Mirage Core Smokes: Volume 1

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a game that takes a lot of time and commitment. For many people this is their first time ever playing a Counter-Strike game and it’s a difficult adjustment to most modern first-person shooters. When it’s your first time booting up your game you should be looking to improve your aim, control your spray, and then eventually learn your smokes. At a certain point in your Counter-Strike career you have to actually learn proper smokes and flashes because aim can’t take you everywhere. Aim is the core to the general gameplay but it can be enhanced and make you a better player once you actually can execute proper site takes.

While you’re climbing Valve’s ranking system (match making) and you finally reach the rank of Distinguished Master Guardian everyone is pretty much on par with you in terms of aiming and spray control to almost near perfection with some rough spots. When you finally hit that rank it’s about time you learn some smokes and flashes because people are actually able to hit you running out of terrorist ramp on Mirage. Flashes are crucial to making your enemies easy targets and putting them at uncomfortable angles.

The hardest part of Counter-Strike is actually doing the smokes. Smokes are able to cut off certain angles in a map, they almost act as walls that block your enemies and force them to either push through that smoke or adjust to a less comfortable spot. This is when you as a terrorist or a counter-terrorist retaking a site have to take advantage of the smokes and move in to take the site and kill any mobile enemies. You never want to fight a fair fight in any situation.

In the map Mirage, which I’ll be showing you today; there are two smokes I think everyone should know to win rounds on the terrorist side. First, I will be showing you the smoke for E-Stairs on A site. This smoke is going to help block any Counter-Terrorists attempting to spot any Terrorists coming out of Palace and denies Counter-Terrorists from peeking T-Ramp. 

To start doing this smoke you need to make you way to the T-Roof area as indicated in the first picture and put your crosshair in the middle of the wall at the entrance onto the roof. Then you have to align your crosshair with the two objects circled in the third picture and then release once you have it properly set. This should end up looking like the fourth picture blocking the view of any counter-terrorist set up in the position. Obviously this isn’t the only smoke you will be using but it is one of the more uncommon smokes used by average players and is good to know when going into A site with the combination of the jungle and CT-Spawn smoke.

 E-Stairs Smoke

Counter-Strike has an amazing community and Youtuber TomExNine helped me discover a command that you will need for your next smoke and for future smokes I will show you. This is an advance smoke and you should have prior knowledge of how to put things in your autoexec/console. Put this command in your console and in your autoexec if you like and replace the "key" in the third line with any key you like:

1.alias "+jumpthrow" "+jump;-attack"
2. alias "-jumpthrow" "-jump"
3. bind "key" "+jumpthrow" 

This will allow you to throw the best smoke grenades while jumping to execute certain smoke grenades that are very difficult to do without this bind. We will call this the "Jump Throw key" Mirage is a map that has a big emphasis on who has mid control as it allows you to go connector, catwalk or boost into the window room. As a terrorist you are able to grab mid control easily with this smoke that goes directly into the window denying any AWP or rifle presence from the counter-terrorists when entering the middle of Mirage. This smoke works best when used with the connector smoke that can be easily thrown without any special tricks from a teammate.

To execute this smoke you need to first need to familiarize yourself with a dot on one of the walls in T-spawn shown by picture one in the circle. In the back of T-Spawn there are a set of stairs and you want to position yourself in the very corner of the stairs as shown in picture two. Then you want to look back to the wall and locate that dot again and place the bottom of your crosshair on that dot. Once you have that all set up you just need to hold left click and press your “Jump Throw key” and it should land right below the window as shown in picture four and block all vision of any counter-terrorist attempting to get into the window room.

 Mid Smoke

These smokes give you a huge advantage when playing with your friends in conjunction with other smokes. I hope this will help you move on in the match making ranking system and get you to learn even more smokes that I will hopefully teach you in the future. Try out these smokes in an offline server and see if they work for you and keep doing it in more matches. Soon enough you won't need to refer to these pictures and it will just be muscle memory for you to execute these.