If you find yourself on a busy server running cs_assault and you are a CT, here is a nice spot to put yourself if you fancy getting some wallbang kills. The more people on the server the better as it increases the chances of people being where you want them to be.

This is your spot:

The terrorists on this map, more often than not, camp inside the warehouse including the catwalk that encircles the inside.

Get yourself a P90 and climb onto these crates. There are two places to fire at and they are as follows:

Now there is no guarantee that anyone will be there, that’s why it is best to try this on a very busy server. This wouldn’t work too well during a match, for example. All being well, after a bit of practice, you can notch up the odd cheeky kill.

Needless to say, you won’t get the top score on the server if you stay there everyday, but it’s fun when ya get one (not for them, lol).

There may be a full overview of Cbble in the near future but, in the meantime, here is a handy hint for Terrorists.

Bombsite B:

Here it is, a bunch of crates and some steps. Not entirely sure what the strategical advantages of blowing up this area could be, what exactly is in those crates?

The common place to plant the bomb here is behind the two crates on the left and then to camp next to it, opposite it or to go up the stairs and camp there. What’s wrong with this?

Well, when I’ve been a CT and come trotting to a beeping site B and couldn’t see the bomb, I knew tat the bomb was behind the boxes and, therefore, that there were some nasty terrorists somewhere in that area. No surprises then that out come the flashes and the nade and, if I’m hacking lucky I can pop a few off and maybe even get the defuse. If there are more than just me then we stand a good chance of winning the round.

Plus, if one of gets in and starts the defuse and there are other T’s approaching the site, they cannot pick off the defuser as they are hidden by the boxes. They have to waste time running all the way up to the site.

The solution?

Ok, so what do we have here? Bomb out in the open, any defuser is going to need some good defense around him, very low risk of a ninja defuse. Plus, a few more places for camping T’s to be hiding. So that’s all very nice, some people may say ‘yeah, each to their own, no clear cut advantage’. But here is what makes this spot super happy 1337:

Planting the bomb here allows you to keep an eye on it from a very nice little spot out of the way of most flashbangs and nades and crossfire that may be happening around the site. Your cosy lookout post is here:

From here you have a great view of the bomb, obviously any sniper is laughing at this distance. Should you see someone start a defuse you can safely fire at him. Even with a pistol you can take them out before they finish. A funny thing is to watch them try and figure out where the shots are coming from. This position is especially good if you are the only guy left and have managed to get the bomb down with the enemy elsewhere in the map.

You are fairly safe, a nice distance from the bomb means that the explosion won’t kill you, the enemy will take a while working out where you are and if they get to you and kill you they still ahve to get back to the bomb. All the while the bomb is ticking, not much time for them really.

A word of caution: Your only main point of vulnerability is from here:

Depending on how many people you are playing against determines the chances of people passing through here. Against a small team, say in a match, the chances are that they are already at B and maybe some are at A and are coming the other way. Keep your ears open. With the bomb placed anyone coming through this way will be running and these corridors aren’t exactly lined with wall-to-wall shagpile carpet. Your main focus is the bomb but occasionally make brief, visual checks of this doorway.

This trick can be used a lot of times because even if they know what your doing, they still have to waste time coming after you.

The only tricky part is getting the bomb down in the first place…

Ok so here’s some very useful information about the popular hacks used in Counter Strike. This is placed here for the sole purpose of making it easier to spot a hacker. If you know what to look for then it really helps.

The following information was provided by Cooliced, a former member of WildCards who has now co-created a clan call Fallen Wild. You can visit their clan site at http://www.fallenwild.co.uk/news.php

———————————————————————-

Hacks are sometimes confusing and hard to spot unless you know what they do and what you’re looking for. In this section they will be detailed to help you understand them more thoroughly.

Aimbot: Aimbots use the computer’s accurate knowledge of the enemy’s figure and aligns, and shoots automatically. Aimbots usually aim at the head, but some hacks have adjustable vectors to aim at different parts of the enemy body. Some have randomizing algorithms intended to make the identification of an aimbot user harder by spectators observing the player. In their most basic form, aimbots facilitate hitting the enemy player more accurately. However, that is where the similarities stop.

XQZ’s early, relatively primitive aimbot would be bound to a button on the keyboard or a mouse, and as long as the button was pressed, the aimbot would take care of properly aligning the crosshair on the head (or if necessary, a different body part). This button could be the same button as the fire button and thus could enable the aimbot to only aim while firing. But this gave away its presence to an alert observer by its tendency to “slave” (the all-too-proper, inhuman following of the motion of an enemy player).

Early OGC’s aimbot portion was already much more advanced, and could be configured in a variety of ways. Auto-aiming allowed automated proper aiming and slaving. Auto-shot was another feature, where the bot would automatically cause the player avatar to fire their weapon if the aimbot locked up. It could be configured freely with an aimbot FOV (field of view). XQZ style aiming could also be employed.

Later versions of OGC’s aimbot portion allowed for punctual aiming, where one hit of a button (commonly the fire button) would merely result in one single adjustment of aim, without any form of “slaving”.

Modern, so called “LAN-Proof” cheats implement what is called charged aiming which is yet another improvement over punctual aiming. Punctual aiming mode is only active (charged) when a specific button is pressed shortly before the aiming is needed, and firing in turn empties this charge. While this may be inconvenient, it allows anyone at a tournament to briefly check the suspected cheater’s game for any inconsistencies, only to find nothing.

Some highly advanced and private aimbots do not even bother to move the crosshair as they are proxies and work on the network level. While essentially charged aimbots with a small FOV, the hits appear to be the result of an overabundance of luck rather than anything magically moving the crosshair. The advantage of this is to make nospread (see below) cheats less obvious and thus increase the effectiveness of them while only minimally affecting stealth.

Lan proof aimbots:The first well known aimbot, XQZ, was specifically designed to work at LAN parties where other players could look over the shoulders of the cheater. A modern cheat is a highly sophisticated tool with the potential employed relatively undetected at a LAN party, making what most casual cheaters and anti-cheaters know as cheats (especially the infamous OGC) look like children’s toys.

Many modern stealthy aimbots employ ‘charging’, where only a subtle key combination (e.g. shift + the key to buy ammo, or strafe left and right at the same time) would load the aimbot for a brief time and only for a few bullets. Even if a tournament administrator were to replace the cheater in order to look for anything suspicious, they would find nothing, for they would not know the subtle key combination to charge the aimbot. A series of occurrences of people apparently using their “timeleft” key to charge their bot has eventually made observers dub this type of aimbot Timeleft cheat.

Furthermore, a stealthy aimbot is configured to use only a small FOV (field of view), forcing the cheater to actually move their mouse to aim the crosshair sufficiently close to the position of the enemy. By relying on the cheaters normal reactions for the initial part of aiming the cheat becomes more natural looking and harder to detect but still allows the cheater dead-on accuracy once activated. Alternatively an aimbot can be configured to be charged for auto-aim and auto-fire only when a player is in dire situations. Furthermore, well made stealthy aimbots don’t slave – they are aimed and fired the instant the mouse button is pressed, and do not move again until the mouse is pressed a second time. Even an experienced observer trying to verify if mouse and screen movements correlate would have a tough time seeing anything out of the ordinary, with the cheating being almost indistinguishable from a skilled player with good aim and reflexes.

There are rumors about a few exclusive and private aimbots which appear to work with a proxy-type lucking technique rather than actual aiming, to make the screen’s movement even less visible. The mouse would be dragged near the enemy, and upon pressing the fire button, the bullet magically hits the head of the target despite the crosshair not being directly on top of it. While this would be very obvious with large FOVs, it would be almost impossible to notice with sufficiently small FOVs due to Counter-Strike’s often inaccurate weapons and inexplicable hits/misses, which do not make such hits seem impossible, except for their extreme frequency.

Auto Recoil: Automatically reduces recoil for each gun individually or sets it to the best pre-designated value.

Auto Wall: Automatically shows when a person can be shot through a wall using piercing ammunition.

AVDraw: Draws a dot, like an extended crosshair, to show you where your weapon will hit.

Box ESP: Draws a box around player models. (Configure to be both teams, enemy team or friendly team.)

Barrel/FM Laser: Draws lasers which point out from players to show where they are aiming/looking. (Configure to be both teams, enemy team or friendly team.)

OCG Crosshairs: Customizable crosshairs which have much greater potential than the ones provided by the game.

Distance ESP: Draws text on each player model with customizable information.

Entity ESP: Like regular ESP it also draws information for things like dropped weapons, the bomb and hostages.

Flash Removal/Anti-Flash: Prevents flashbangs from effecting the player.

Font Style: Customizable text font for many of the games aspects.

Auto Bunnyhop: Automatically produces the Bunnyhop motion for a player to greatly increase their movement speed.

General Speed hacks:Speedhacks change the computer’s perception of time and lets the cheater act extraordinarily fast. Most of the time they are found in combination with other cheats. Speedhacks can offer high time rates to clean out maps within seconds, or very slightly increased time rates to subtly improve the performance of an aimbot. Any client with a speed hack installed will find that their in-game movement and weapon rate-of-fire are far faster than other players. Like no-recoil, a timehack (or speedhack) is most often used in combination with an aimbot. Depending on the rate of time acceleration, a timehack can be used to rush to the enemy team’s spawn point and kill all enemy players within the first seconds of a round, or it can be used with a very low time acceleration (e.g. a rate of 1.1 or 1.2) to improve total damage over time of weapons. A timehack with a low time acceleration can also be used to reduce the time required to reload weapons.

Knife Speed: Produces speed hack like speed when a knife attack launched.

Auto Speed: Automatically produces instant movement speed when a pre-designated key is pressed (usually the fire button).

Manual Speed: Produces instant movement speed while a pre-designated key is pressed and held.

Lock Target: Will lock the crosshair onto an enemy target until he is dead. Targets can be altered with a pre-designated key and the switch between targets usually takes less than 20 milliseconds.

Low Ammo Warning: Displays an on screen warning when a person is below a pre-designated %%percentage%% of ammunition.

Lambert: Removes all shadow and dark spots from game play.

Name ESP: Draws text on player model which shows the player name. (Can be configured to show other information as well, such as HP.)

No Sky: Removes the sky from game play.

No Spread/No recoil: Essentially the same thing, no-recoil and no-spread attempt to reduce the inaccuracy of weapons when firing. No recoil describes the automated compensation of recoil on the vertical axis, while no spread tries to compensate the horizontal spread of the weapon. As the recoil and spread of gunfire in Counter-Strike is pseudo-random, it can be reverse-engineered and predicted, allowing a cheat to compensate for inaccuracy.

The different names for no recoil and no-spread are mostly historical. No-recoil is much older and could be performed by protohacks – all that was necessary was to move the aiming reticle downwards in a distinctive way to accommodate for the vertical recoil of the weapons. No spread is by comparison, a relatively recent invention that can accurately predict the deviation and compensate for any inaccuracy, making all bullets hit exactly the same spot.

While both variants can be used independently, some older, slaving aimbots make the use of at least a no-recoil cheat a necessity, thus effectively making them part of the aimbot itself. Even with modern, punctual/charged aimbots it is very common to utilize no-spread if stealth isn’t as important as performance. More stealthy, chargeable aimbots usually link the spread-suppressing factor to the charge and state of the aimbot. This prevents any stray, unaimed shots at a wall from giving away the presence of a no-spread cheat. They may also only remove the spread from the first 3-5 shots, or even only the first two bullets fired from a gun. However, they can eventually be detected by observers from subtle, rapid movements of the crosshair and are thus often disabled completely when stealth is paramount, like at LAN parties.

Overview Radar: Draws the overview map in place of the radar, as if the person were in spectator mode.

No Fog: Removes all fog from game play.

Smoke Removal/Anti-Smoke: Removes all smoke from game play (disables smoke grenades against player view).

Smooth: Smoothly lock onto a target or move crosshair towards target, causing less suspicious action.

Spin Hack: Play appears to be spinning to everyone else in the game. A multi-hack which can be configured.

Team Recognition: Part of the customizable aspect of other hacks to allow selected aiming of players.

Third Person: Changes the player view to 3rd person as if they were in spectator mode.

Time: Draws an on-screen display of the players local time.

XQZ Wallhack/Wallhack: Shows just the enemy through walls or makes walls almost invisible (adjustable opacity level).

YHAM: Is an older multihack which causes a player to change their name over and over very quickly.

Weapon ESP: Draws text on players models of what weapon they are carrying and can also dis

Spiked modules:Long ’spikes’, visible through walls, announce the presence of another player on the computer of a cheater. These are the simplest to implement since a few changes, or sometimes even bugs in the graphics cards drivers, can lead to the ability of a player to see other players through walls.

Ball hack:A ball floating above all players that was visible through walls, even if the players themselves were hidden. But this so called “ballhack” gave the players less information, especially about the armament or the heading of enemies, and thus was not very popular.

Data file hacks:Replacing player skins with brighter colored ones which are easier to spot at a distance or in darker areas of the maps.
Replacing sounds of silenced weapons by their normal counterparts, making them more audible.
Currently, the Half-Life engine and the Source engine both prevent those sensitive data files from being altered in such ways. This means it is only possible to use maliciously altered data files online when combined with an executable cheat that suppresses the engine’s own integrity check.

Methods of creating hacks:Replacing client.dll and datafiles
One of the first type of cheats that appeared for Counter-Strike were the so called headshot scripts. They utilized an altered client.dll that offered additional functions to scripts, therefore a script written in extended CS script replaced the more common mouse/keyboard bindings for attacks.

Similarly, data file cheats exchanged data like sound files, but mostly models for variations that imposed some sort of drawback for the enemies of the cheater, like, louder silenced weapons or player models that were visible through walls and doors due to spikes, or in the dark due to luminous / brightly colored textures.

Neither of the two types of cheats are considered effective at this time. Regular aimbots prove to be far more powerful than headshot scripts, and client.dll, like player models / sound file changes are restricted as servers are provided checksums by clients and can choose to disconnect them if they differ from the checksum values on the server. Although theoretically a new generation of hacks could fake checksums or filesystem calls.
Hooks

Client Hooks make use of the fact that any system that employs Dynamically Linked Libraries allows the relatively easy replacement and/or redirection of function calls within those libraries. These systems include Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OSX, Windows, and just about every other modern operating system.

The reason why Counter-Strike is considered to be vulnerable to this attack is, because the mod is itself a separate entity from the Half-Life engine, and the two parties communicate to each other with easily-intercepted DLL calls. Most people consider this a special weakness of the Counter-Strike architecture that is not directly applicable to all games. However, few contemporary games are one monolithic executable, and almost all of them are utilizing DLL calls for various purposes – if not just driver calls.
The source of the loaddll library, written by the author of the original OGC was eventually released into open source, and lead to a multitude of OGC-like cheats that utilized the same facility to wedge itself between the game’s engine and the mod’s game logic.

The same thing may also have lead to the relative hook-proofness of current anti-cheats. VAC appears, and C-D even claims to be able to detect client hooks reliably, although there has been a history of hooks which managed to work without being detected by either one or both.

Amongst the first aimbots were color based aimbots, known to exist only for relatively early versions of Counter-Strike. They colored either team in its distinctive color (e.g. bright green or bright red) and would automatically fire on any pixel with this color. Since they could sometimes been foiled by using multi-colored logos, they did not have much success. A key was pressed to switch from auto-aiming at one team to the other.

Driver manipulation

Beginning with XQZ, Counter-Strike has had a long tradition of being susceptive to altered drivers. As any modern computer game, Counter-Strike makes heavy use of Win32 infrastructure – Windows API, DirectXfor input, networking and sound, and the ability to use either Direct3D or OpenGL for the graphics. Theoretically, each one of these components could be manipulated to gain an unfair advantage. Although almost all drivers could be used, in practice, almost exclusively OpenGL and DirectX infrastructure, and more rarely, mouse drivers are manipulated.

Cheating-Death, unless disabled properly by specialized support hacks, generally detects replaced OpenGL drivers, VAC at one time banned users with a certain ASUS graphics card because the drivers replaced the normal DLL supplied with Windows during installation. Coincidentally, certain ASUS drivers at some point also allowed for wallhacks without requiring any additional drivers. Such False positives have seriously harmed the efforts of the ban-them-all proponents. VAC currently does not detect these cheats, which are the easiest to create.

Driver manipulations are especially nasty to detect, as basically every file on the computer could be part of a legitimate driver or a cheat. Therefore it is essentially impossible for both a Lan-Party admin or an anti-cheat tool to detect such a cheat, even when being freely available to search the suspected cheater’s computer.

Proxies
There are no known public cheats that utilize proxies, and thus are never detected. But some people suspect that proxy-like cheats exist, which could allow a cheater to remain safe from both visual detection on a lan-party, and known client- and server-side anti cheat mechanisms.

Proxies are exclusively aimbots and are giving themselves away by not having the crosshair correlate to the position of the actual impact. With small FOVs however, these cheats can be both extremely stealthy and effective even in lan play, as hits can easily be attributed to Counter-Strike’s relatively inaccurate weapons, so called lucking.

Hackers are the scum of the Earth! Only three groups of people are worse: Nazi war criminals, suicide bombers and people who bought Daphne and Celeste singles (you know who you are).

For some reason they like to highlight their nabishness (c’mon Oxford Dictionary 2008, make me a hero), and show that they spend evenings cheating at a game which is very easy to be reasonably good at.

Obviously, the easiest way to beat them is to ban them and stop them from playing on the servers we all enjoy. Before we can do that though, we need to determine that they are cheating and then we need proof.

What to look for:

Here are just a few things to look out for when speccing a suspected hacker. There are many others and please feel free to name your own with a comment at the bottom.

• Ridiculously high score. Its not difficult to get a score of 30-5, 40-7 etc but if it’s waaaay high and the death count is low. This first point is only a hint or a suspicion raiser. A high score does not mean a cheater.
  
• Shaky crosshair. If you spec them and their crosshair is all over the place, in a manner that you would have trouble playing like that, chances are its an aimbot.
• Constant headshots. As a pistol whore I aim for the head always, on most servers my headshot percentage is around 50-65% (on a good day). A pro would be higher, obviously. Aimbotters tend to get headshots with most weapons and very often. However, more advanced aimbots dont just aim for the head but also the torso. If you suspect someone of cheating but they aren’t getting too many headshots, dont dismiss them on that fact alone. But, a high number of headshots in itself is not proof of hacking. Please see the next point.
• Look at them run, where are they aiming? A good player will run with his crosshair at head height, thats a reason they get a lot of kills. Now, going on the point prior to this, if they get a lot of headshots but always run around aiming down like a lot of noobs do, this is a good sign that they may have some kind of aimbot.
• Looking through walls. Yes wallhackers look through walls. The real morons out there actually do it blatantly even when there are seven people in spectator mode.
• Pre-fire. Some people pre-fire at every obvious hiding place, this is OK though a bit wasteful and a great help to the enemy to let them know someone is approaching. If someone has radar hacks or wallhacks they will pre-fire only in places where the enemy actually is.
• Look at the player. What is his Steam ID? If it’s four digits then there’s a good reason why he’s kicking your arse. If it’s eight digits then be suspicious, but this isn’t proof by itself. What is his name? Is his name offensive, immature or full of random characters and 1337 speak? Member of a clan? Check them out.
• Running super fast. Obvious one really, if he’s running twice as fast as you, then its speed hacks and I’ve never seen a speedhacker that doesn’t have aimbot, apart from the ones who only go for knife kills.

How to deal with hackers:

You have two choices: Leave and join another server or try and get rid of them. The first choice is easy, the second is not.

Once you have suspected someone of cheating (and it’s not just you being a nab at CS:S) here is what to do. Spec them. Go into the console and type ‘demo ***’ instead of asterisks type something that you will remember. Then continue to spec him for a while until you feel as though you have seen enough ‘proof’. This will be saved into your counter strike folder and the file can then be sent to others.

At no point announce that you think he is hacking. A lot of cheaters will then promptly leave for another server. if you have to talk about him do it in team chat (press ‘u’) or talk when you’re dead and he isn’t. If an admin is on the server type @ and your message to send it to them alone.

Ok, you have your demo, you feel there is enough in there to convince people that this guys is cheating. Go to your console again and type ’status’. This will bring up a list of everyone on the server along with their Steam ID. Make a note of it or copy it and paste elsewhere. Or, on some servers, you can type ‘zb_netinfo’ which gives the same info plus the rates that they are using. I have a big thing about people having low rates, but that’s another rant for another post, lol.

Ok, so now you should have a demo of the hacker and his name (at that time) and Steam ID. The next step is to find an admin for your favourite server. You may already know one and how to contact them. If not then visit the forums for the clan who run the server, most have the website address pop up in intervals so keep an eye out. If one is online then add to your steam friends on on x-fire, their details should also be on the website.

Send them a message stating when this hacker was online, give their name and Steam ID and send them the demo file (what did you name it as again?). Also say why you think they were hacking.

It is now in their hands. If they decide it was a hacker then they will be bitch slapped off the server.

Another option is to send to Steambans.com. This is very popular but I have my doubts about their effectiveness. At the end of the day (you go to bed), it is very rare to be 100% sure that someone is cheating. An admin has the right to decide whether one person should be allowed on their server. I don’t like the idea that a handful of so-called experts can stop someone from going on thousands of servers because they think they are cheating.

If you get banned off a server for cheating and you are innocent it’s very annoying, especially if that is one of your favourite servers, believe me, I’ve had it done to me many times. But imagine how much more worse it would be if you couldn’t get on loads of servers and you were innocent. Mistakes are made by even the best of ’spotters’. My personal preference is let each server’s admin take charge of their own server.

So there you have it, it’s not an exhaustive list, but it should point you in the right direction and give you a good place to start.

I’ll end it here as I fancy a frag. Now, where did I put my aimbot mousepad?

Never put your full trust in a flashbang.

The Q button is your friend, make sure you know what you’ll switch to though.

Use a smoke as a fake flash.

If you are in the middle of reloading but still have some rounds left in the mag and someone pops out and attacks you, dont wait for the reload to finish. Instead, press Q twice to switch back to your gun and cancelling the reload. This also works when taking a silencer on/off.

In a match when you kill someone then can still see from their corpse for a few seconds, they will call which way you are heading. So wait a few seconds and then change your direction, especially useful if you’re the last man standing on your team.

On Dust2 when going short A there is a ledge along the catwalk. Running on that will sound as though you are running down mid rather than the heavy footsteps of the paved catwalk.

This doesn’t involve a grassy knol, a second shooter or even a dead president. Here is a cheeky trick to use on a pistol server or when you and your opponent both have pistols.

Ok, imagine the scene: Your tearing round a map and come across a hostile, you both have pistols and start squeezing triggers. Sooner or later you both run out of bullets, if one of you don’t end up a bloody heap on the floor, then you both start either reloading or switch to knives. Maybe one starts to reload whilst the other one gets his knife out.

When I’m out and about pistol whoring, not that I do it that much lol, I always have my knife ready and waiting for a quick tap of the Q button to get that cheap frag. Now here’s where the sneaky, down right cheeky and cheap tip comes into play. Engage the enemy, fire ya little army of lead soldiers but stop and switch to knife when you have one bullet left. All the while trying to dodge his shots, obviously. He may have a few rounds left, especially if he’s using the deagle and firing a bit slower. Come at him with the knife, strafing all the while. Be careful though, he sees you with a knife out and he may take extra care with his last few rounds. When he runs out he wont be too fussed because he can reload whilst still backing off from you and plus, you haven’t reloaded yet.

This is the moment when you switch back to your pistol and deliver ya final package, BOOM! Smeg shot!! Out of ‘nowhere’ a bullet magically appears in your chamber without you reloading. Obviously, you can save a few bullets in the chamber so that you have back-up should ya first shot miss (noob), but it feels a whole lot better if ya save just one.

Reading this may seem a bit strange, but it does work. Make sure that knife is on Q and that you keep advancing towards him whilst firing and continue when you draw your knife. Strafe out those last rounds and take him out once he’s spent.

Ok, its been a while since an update and , as I’m at work, here’s a nice, short and quirky tip I can get away with writing whilst sat opposite my boss. Only ideal for public servers with noobs on:

Trapped with no flashbangs or smoke nades: Right, so your trapped behind something, a box or a corner, and a guy knows your there and you can sense him just crouching and aiming head height ready to pick your noggin off. You’re out of flashes, you even used your smoke to spoil the noob AWPers fun.

Don’t worry, it’s not over yet!

There are two last ditch efforts you can try before just leaping out John Woo style, hoping to pick them off before they deliver a lead nugget to your head. Most likely you’ll have a pistol and a rifle (noob, lol). The first thing you can do is throw your pistol just as you would a flashbang and then pop out and try and catch him off guard. He may think its a flash (though few good players do) and turn away, or it may just distract him enough for you to get your noob rifle off first, thus ending his sorry round.

Secondly, if you’re good with a pistol and feel extra cocky (and suicidal) you can do a reverse of the above. Now, nobody in their right mind would see a rifle hurtling towards and think ‘crap, a flashbang, I must turn my back and retreat’. So, you don’t throw it like a flashbang. Instead the aim hear is purely distraction and when i say distraction I’m talking fractions of a second. The guy isn’t going to be staring at a pretty M4 (’oooh, it even has a fancy silencer’) flying through the air all day. You’re gonna have to through it, not to him, but straight across where you would strafe out. Try and get it as high and far as possible. The important thing here is to get out as soon as you throw it so that as your pistol is ready to fire, your crosshair is on him.

This sounds a bit daft but it really does work on the average schmoe you find on public servers, but don’t expect everyone to fall for it and to get away with doing it every time with the same guy. I’ve even seen people firing at rifles that have been thrown, lol. If you try this in a mid+ match then you must be very desperate or just want to die in style, lol.

Final tip: If you only have a pistol, don’t throw that and hope to get a knife, otherwise you’ll be dead before you have time to write and complain on here.

Yay, another tactic where everyone sticks together.

We’re going to go the long way to bombsite A, but on the way we are going to cause a distraction at B to hold off anyone there.

First step, lob a smoke from spawn to mid doors. Everyone rushes tunnels and heads right. Someone, not the lead guy, lobs a smoke into B and sticks with the rest of the crew. Everyone runs from lower, up mid, and there’s a nice cloud of smoke at the doors to protect against any sniper. The team need to be on guard for any CT rushing long doors, the could meet him head on at tree so get ready to take anyone down. Head through to short, its important that everyone is still together, there will likely be someone at short but he/they wont stand a chance against five Ts. Then it is the job to secure the sight and plant the bomb which the team should have their own tactics for this.

This is not a tactic that you are going to use every round. The benefits of it though are the distraction at B, holding off B defenders, and it buys time to draw out any rushers from long. Sometimes you want to hold outside of a site when you know the enemy have a tendency to rush most of the time, on this tactic, a long rusher will come face to face with the full team around the tree (if he goes through T spawn then thats one less guy to worry about for now).

The B Rush may be one of the simplest tactics on paper, but it is also the easiest one to screw up by doing the tiniest things wrong.

The basic idea is to simply run as fast as your clogs will carry you into the tunnels, never stopping.  As the lead man enters the tunnel he looks right, to take out anyone on the steps.  Without stopping he or the man behind, depending on who is in front after any stair shenanigans will flash into B as soon as they enter the final part of the tunnel.  Only one person should flash and that is whoever is in the front.  Everyone then piles in and then wipes out anyone in there, gets the bomb down and gets into a defensive position.

The first big problem to this plan is what the enemy does.  Sometimes the enemy will have one or two people rush tunnels, if this is the case then the T with the flash in his hands is going to get wiped out.   The second thing they could do is to double nade the tunnels, and with everyone close together, this could be deadly if well timed.  The third thing is that they could stay put but flash.  Now a noob team, time and time again will make the mistake of trying to turn back.  They are all blind, the guys at the front are trying to retreat and the guys at the back are trying to go forward with the rush.  This leaves one nice huddle of blind sitting ducks, waiting to be pot-shotted by a CT.

This brings us to the biggest cause for a B Rush failure.  Once you are in the final part of the tunnel on a B Rush, you do not stop or turn around until you are in the bombsite.  I’ll repeat that and put it in bold so that the nubcakes don’t miss it.   Once you are in the final part of the tunnel on a B Rush, you do not stop or turn around until you are in the bombsite.  This still applies even if you come down with the Stevie Wonders.  Once you stop or turn around it throws the team into confusion with everyone getting in each others way.  Do not stop, do not turn around.  Get in there, visualise the site in your head, try to get to the steps at B platform where you will get at least some cover.

Well, let’s assume that your team got into the bombsite ok, get the bomb down at the front of the site, near the barrels.  This allows for maximum coverage of the bomb.  A lot of the time in a public server someone will plant in the back corner, under the window, or in the middle behind a box but this is foolish.  In these places the bomb can only be protected by one or two positions.  If someone was defusing then you would have to run all the way into the site to kill him (or even knw that he was there).  By planting at the front the bomb can be guarded by the platform, by B Car, the tunnels and anyone outside B who pops through the door.

Whilst the bomb is being planted the team need to secure the position, firstly by protecting against anyone outside B doors.  I am not going to go into how to defend the bombsite in this post, there are many ways to do this and no single one is the best way.  I will say that it is handy to have someone in tunnels indicated by the arrow.  There may be a seperate article on bombsite defending in general in the future, but not at this moment.

To flash bombsite B, one of the best methods is to rebound it off the wall as shown below.  This will get the flash more centrally into the site as well as away from the sightline of the rushing Ts.  The Ts should also turn their backs to the flash but whilst still advancing into the site.  Once in, spread out and take out anyone in there.  If anyone is hiding at the back, double nade it if possible.

The Decoy is an interesting tactic as it takes a step up from other tactics by introducing the team to the concept of mind games and tricking the enemy.  The idea behind decoy tactics are to keep some members of the opposite team busy at one site, whilst your team get into the other.

Team B, consisting of 4 players and the bomb, are heading to A, in this instance they are going to go via long.  They hold off either outside long doors or at long a behind the corner, not letting the enemy see them.

Meanwhile, team A, a lone wolf, trots off to B tunnels.  His mission is to let any enemies at B know that there is someone there.  A nice flash and a smoke, as well as some shots into B will keep anyone there occupied.  Until they know for sure where the bomber is heading, they have to stay there and protect B, a noob may even call B just because they have seen someone.  A CT covering mid may also come over to protect.

Once adequate noise and presence is made known at B, team A then head down to A.  At this point it is usually 4 vs 4 or 4 vs 3 in the Ts favor, with one or two tied up at B still.  It is then their job to obviously get the bomb down and secure the site. Note that once the bomber is spotted, any half-good team will call the play as A and get his team mates over as quickly s possible.  This is when the lone wolf heads to lower tunnels to provide back-up against any CT heading through mid and short.  He can stay in the tunnel entrance or use his discretion to go up mid and short to guard the site or to go through mid doors and CT spawn.

In this example we used bombsite A as our target, but it can easily be flipped by having the Ts wait outside tunnels whilst the decoy smokes and flashes long A and generally makes his presence known.  If the bomb gets planted at B then he can head to crossover to snipe or go through mid to doors or lower tunnels.