The nature of a competitive game like Counter Strike is being competitive, and to stay competitive. However, doing is a rather vague goal to accomplish. At any level of play, you could be focusing on a variety of different skillsets to work on, and Counter-Strike relies on many aspects to good player, with complex components that each require practice to master. To most efficiently improve at each, you will want to do training drills aimed that primarily focus at improving one skill at a time. Doing this step-by-step for each skill is one of the best ways to improve as a player and mastery of one skill should be enough to take you from one skill level to the next.
In this article, we’ll be outlining what skills are most important at each level and how improving at them will help you reach the next level.
5000-10.000 Rating
Counter-Strike is at its core still a first-person-shooter, and at this level both your team and the enemy team will make many mistakes on the shooter aspect of the game. You’ll make lots of mistakes, miss utility, overpeek, and repeek. This combined with most fights being a straight up 1 on 1, the main determining factor for who comes out on top in a fight will be pure mechanics. That is why the most important thing you should learn at first is shooting and movement mechanics. Be familiar with the most common positions on each map by playing a few prefire maps; learn your sprays and how to counter-strafe. This will be a solid foundation on which we will continue building while growing our elo.
10.000–15.000 Rating
As you start climbing the ranks, the number of mistakes and misplays by both you and the enemy teams will decrease. You will see more basic crossfires as well as more measured peeks. To counter these positional advantages, you’ll want to learn some basic utility. This will allow you to get into better positions, break up crossfires, force the opponents to take a different, less powerful angle, and enable you to catch them off guard. In other words, as your opponent’s makes fewer mistakes, you use your utility to force them to make a mistake.
There is a lot of utility that can help you take a good fight, and many you can throw to help your own engagements as well. At this level, you can use these to comfortably hold your own, even without the help of your teammates. To learn utility efficiently, you can use our utility hub, or NADR, a training mode made to easily help you find and practice your utility usage. We have an article on how to start using these modes efficiently.
15.000-20.000 Rating
Eventually most people will run into a hard skill ceiling at this rating due to various factors, your opponents will be able to dodge utility or position in such a way that allows them to get out of harm’s way and drastically lessen the chance they would get killed. And on top of that, you’ll have to start properly rely on your teammates to help you out. Your opponent will be skilled enough to ensure many encounters where you’ll end up in a crossfire, and to reduce the chance of losing that engagement, you’ll have to engage in pairs. This way, you will ensure that even if your opponent manages to weasel their way around your utility and manages to take a kill, there will be a teammate to trade you.
While trading one for one doesn’t sound impressive at first, it has the benefit of gaining you control over a specific area of the map. This, combined with proper utility usage, will enable you to take sites and play the around objective by establishing after-plants, and forcing your opponent to give up the round in favor of keeping their equipment. Around this level, just getting kills isn’t enough to win rounds. It is also about where you get them and how you use them. The tactical aspect of Counter Strike starts developing more and more. This is less of a skill you can hone on an offline server and relies more on communication and awareness of what your teammates are doing. Our recommendation is to focus on your communication skills with randoms, or to make sure to always play with some friends, to ensure proper engagement.
20.000+ Rating
Stairs set from Mid – use it to help your B player😉
— czaaje (@czaajecs) March 12, 2024
Those lineups are part of a huge CS2 Utility Database with 475 unique Vertigo nades, available on @OfficialRefrag
I'm posting util everyday – RT, Like & Follow for more CS content 🫡 pic.twitter.com/TYs4V9raWb
Once you and your opponents successfully employ all the above-listed skills, the game becomes more nuanced. Up to these ratings, you could always create opportunities by taking fights together, trading, using utility, and just aiming well. However, at these higher ratings, being able to predict your opponents starts gaining more importance. By knowing your opponents possible positions you can predict their positions and target them with utility. Opponents will also become more active, especially in the mid-round, and being able to predict where your opponents will try to push enables you to take advantage of their positions, and potentially find gaps to sneak through to catch unsuspecting opponents off guard. This is generally known as gamesense, or experience, which you gain more and more by playing against equally skilled opponents.
One of the ways to gain better game sense is by using Refrag’s NADR mod. Using the .timer code will start a timer once you start moving, allowing you to get an idea of how long it takes to get to certain positions on specific maps. This way, you can be completely sure about which positions an enemy could and could not be during the start of a game.
Perfecting one skill to an exceptionally high level can also carry you to a very high rank. Some players will be able to dominate through good aim up to 20.000 rating. While this is possible, most training will have diminishing effects. That doesn’t mean you can’t still improve, but as you become better, gaining that extra percentage becomes harder and harder. This guide is not meant to dictate when you need to train certain skills. It serves more as a general assessment of which skills are most important and should be focused on first. Those being core mechanics and utility. The one constant among all your matches will be you. Maximising how well you are able to perform without relying on help from others will most effectively translate to better results, especially when playing solo.
