a business.
As long as you play well, people will start noticing that you are a good player. You're not better if you have a good number of followers on social media, at least from a player perspective. It’s probably a bit different if we look at it through an organization’s perspective, as more followers can be good in their eyes.
The tip I can give you is to look at social media as being part of your daily grind. Interact with your followers, start streaming or making videos to YouTube, all of that helps you improve your reach in the long run.
In the end, it’s all about putting the hours and grinding hard enough until you get somewhere where people can notice you - either that is local tournaments, HLTV matches, or even FPL, what matters is that you’re getting the people’s eyes onto you.
Thank you for reading this article. You can reach out to me for feedback or suggestions via Twitter.
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