“He pre-fired me! He’s cheating!!” - what a normal thing to hear during a CS:GO match. I can bet that every single one of us has said something along those lines at least one time during our CS:GO career. But what if the other player is simply good and has its pre-fire angles studied? What if he has the best resources installed to practice those hard angles in order to hit the opponent’s head every single time like XANTARES?

Well, if you want to know about these resources and you’re up to the challenge of practicing those angles, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, you’ll be able to understand the secrets of pre-firing and, above all, how you can practice it to a point where it becomes natural to you to do it on different parts of each map.

First of all, what exactly is pre-firing? Some players think that pre-firing is somehow related to cheating, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Pre-firing is simply the act of firing to a spot as soon as you cross the corner or even before. Let’s say you’re about to cross a spot where there’s a good chance that an opponent is there holding the angle - by firing before or as soon as you cross that corner, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to kill him before even giving him the chance to fire back.

When you have your pre-fires on point, you know exactly where your opponent’s head will be so that the first bullet will land and make that delicious “dink” sound. Given that there are so many spots on each map and sometimes they’re at different heights than you are, practice is key. If you do it enough, it will eventually become muscle memory and natural to you - and you’ll start getting called out for cheats, which, being totally honest, feels really good from time to time.

There isn’t a formula for perfect pre-fire every time, it’s all down to practice and how many hours you’re willing to put into it. You’ll learn and practice more by just playing the game, naturally, but there are some resources that you can use to up the speed at which you improve at it, namely some community-made maps on the workshop that are truly works of art.

Let’s take a look at some of my favorites and what makes them good maps:

Yprac Maps

The single best resource you can use - this collection of maps is just incredible. Made by a very dedicated user, there’s a single one for every competitive map in the pool (except Ancient for now) and there are countless options on each one - one of them being pre-firing training.

When inside the map, just select “Prefire” and you’ll be guided into a part of the map where every corner will be guarded by a bot, allowing you to practice those angles as much as you want, even the ones that are not as common or hard to tackle. You even have different “routes” available, with the goal being to do them as quickly as possible.

You can find all the links below for every single map available:

Inferno

Dust2

Mirage

Overpass

Vertigo

Train

Nuke

And even Cache

CS:GO HUB Skills Training Map

This is a relatively new one made by CS:GO Hub and ESL - names like those can only mean good quality. Just like the other ones I’ve shown you, this one also has a variety of different modes, with one of them being pre-fires.

The map works in a similar way to the last one, but it also has online leaderboards that allow you to compete with players from all around the world if that’s something you might be interested in.

This is definitely one I strongly recommend!

There are a few other maps available in the Workshop to practice pre-firing, but being totally honest, they’re not even close to these two in terms of quality - and I believe more in quality rather than quantity. You’ll have more than you need with just these two.

Note: To use these maps you need to visit its Steam Workshop page while being logged in to your account and click “Subscribe”. The map will be automatically downloaded into your Steam folder.

I can’t reiterate this enough - you’ll only get better if you put in the time. Work beats talent, that’s something I truly believe in. Make sure you understand how the maps work and repeat the pre-fires as much as you want or feel that you need. Also, you need to understand that playing on these servers specifically made to practice is totally different from playing a match and trying to apply these new strategies. During a match, you need to be aware of everything happening around you, which means that doing stuff like pre-firing needs to come to you pretty much naturally and instinctively.

I didn’t write that to discourage you to practice, not at all, but just to make sure you know that practicing and using what you practiced during “real-match scenarios” are totally different things - opponents can be almost anywhere and everywhere, so combining these peeks with good teamwork and even better-placed utility can be the key to victory.

Thank you for reading the article! Hopefully, it will help you improve your pre-fires, as long as you have the will to put in the time needed to improve. You can reach out to me for feedback or suggestions via Twitter.

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