The Art of Anti-Stratting
A guide for CEVO and ESEA teams looking to Anti-Strat their opponents.
Introduction
The idea of out-thinking your opponent has been around for as long as humans have been in competition with each other. In the case of CounterStrike, we call this anti-stratting. Anti-Stratting can net a CEVO or ESEA team easy wins, but requires a lot of work, dedication, and patience. Anti-Stratting has had a resurgence of lately in North American CounterStrike. It has been successful for players like Sean "SeanGares" Gares on teams like Cloud9 and EchoFox. Anti-Stratting has even become the topic of one of the biggest CounterStrike, analysts, Duncan "Thorin" Shields. You can view a whole video of his here if you want to hear his thoughts and suggestions for teams that Anti-Stratting.
What is Anti-Stratting and When to do it
Now you’re probably wondering what the heck anti-stratting is. Anti-Stratting is observing another team’s playstyle and using it against them. For example, Cloud9 would “hard counter” teams. This meant that they attempted to predict a team’s play before the round begins to develop. The best time to use this is against teams in official matches in CEVO and ESEA leagues. It is very hard to do this in matchmake games due to the fact that you do not have as much information on a team. In CEVO and ESEA leagues, you are able to view the team’s scrims and official match demos. This is one of the most important part of anti-stratting.
How do I Anti-Strat my Opponent?
Anti-Stratting requires a lot of time and patience. First, you have to begin watching demos of the opposing team. This can be very difficult if you are playing a team that does not have a lot of history. Specifically, you should be looking at their scrimmage and official match demos. When watching these demos you want to be watching for many things. The most important are indicators that teams play off of. For example, on CT-Side of Dust II, if the Terrorists smoke mid door, many teams will begin to run up catwalk and have two lurkers. If you observed this in a demo of the team you are playing, there is a very good chance that they will do this in an official match. It’s things like these that you are looking for.
[Courtesy: CSGOBoard.com]
How to Apply the Anti-Stratting
Let’s go ahead and use the above image as what you can do to anti-strat this. Let’s assume you are the Counter-Terrorists and it is the first pistol round of the game. The team immediately throws their mid smoke. Once this smoke blooms, a good idea would to be hold something like the image below.
[Courtesy: CSGOBoard.com]
In this setup, you have two players get fast boosted to catwalk to take the fight. The player that is currently in CT is holding mid doors from CT. This allows him to rotate quickly to A in the event that the team begins to push catwalk. The player that is currently on the trash can that boosted the players will then move to long corner and wait for a lurker to push up long A. The player on B is spotting upper tunnels in an attempt to stop the other lurker or a possible fake. The two players on catwalk should be taking the fight from either bricks or close up on catwalk stairs. The terrorists will most likely not be ready with this and you have a very good chance of catching with their knives out trying to get up catwalk as fast as possible.
Anti-Stratting in Other Situations
The example above is one of thousands of instances that may happen in a game on any map. It is up to your team to decide if they want to hard counter strategies that a team you may be playing against. Dust II is one of the many maps that are in the active map queue. Using Cloud9 as an example again, you can view another way that they hard counter EnvyUs at the ESL Pro League. At 14 minutes in the below video, you can hear Sean discussing with his team what exactly one of the other players, Happy, is going to do whenever he lurks. This is a hard counter that allows Cloud9 to know exactly what will happen when Happy throws a flash.
Conclusion
Anti-Stratting can be a very good tool for a CEVO or ESEA team to use in official matches. Anti-Stratting can win you matches very easily, but can also lose you them if the opposing team knows that you are trying to anti-strat them. I suggest using Anti-Stratting against teams that have a lot of demos that show them doing the exact same thing every game. Teams like this will show little to no dynamic strategies and allows them to be easily read by anyone on the team. Your IGL as well as other teammates should be viewing demos and looking for the indicators that show what the other team is doing.
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