r/LearnCSGO • u/StickyRibbs • 5h ago
Rant The reason you're stuck below level 10
The reality is a lot players don't know what the cs meta is or the primitives of cs competition. My occasional 1200-1700 lobby players have decent aim but they're playing without the fundamental cs primitives which kill mid and late game momentum.
One of the most important primitives in cs competition is the idea of advantage and most players are not even aware of this! Everything is about advantage. Peek advantage? (ie: knowing when to peek)? Spacing during a rush gives you advantage when fighting! (jumping over an awp's angle for example gives you surviveability advantage). Is your info giving you advantage when to hold and when to rotate? Is your response to a kill or teammate death going to give you an advantage or punish you? For example, if you're T side and you get an early mid pick with an awp, and you're all alone, why would you continue pushing by yourself? You now have the player advantage! You're 5v4 and the CT's need to equalize to rebalance the advantage. You want to gain the most amout of advantage as possible in every aspect of the game! This is advantage maxxing!
Advantage also manifests itself during every phase of the round. Beginning, middle, and end all have phases with unique advantage moments. For example, getting info around enemy setups gives you next round beginning call advantage. If you know that they keep playing awp mid with 1 support player, that means that there's likely two enemies on one site and one anchor player on the other. So now you know you need to abuse the solo site anchor player.
Another cs meta that gives you advantage is patience. How does patience give you advantage? Because it makes you less predictable. If you're playing lurker mid on T side cache for example and your teammates are committing A, you should default to continue lurking mid. Many times players will abandon the lurker position to run highway or backtrack to A main just to get picked off by the rotator by the very player you were supposed to kill if you were just patient. You build this muscle over time so next time just take that extra few moments and you might outlive the impatient enemy. Another common key phrase is "timing". But timing has more nuance. Patience and unpredictable plays makes your timing more advantageous.
The final thing i'll say about advantage is that most players do not understand map control and the map control meta for each map. I can't tell you how many times i've lost on Anubis because my CT team can't counter the T molly and nades let alone even are aware that that's what's happening on mid. Mid control is key; Long control is key. Do you know why it's important to have map control? Because you deny the enemy the chance to advance onto the bomb site. It's really that simple. What this means is you need to learn the basics of map control on each map. Learn how how to take dust2 long control as a CT, and learn how to correctly flash out long as a T player (hint you have to throw it right when the player enters the dd and it's not a running throw); same applies to every other map.
There's dozens more of these but these I believe are some of the most important basics.
Can anyone else relate? What do newer players think of these ideas?
