Reflection is one of the most important processes that any person must go through in order to improve at anything. The most effective way to analyse Counter Strike is watching demos, despite their buggy and unreliable nature when compared to VODs. Demos can be used in many ways to analyse both a team's performance as well as an individual's skill and decision making ability. We can use them to learn from others, often high-level players, such as those found on professional teams as well as reflect on our own teams, and individual performances.

1. What was the precursor?

Making mistakes in Counter Strike is an inevitability. Sometimes this is a mistake made by your mechanical skill; however we also make bad decisions in Counter Strike. Often when players review their own demos, they can be quick to blame deaths on a mechanical mistake, however asking yourself questions such as if you had to take the fight right then, if you gave yourself the best chance of winning the fight, and if there was a better alternate decision are often far more important. But, the best question you can ask yourself, is about what lead to you having to make that decision at all. What was the precursor to your bad decision? You will find that once you boil down your mistakes to the precursor of the decision, patterns and tendencies in your own gameplay tend to become far more apparent.

These tendencies can be both good and bad, ranging from being overly aggressive or passive on certain areas of certain maps, to never fighting enemies blind, because you don't know enough popflashes. Once you can find these deeprooted predispositions within your playstyle, you can harness them to improve and play at your best. Make a big effort whilst playing to be constantly looking to correct your bad habits, whilst repeatedly trusting and putting yourself in situations where your good habits can take over. Thorin did an excellent video explaining and relating this very concept to the North American Counter Strike scene, which I have included below.

2. Looking at the bigger picture

Sometimes when watching a demo, we don't focus on the individuals in a team, but rather the overall strategy of the round. When doing so, we spend a lot of time looking at the mini-map and try to understand why teams made certain decisions tactically, as well as how the individual elements of a tactic complement each other. However, this is also an important consideration when evaluating a player's individual game. For example, players may be more aggressive if their team is on a low-econ buy and don't have much utility. The same is also true for the flipside. When analysing a strategy, although the abovementioned points are the most important, it's also highly important to analyse the individuals who make up the strategy and how they are playing as an individual. How and where they are choosing to make gunfire and footstep noise, how are they reacting to the enemy differently because of the strategy, how aggressive is each player, etc.

The video below by mauisnake gives you a really good idea of how to analyse the overall strategy of a round without losing sight of the individuals that make up the round.

3. Have a specific focus

This is probably the most important tip for those beginning to watch demos to improve their level of play. A lot of different things happen simultaneously within a Counter Strike match, some good and some bad. If you are new to analysing the game, it can be very easy to focus a lot of time or energy on one specific detail, while missing several other key components that might improve your gameplay far more. Instead, have a focus for watching your demo. If you are looking at the bigger picture, specifically focus on how the team took Banana control on Inferno, for example, or if you are focusing on a single player, look at exactly where he had his crosshair placed and why, when entry fragging out A Main on Cache.

Look for how he varies it between rounds and think about why he might do it, or why the team taking Banana control throws the flashbangs, Molotovs, and smokes that they do. By homing in on a specific thing, you waste less time when you might not know exactly what you are looking for. Over time, as you get better at analysing the game, your focuses will broaden out, as you begin to focus on much wider subjects. One problem this might raise, is when you watch your own demos, as you might not know what you do well or poorly and thus don't know what to focus on. A good start in this case is to look at how you died each round and take note where and how you died. If you see yourself dying more than once in a single game, in a specific way, follow the guidance from the first tip and see what precursors led to your death in the end.

In conclusion, watching demos is probably the single most important activity a player can do to improve, aside from actually playing. However, saying that, there comes a point of diminishing returns after hours of deathmatch, where your time could definitely be best spent watching demos. They are an invaluable tool for both self-reflection, as well as for learning from the best. No matter how many hours you have, there is always more to learn and be it a smoke, a strategy or a new position to hold on the Counter Terrorist side, there is always something to be taken away from a demo which will make you a better player in the long run.

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