The economy is one of the hardest things to fully understand in CS:GO - it’s what makes it differ from other similar competitive games and it’s one of the aspects that makes learning the game so addictive. CS:GO is a rather easy game to play, watch and enjoy, but the economic aspect makes it harder than it looks at first sight.

As a player that’s looking to improve at the game, managing and understanding the economy should be one of your first priorities - and it’s exactly that that I’m aiming to help you with this article. Here, you’ll be able to learn how to read your opponent's economy and what decisions you should make when knowing what they’re about to bring into the next round.

First of all, understand this - knowing how to read the economy of your opponents it’s all about knowing what they’ve done during a round (if they planted or not, if they died after the time while playing the T-side, etc) and the easiest way to make this more automatic in your head is just going straight to basics - use a pen and paper while playing.

As you may know, CS:GO has a mechanic called Loss Bonus, which, in a way, rewards players for losing. Essentially, the more you lose, the more money you’ll receive in the next round. In the past, it was a mechanic that punished the players way more than it does now, especially if you were losing a few rounds in a row, managed to win one, and then lose the next one - you would be back to square one. Nowadays, you only lose a bit of progress. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s start from the beginning.

When you lose a round that’s not the pistol round, you get a bonus of $1400. For every round you lose in a row you win $500 more, up to a maximum of $3400. If you lose the pistol, you get an added bonus of $500, giving you $1900. It’s like this:

- Losing Pistol Round: $1900 (+ $800 if you plant the Bomb as T)

- Losing 1 Round: $1400 (+ $800 if you plant the Bomb as T)

- Losing 2 Rounds: $1900 (+ $800 if you plant the Bomb as T)

- Losing 3 Rounds: $2400 (+ $800 if you plant the Bomb as T)

- Losing 4 Rounds: $2900 (+ $800 if you plant the Bomb as T)

- Losing 5 Rounds: $3400 (+ $800 if you plant the Bomb as T)

- Losing 5+n Rounds: $3400 (+ $800 if you plant the Bomb as T)

They might seem like a lot of numbers, but they’re really easy in fact. Also, if you’re playing as a Terrorist, are able to plant the bomb and lose it, you’ll get an added $800 per player and an extra $300 for the planter. Remember that the numbers above are all rounds lost in a row.

What happens if you finally win a round and then lose the next one? You’ll just go down “one step”. Eg.: you’ve lost 3 rounds and received $2400. The next round you lose after winning one will get you back to $1900.

Now, winning rounds also give bonus money and the amount is relative to the way the round was won. Let’s make it really simple:

As a Terrorist

Winning by Team Elimination: $3250

Winning by Bomb Detonation: $3500

As a Counter-Terrorist

Winning by Team Elimination: $3250

Winning by Bomb Defusal: $3500

Winning by Time: $3250

I’ll just throw something more into the mix - if you’re playing as a CT, you may want to hunt down the last few Ts alive that may be saving. If they die after the time is up, during those seconds where the game hasn’t loaded the next round, they will get no money at all, $0! This only applies to Terrorists, as CTs always get the bonus.

With the economic part of this article and the game out of the way, now I’ll give you a few tips on how to read the economy of your opponents. Knowing the basics of the game economy already gets you enough knowledge to be able to read it, but I can give you a few more pointers.

As I said above, make sure to use pen and paper in the beginning. It helps a ton! After you’re more comfortable, you can just refer to the scoreboard (TAB) to know how many rounds they’ve lost in a row. Also, take note of how many players survived - this is important because these are players that won’t need to buy in the next round and might have enough money to drop weapons to the teammates that died (I told you that the CS:GO economy can go really deep). All this information is available on the scoreboard, you can hover the mouse over the round history to know how many players survived.

All of this is where the pen and paper help - you can take note of the current loss bonus level they’re in and how many weapons they saved. Also, knowing if they were able to save an AWP can be really good information - if they’re on a low bonus, they wouldn’t have had money to buy an AWP, but now you know they saved one. It might seem awkward using pen and paper to play the game, but in the end, what matters is the win. Also, Joshua "steel" Nissan, a former professional CS:GO player, used to have post-its on its monitor, even during LANs. They weren’t there because of the economy, but instead for anti-strating their opponents, but you get it... it’s just so you know it’s not that weird.

Make sure you’re able to understand what guns they’re using, especially if it’s some weird buys like some players playing with rifles and others with pistols. This type of rounds says one of two things - either they’re not communicating and it’s each man for himself, or they’re doing a semi-buy and the players that bought had more money than the others, meaning they’ll most likely have a full buy in the next round.

There isn’t much else to know when it comes to reading your opponents’ economy, and although it might seem hard due to the amount of information, it’s really easy once you put enough hours into the game, and let’s be honest, if you’re reading this article, it’s probably because you’re already putting a good amount of time into it and want to get up to the next level.

Thank you for reading this article! You can reach out to me for suggestions or feedback via Twitter.

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