Every Monday in Triggernometry*, Evan writes about FPSes.

Aiming is one of Counter-Strike s central skills. Good aim can get you out of a bad situation, like a mistimed rush or a weapon disadvantage. Even if you ve been playing CS for a decade, I m willing to bet that, like me, you ve got some bad aiming habits.

I ll go first: I m awful with the AK at long range, and I struggle to get kills with the P250 on eco rounds. I ll probably get better with those guns as I keep putting hours into CS:GO s competitive matchmaking, but bad habits are easy to lose sight of in the middle of a match, when you re caught up in the emotion of the situation. CS:GO also hides a ton of its nuances—especially the bullet spray patterns of its weapons.

Aim maps have a way of immediately illuminating what you ve been doing wrong. Through repetition and drilling, they can teach you a lot about your own bad (and good) aiming behaviors. These are my three favorites.

How to play custom CS:GO maps locally:

• Subscribe to maps on Steam Workshop
• Launch CS:GO
• Click Play > Offline with bots
• Click Workshop, search for the map you subscribed to
• Select the map, select No bots

training aim csgo 2

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This is CS:GO s best drill map, and it has a ton of customizability. You can tweak it to test almost anything you need to work on, from long-range AWPing to short-range spraying against targets that take multiple hits to break. I particularly like the sliding test, which lets you set up static or pop-up targets along different axes, letting you practice the rhythm of strafing, stopping, and shooting outside of a live environment. I also get a lot out of the Burst Training, which tracks how many of your shots connect on a full spray.

Training: Bot Aim V4b

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You can work on any weapon on this map, but I ve found it to be best for building pistol skills. It loads a number of bots into a narrow corridor and has a few toggleable obstacles—crates and a pair of doors—that you can bring into the setting to make it feel more practical. Bots can be set to return fire or not. The god mode setting is really helpful if you want to focus on training one weapon for a sustained period.

aim botz

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This rifles-and-pistols map is the best one I ve found for working on killing enemies who are moving laterally. The bot movements are a little unnatural (you can also set them to move faster than players can in-game, as in the GIF above), but you can set them to mirror different ADAD patterns (alternating left and right strafing), which can be a particularly tough maneuver to counter. There s a good amount of setting customization, too, including boxes and uneven ground. You can also toggle on impact visualization, which will produce a wireframe of the bot hit that lingers in the environment.

*[Hats off to Reiniat, who suggested that we call this column "Triggernometry" instead of its original, inferior label "Shooterology." If you're listening, get in touch with me in the comments below to collect a prize that I have not yet determined. —Evan]

Here's a strange addition to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: you can now customise the game's music. Rather than a simple option to stream your own music from, say, Steam Music, the functionality is a virtual reskin of the music. That means new, specifically composed music for the Main Menu, win and fail screens, death camera and so on.

Dubbed music kits, the functionality is designed to help "establish your identity" in the game. "You can share your music kit with anyone you are playing with," the blogpost reads, "and they include a special broadcasted MVP anthem that players whenever you are MVP."

Nine music kits are available at launch from artists including Austin Wintory, Sean Murray, Skog and Sasha.

The Dreamhack Winter 2014 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Championship tournament being held in November will be the latest to put a $250,000 prize pool up for grabs. And for the first time ever, all the teams taking part are being invited to train at an advance "boot camp" in Stockholm, Sweden, with accommodations provided by Valve and Dreamhack.

Following the 2013 DreamHack SteelSeries Championship, the EMS One Championship at Katowice, Poland, and the ESL One Cologne even in August, the Dreamhack Winter 2014 tournament will be the fourth beneficiary of Valve's community-funded prize pool, with prize money raised through last year's CS: GO Arms Deal update. The tourney will feature the top eight teams from ESL One Cologne—NiP-Gaming, Fnatic, Titan, Team Dignitas, Virtus.Pro, Cloud 9, Epsilon and Na'Vi—and eight others that will earn spots in online qualifiers held through October.

Announced in August 2013, the CS:GO Arms Deal update was intended to help boost the prize purses at CS:GO competitive events, and thus their visibility amongst gamers and the e-sports audience. It appears to have worked: The number of Global Offensive players has grown by more than 250 percent over the past year, while three million unique viewers tuned in to the ESL One Cologne event.

The Dreamhack Winter 2014 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Championship will run from November 27-29 in J nk ping, Sweden. Dates and locations for the Stockholm boot camp have not yet been announced.

Evan writes about FPSes every Monday in Shooterology.

There was a round of CS:GO during last Friday s Dreamhack Invitational matches that I found really inspiring. I ve recorded some commentary over it at 25% playback speed in the video above.

The round, from a match between two of the best teams in the world, showcases Swedish sniper jw s absurd spider sense. It s a terrific individual effort, and while it delivers as a Sick MLG Pro 420 Noscope Frag Video , it also showcases two of CS:GO s best aspects: the importance of physical awareness and the way the game s decade-old, refined map layouts prompt tough decisions.

CS:GO isn t without flaws aside from the presence of hackers in competitive matches, the CS:GO competitive scene itself continues to suffer from DDOS attacks on players and servers during matches. The Dreamhack Invitational, despite being a LAN event, wasn't even safe from this. And those ancient maps, terrific as they generally are, aren't perfect. Nuke continues to heavily favor the CT side in CS:GO, arguably giving advantage to the team who starts on that side.

You really should watch the rest of the tournament, though, especially the final between French rivals Titan and Team LDLC.

Evan writes about FPSes every Monday in Shooterology.

There was a round of CS:GO during last Friday s Dreamhack Invitational matches that I found really inspiring. I ve recorded some commentary over it at 25% playback speed in the video above.

The round, from a match between two of the best teams in the world, showcases Swedish sniper jw s absurd spider sense. It s a terrific individual effort, and while it delivers as a Sick MLG Pro 420 Noscope Frag Video™, it also showcases two of CS:GO s best aspects: the importance of physical awareness and the way the game s decade-old, refined map layouts prompt tough decisions.

CS:GO isn t without flaws—aside from the presence of hackers in competitive matches, the CS:GO competitive scene itself continues to suffer from DDOS attacks on players and servers during matches. The Dreamhack Invitational, despite being a LAN event, wasn't even safe from this. And those ancient maps, terrific as they generally are, aren't perfect. Nuke continues to heavily favor the CT side in CS:GO, arguably giving advantage to the team who starts on that side.

You really should watch the rest of the tournament, though, especially the final between French rivals Titan and Team LDLC.

Evan writes about FPSes every Monday in Shooterology.

There was a round of CS:GO during last Friday s Dreamhack Invitational matches that I found really inspiring. I ve recorded some commentary over it at 25% playback speed in the video above.

The round, from a match between two of the best teams in the world, showcases Swedish sniper jw s absurd spider sense. It s a terrific individual effort, and while it delivers as a Sick MLG Pro 420 Noscope Frag Video™, it also showcases two of CS:GO s best aspects: the importance of physical awareness and the way the game s decade-old, refined map layouts prompt tough decisions.

CS:GO isn t without flaws—aside from the presence of hackers in competitive matches, the CS:GO competitive scene itself continues to suffer from DDOS attacks on players and servers during matches. The Dreamhack Invitational, despite being a LAN event, wasn't even safe from this. And those ancient maps, terrific as they generally are, aren't perfect. Nuke continues to heavily favor the CT side in CS:GO, arguably giving advantage to the team who starts on that side.

You really should watch the rest of the tournament, though, especially the final between French rivals Titan and Team LDLC.

Every Monday in Shooterology, Evan writes about FPSes.

You re dead, and you re broke. How are you going to win the next round when the enemy team has body armor and rifles and you don t?

This is the daunting proposition of an eco round in CS:GO, when your team collectively decides to fight on a budget so it can afford a full complement of gear in the next round. As one of the regular hurdles of competitive play, mastering the eco round is an important part of winning. Here s how I try to make the best of an economic disadvantage.


Decide to win
I ve solo-queued with so many people who see eco rounds are an invitation to play lackadaisically. You ve got pistols, they ve got rifles let s just get this over with, right? In high-level competitive play, though, eco rounds regularly go the way of the underdog. Part of that is because pro players are so comfortable with pistols, but the other half of that is their mindset: they see eco rounds as an opportunity to gut their opponent s economy rather than a round that they re pre-destined to lose.

If you ve already made your mind up that you re going to lose, congrats! You probably will.


Buy the pistol (or shotgun) you re most comfortable with
If pistols had a popularity contest, the P250 would win. It s beloved for a reason: it s a $300 weapon that can kill with a single headshot at close range. It s more versatile and more accurate than the Deagle in most situations. But if the Deagle or Five-Seven somehow speak to how you play Counter-Strike (and you don t mind buying one fewer grenade next round to offset the cost), go for it. There s plenty of math you can hold up as evidence, but I m a big believer in the idea that you re going to perform best with the weapon you feel the most confident with.

Don t rule out shotguns completely, either: mid- and late-game eco rounds are one of the situations where shotguns have a lot of utility. A Nova at $1200 or a MAG-7 at $1800 are several times the cost of a pistol, and tend to favor defensive use, where you can dictate the range that you encounter enemies and pick spots that force enemies to look two ways as they cross a narrow area (like the ramp on Nuke, or banana on Inferno). Holding a weapon that deals a lot of damage all at once is a way of compensating for your fragility and the accuracy-destroying power of aimpunch.
Make the enemy encounter multiple pistols at once
Unless you brain an enemy, you re going to have to shoot them more than they shoot you. Offset that disadvantage by positioning yourself with a teammate to see and shoot an enemy at exactly the same time. If you re covering an entry door, your teammate shouldn t be able to see an enemy before you do, and vice versa. Because there's less room for error, your timing and angles count a lot on an eco.


Do something ridiculous
On the surface this seems like it runs contrary to Decide to win, but think about it this way: one of your biggest advantages on an eco round is that you ve got less to lose. Try a strategy that your opponent would never expect, like rushing everyone through palace on Mirage, or making a hard balcony push on the T side of Inferno. On defense, consider stacking a single bombsite with your whole team in the hopes that the Terrorists will split their attack.


If you can t beat em, rob em
CS:GO is a pay-to-win game: buying power equals firepower. When you steal a weapon from a dead enemy, you re fighting on their tab. Given the choice between fighting on the wrong side of a three-on-one with no armor and cowering in a corner with a nicked AWP, save the AWP. You re probably going to lose more eco rounds than you win, so be willing to take a small gain out of a bad situation.

If the enemy knows you ve taken an AWP or another valuable weapon, it may even go out of its way to hunt you down in the final moments of the round. In this situation, a secondary, riskier way to do economic damage to an opponent on an eco is to go for exit kills, or positioning yourself to lose the round, but kill one or two players as they re exiting a known position (usually one at a time, to look for you in the waning seconds of the round).

Not being able to shoot things really annoys some people. There are few better demonstrations of this enduring truth than Fullbright s first-person exploration game Gone Home. Not only has it spawned an hilarious parody featuring lots of things being killed, but now you too will be able to kill things in the titular home, thanks to this Counter-Strike: GO map.
"Your family is mysteriously missing again," so says the Steam Workshop description. "But you can figure that out later. Right now you have more pressing issues to attend to, like the fact that your house is full of terrorists and some dude has been taken hostage. Rescue him by taking him to the garage where you can make a swift getaway on that old bike thats been sitting there for twenty years."
The hostage map is recommended for less than 32 players, and can be downloaded here. Of course, you could go ahead and play Gone Home again, which comes highly recommended.
Thanks Joystiq.

If you've recently been invited to take part in a raffle for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive items while chatting in Twitch, the good people at F-Secure have a bit of advice: Don't do it.

The messages are being spread by a Twitch bot, according to a recent F-Secure report, which enters channels and invites users to follow a link in order to enter a draw. The link leads to a site that asks for the user's name, email address and permission to publicize his or her name, but once that information is entered, a Windows executable is run that does some pretty nasty stuff: It can take screens, add new Steam friends and accept pending friend requests, initiate trades with new Steam friends, buy items (if there's money present in the user's Steam wallet), send trade offers, accept pending trades and sell items at a discount.

Previous variants of this hack were selling items at a 12 percent discount but it's apparently now running at 35 percent. The software is able to completely empty wallets, armories and inventories. "Being able to sell uninteresting items will allow the attacker to gather enough money to buy items that he deems interesting," the report states. "The interesting items are then traded to an account possibly maintained by the attacker."

F-Prot notes that all of this happens from the victim's own PC in order to get around Steam security checks that kick in when a user logs in from a new machine. It's a good warning to take note of: Steam may be a very secure environment, but nothing is foolproof. Be careful what you click.

Every Monday, Evan writes about first-person shooters.

Playing a competitive online game means being subjected to a certain amount of unsolicited criticism. I think you receive a bit more of it in CS:GO, though, because your dead teammates form a kind of peanut gallery who can talk to you from beyond the grave. Being the last one alive as four other players hover over your digital shoulder is a quintessential CS experience.

I ve been that digital shoulder hundreds of times, struggling to clutch while a person I ve never met tells me which gun I should grab to retake Nuke s A bombsite, or chastises me for using a grenade in a one-on-one situation. It s annoying, but I m actually grateful for a lot of the harsh feedback that s been handed to me in these moments because it s shaken me out of some bad habits.

Below, a selection of some of the criticism that s been condescendingly muttered at me in CS that turned out to be great advice:


Don t reload.
Shooters, single-player shooters especially, condition us to reload as a Pavlovian response to getting a kill. Resisting that urge is one of the first things most new CS players have to unlearn. Most weapons in CS:GO take between two and four seconds to reload: plenty of time for someone to peek around a corner or move through the space you should be defending. But maybe more importantly, in close-quarters, reloading betrays your position with sound. Consider the trade-off: would you rather have a full mag and an enemy who knows where you are, or a shallow mag and an enemy who s out of position?

Don t underestimate how much you can do with four or five bullets. With a rifle, it takes three or four non-headshots to take an enemy from full health to none and in late-game situations, it s even less likely that the enemy around the corner has 100 HP.


Don t pretend.
A few months ago one of my teammates in a match I d solo queued into called me out on this. What are you doing? I bet you saw that on Twitch or some shit, right? He was right. I was ADAD spamming (quickly tapping A and D in alternation) to hold a corner on de_inferno. There was no purpose or tactical value to what I was doing, I was just miming something I d seen in a tournament. It was the equivalent of doing a bunch of fancy dribbling in soccer with no one playing defense against me.

It s great to experiment with stuff you see in competitive play, but understanding the situational benefits of each maneuver is a huge step toward pulling it off successfully. After the ESL, I started backing away from my own flashbang grenades on entries, something I loved seeing in that tournament. But then I realized that my grenade placement wasn t nearly good enough to guarantee that I was flashing enemies at all I was just imitating for the sake of imitating.


Please, please don't throw that grenade.
Put the pin back in. I see so much misplaced faith in the frag grenade in CS:GO, partly because I used to be that guy who d start a bombsite retake with a frag toss, often coming around corners while still in the follow-through animation for the throw. Here s what I learned, after someone finally scolded me: your frag isn t going to kill anyone. Even if you re the Joe Montana of grenades and toss directly into the enemy player s mouth, it ll do 57 damage. If you played a lot of CS:Source, where grenades did a max of 72 against armored opponents, take a moment to realize that a perfect toss will only inflict as much as about two bullets.

In almost all situations, but especially in one-on-ones, your rifle is going to be able to kill someone faster and more safely than any sort of offensive grenade. Flashes are handy in a lot of situations in CS, but they re also unreliable: you can t be sure how well you ve blinded someone. If I had just kept my gun out instead of reaching for that 4 key, I would ve won many more rounds for my team.


Don't turn a three-on-one into a series of one-on-ones.
This is the one I ve started to preach most to players that I solo queue in Competitive mode with. It s easy to take a round win for granted when you re in a 3-on-1 or a 4-on-2. The easiest way to give away an easy win, though, is arranging your team in a way that the enemy can encounter you one at a time, on their own terms. When you re defending a bombsite against a shorthanded enemy, your goal should be to guarantee a trade: put the enemy in a position where they must cross the firing line of Player B if they want to kill Player A.


Are you afraid of your own pistol, or something?
Pistols have an amazing amount of utility in CS:GO. In the current build, the CZ75 the only automatic pistol has a ludicrous amount of value as a short-range, spray-and-hope-for-the-best gun when your AWP isn t cutting it or your M4A1-S runs dry. Even with the recent change to price it at $500, the cost of two grenades, it s a strong backup for serial AWPers who fear being rushed.


Dude, why would you ever crouch-walk?
This is ancient, ancient advice, but it s something that I still occasionally see players doing on casual servers. Crouch-walking around a corner will always grant advantage to someone who s watching that corner they ll always be able to see your gun poke out, then your knees, and blast you before you see them. If you need to check around an object, shoulder peek: dart out of cover while revealing as little of yourself as possible, then back in as quickly as possible, purely to see where an enemy is.