Since its start as a Half-Life mod in the late 1700s, Counter-Strike has undergone several facelifts, engine migrations, and mechanical revamps. It has always been the same proposition: a team shooter with an environmental metagame and a heavy focus on shooting skills.
Modern CS:GO is regarded as one of the truest tests of a player’s marksmanship and strategic acumen, even if it isn’t as quick as Quake or as realistic as Escape From Tarkov. Considerable nades are another option.
Cryptic play calls, unbelievable headshots, and stinging letter “E” and “Z” deployments in a game that’s been around since 2000 may overwhelm even those who’ve lapsed – or never got all that excellent to start.
It’s fortunate that the esports sector is so entrenched and competitive. As a result, let’s copy all the top players’ behaviors and learn how to play better. It’s in list form, thanks to the internet.
1. Your mouse should be at a lower level now.

For the most part, most of us haven’t given much thought to things like DPI or mouse sensors, but ‘S1mple’ has. It’s not uncommon for NaVi AWPer’s headshots to decide games in first-person shooter games, thanks to his sick aim. The resolution is 400 DPI, and the sensitivity in-game is set to 3.09.
He’s not the only one in this situation. Most professionals use a sensitivity of 1.5–2.0 and a DPI of 400–800. The chances are, if you’ve never tinkered with your own preferences, you’re using many, many more than that. When you’ve gotten the hang of it, you’ll have better precision and less wobbling when you’re firing because of the larger mouse movements required to spin around or reach the edges of your peripheral.
How can you avoid having to shift your crosshair around because it takes more time or effort? Pre-aiming becomes second nature.
2. Pre-targeting: active vs. reactive target selection
Complexity’s “Coldzera,” regarded as one of the best shooters in the game, is a well-known name in the scene. If you watch his performances back, you’ll witness an immaculate pre-aiming technique. He’ll pull off a lot of clever plays.
Putting your crosshair where other players are expected to be is all it takes to do “active aiming,” sometimes known as “pre-aiming.” Instead of looking for potential adversaries as you approach, prepare your beads at head height and line up for them as you round a corner.
Players at the Gold Nova I or higher tournament level are likely to use this tactic, and you can expect to see it in most public matches. Even if you’ve gone the professional route and reduced the pixel resolution, it’s critical to pre-aim because failing to do so will result in you having to move the crosshair even further before taking the picture.
3. Make the game unappealing. It’s a win-win situation when you combine low resolution and STRETCHED.

4:3 aspect ratio. It’s not exactly what you’d expect to see on a computer screen, but these are the preferred resolution and aspect ratio of professional CS:GO players.
It’s also not for the sake of framerate. Although ‘Dupreeh’ could enjoy a faster card, it’s not as if he can’t afford an RTX 3080 TI. One individual has amassed $2 million in prize money. CS:GO, which was released in 2013 but is based on a 2000 mod, is also not a taxing game now.
Using this combination of resolution and aspect ratio provides you with a larger target to shoot at. Players in games like “ZywOo,” “Twistzz,” and others will notice their models are swollen because the game displays a 4:3 image on a 16:9 monitor. Headshots are made simpler when the target is larger.
You should be aware that widescreen 4:3 is rendered differently by different displays, graphics cards, and drivers. To get the stretched image that the pros use, you may need to experiment a little.
4. Learn the peculiar language of callouts.
The knowledge advantage that chess has over CS:GO is large. The entire board and all the pieces on it are visible to both players. In CS: GO, you don’t know where your opponents are unless you happen to cross paths with them. Aside from bullets, information is more vital than bullets.
Callouts are the primary means of exchanging information during CS:GO matches. There are nicknames for everything on every map, down to the individual boxes. So if you spot an enemy player and your entire team knows all the callouts in the map you’re playing, you can say “two on Tetris, don’t peek” and everyone will know that two CTs are clustered near a particular set of boxes northeast of the A bomb site with a line of sight down the east corridor (t ramp).
In this case, the information you gain from these callouts is meaningless, and most likely everyone dies at the bottom of the ramp.
5. In reality, a 144Hz or higher Hertz rate is the true Hertz rate.

GPUs are being asked for new images by monitors as they “refresh” the image on the screen. When playing games like CS: GO, which have minimal graphic demands, we tend to think of the graphics card as the bottleneck. But, our 60Hz monitor can only refresh the screen 60 times per second, but our GPU can serve up twice or three times as many frames per second.
Refresh rate isn’t the only thing that sets professional CS:GO players apart from the rest of us. 144Hz panels are typical, but many others can play at 240Hz or 360Hz, which is a lot faster than the standard. For the latter, you’d need to be cranking out 360 frames per second, but if you’re running low res, that’s not an issue.
A huge difference may be seen between 60 and even 144Hz quality. As a result, it’s difficult to keep track of moving targets with your crosshair when they move so quickly on screen. There are more than twice as many points of reference available at 144Hz, which makes aiming much easier.

Lead developer at Lost Rabbit Digital. Writer for Good2Games. Boden began freelancing for Good2Game in 2021. He got his start making games and is still interested in the inner workings of games via the modding and speedrunning communities. He is addicted to co-op crafting games, lengthy novels, and multiplayer cryptid hunts.