The Importance of Decision Making

The decisions you make range from the angles you choose to play all the way to how you handle and play out 1vX clutch situations. How you decide how to play these situations comes from your past experiences playing in similar situations and your knowledge of the current scenario.

The first and most important step is to stop hesitating when you are playing. Those few seconds where you ran from spot to spot trying to pick out your preferred after plant spot are crucial. Every second you waste is given to the other team and gives them the option to take control of the situation. It is also the first step to gaining experience, if you die in the time you were trying to decide how to play it, you will never see how it would have played out if you had chosen a spot.

Your goal in all of these different scenarios is to turn whatever engagement you are in, into as many 1v1 aim duels as possible, ideally ones where you have superior positioning. This is also where the playstyle of the individual players will show. A player like Krimz, you can count on playing with a more classic and standard approach. The opposite could be said if JW was trying to clutch out the same round He would play it very aggressively, in a more unusual way which pairs well with his overly aggressive style.

The video above is a very good example of overall awareness and commitment to the way he approached it. He turned it into 1v1 aim duels removing the other team's player advantage while positioning himself to play the best angles he has available. Hiko also does well at being aware of the bomb time and the position of the last player knowing he doesn't have time to push all the way to chicken coup get the kill and get back to the bomb. So that leaves him with the option of wall-banging him down which is exactly what what he does and he wins the round.

One of the harder aspects of developing your own style of play is balancing aggression, sometimes the risk versus reward of a play makes it not worth even attempting and you have to recognize the stress it can put on your team. Sometimes the weight that you put on your team when you go for the early push or an aggressive peek and put your team down a player can be too much for them to overcome. Worse is when you already have the player advantage and need to just play trades and you can guarantee yourselves the win, until people want the frag more than they want the round, so they peek and die. This is especially true for the CT's, it's often times much harder to comeback from a player deficit due to getting stretched out all over the map afterwards.

The opposite could be said for T side. You may want to balance the fast pushes on spots with the slow gaining of map control in others. No matter how you start the round eventually you will have to get aggressive and get the entry at a reasonable time otherwise you might find yourselves in an almost Na'Vi style scene where you have less than 20 seconds to take the site and plant. Then you need to gain some form of control for the afterplant, which is oftentimes just sitting on top of the bomb, a very weak position that leaves you too open to various angles.

Smoke pushing with flashes is a common strategy in all ranks of the game, but oftentimes works rarely and is only truly used efficiently by pro players due to their understanding of when to do so. Player examples would be that Snax is a very good player at playing around the corners of the smoke and getting surprise kills. Whereas Stewie2k has made a habit of pushing smokes and, in doing so, has made it too obvious a tactic for it to work reliably.

Its a fine line to balance and it takes a while to gain the experience to know which to chose and to stay calm in clutch situations, but the only way to get better at them is to continually put yourself in the same scenario.

The three best ways to improve your decisions would be Match Making, Retake Servers, and to watch pro players. Obviously MM is pretty straight forward. Just queue up and pay attention to how you die and how you could have played it differently. Retake servers are just that they are community run servers that you can search for that only put you in after plant retake situations. This is arguably the most efficient way due to not having to wait in MM for the rounds to get to that point. Last, but not least, is to watch pro players. Pay less attention to what they do and more attention to trying to figure out why they're doing it. If you only see what they do, it will be near impossible for you to implement it into your own games because you aren't aware of why what they did worked. You want to be able pick apart one of the player's plays and know why they chose the angles and positions they played from with the timing of the peeks and engagements they paired with it. When you understand the why, the plays they make become possible to emulate into your own games and it builds your knowledge and understanding of the game.

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