For close to every situation in Counter Strike, there is a piece of utility you could know that will make the situation easier. As you spend more and more time playing the game, you will learn more nades for specific situations. If you’re just starting out however, there is no need to learn thousands of nades at once. Some will benefit you more than others; let’s go over which ones will be the most useful for you to learn.

The two main factors determining which piece of utility is best for you to learn will be based on:
1) The position you usually play and
2) how often you will be able to use them

Chances are that if you’re deciding to learn nades, you have at least played some matches on a few maps already, and as such, you probably have a preference for where you like to play. If we take Mirage as an example, you might prefer going towards A ramp and palace or towards middle. The nades you should learn first should be from spots you are around naturally during the round.

The types of smokes you’ll want to be looking at are those that smoke off the most common positions on a map and allow you to push the CT’s further back on the map without risking to die. This will make it harder for CT’s to rotate and could give you some easy lurk frags by catching them off guard. This process can be described as getting map control.
I will be going through some examples of these types of smoke on Mirage, Nuke, and Inferno.

On Mirage, these smokes would be:

The top mid smoke – which allows you to cross to the mid boxes without being seen from connector and window. 
The window smoke – which prevents anyone in window from spotting you coming out mid.
And the top connector smoke – which allows you to take short without being seen from A.

On Nuke:

The Outside smokes – there are about 3 different variations of the outside smokes that allow you to cross outside to secret or even to lurk into garage. If you want a more in-depth explanation on what makes each variant special, and how you can use them most efficiently, I recommend watching the explainer videos on our Utility Hub.
Alternatively, there is the squeaky door smoke – this one will allow you to sneak out in front of squeaky door or even down vents, just be careful of any CT’s spamming the smoke.

On Inferno:

The only real smokes resembling the type we are looking for are the long and short smoke on top mid – these will allow you to break up long-short crossfires by the CT’s and make taking mid significantly easier. Afterwards, you can wait for to re-engage, or use the lack of information CT’s have to keep them guessing if you’ll end up going A or B.

Because there are also fewer smokes for map control on Inferno, you’re more likely to learn the other kind of smoke utility in CS; execute smokes.

The purpose of these is to isolate a site, thus forcing the CT’s to either push through the smoke, a very risky endeavor, or to give up the site and play for the retake once everyone else rotated in.

The easiest way to get started with execute smokes is by learning one smoke for each site – A and B. Usually some of your teammates will also know at least one smoke, so together you can craft a full site execute between all five of you.

You can find our database of execute smokes on our utility hub and choose one that is easy to remember for you, and that you feel comfortable using in-game. Once you have those down, you can start learning a second smoke for each site, and so on. Slowly expanding your knowledge as you climb the ranks. Take a look through our Utility Hub and get started on better utility usage today!