For Terrorists, mid control on Dust II is crucial if you're not rushing a site. It allows your team to freely roam your side of the map and set up an eventual assault onto a bombsite. Taking it at first is relatively easy, given the right precautions. However, denying the CTs any info mid is a fantastic asset to have, as the uncertainty and lack of information keeps them guessing and keeps their numbers split.





Early Round

You've all been at the top of mid, staring down the scope of a sniper and counting the cross, but why do you do it? It's important for Ts to know the number of players on each bombsite and this is a fantastic early round way to determine just that. If there is 1 or less crossing, you can assume an A stack. If you count 3 or more crossing, the CTs are committing a lot of their resources to holding mid and B, potentially making an A take easier. However, most CT teams aren't stupid and will throw a smoke to cover cross or more recently, a standard HE grenade. This is to hide the intel from you and there's not much you can do about it. On the odd occasion, you may see a slightly deeper smoke than what you'd expect to cover the cross. This will usually be indicative of a mid play from the CTs. In this case, you should make a call to your B watcher to watch lower tunnels. This is an extremely important call to make because otherwise it may result in the CT getting one or more picks and falling back to the safety of CT spawn.





Establishing Mid Dominance

Taking mid is an important skill for any team to have, but having dominance of it and controlling what the CTs can do and where the can be is equally important. Whether you just want to run catwalk or split mid to B, controlling what your opponents can do is crucial. This doesn't mean forcing them out all-together, it simply means making sure they have as little info as possible on you. It usually doesn't take many resources to do this in matchmaking, typically a flash or two and some prefire. This is enough to get any CTs in the mid area to play more passively and not get a lot of information. If you can manage this with your team, it makes it especially hard for CTs to gather information on the eventual execute and makes them unable to stack a bombsite. Here is a useful flash to push the CTs out of line of sight to mid doors.

This is a fantastic easy-to-throw flash that is incredibly effective at clearing the area, especially if you're going to execute mid to B.





Rotations and Executes

Later in the round, when you need to decide on an execute based on knowledge gained throughout the round, you will almost always have to rotate some players to the targeted bombsite. Having mid control at this stage of the round is crucial, as without it your rotating players may be seen trying to get to the bombsite, or killed in the process. This will result in quick reinforcements to your targeted area of attack and decreases your chances of winning the round. It's such an important aspect of the late round that you may dedicate at least one player to holding any potential peeks or pushes from overly eager CTs.





B Split

B split is one of the oldest tricks in the books, but it's still highly effective. It is explained in the name, splitting your push to enter B site. It will usually consist of either 3 tunnels and 2 mid or 2 tunnels and 3 mid. The variation is unimportant for this example. To start, you will need to rotate several players into position from their holding point, for example the player catwalk will need to drop down to mid and the player holding long will need to get down mid. This makes mid control crucial throughout the round in order to safely rotate to setup positions. For the players pushing through mid, you will need to throw a simple smoke on order to smoke off CT spawn. This smoke is adequate, but only adequate. To completely block vision, you will need to throw a more complex smoke. Both smokes are shown below.





Basic Smoke:





Complex smoke (not necessary):





Note: The lineup is dragging down from the window until you reach the box that you're standing against. This smoke requires a jump throw.

Once these smokes are down, simply throw some flashes in order to deter any aggression through the smokes and make the call to tunnel players so they can start their push. Attacking from all angles can send the defense force on B site into complete disarray and will give you a great chance to take the site cleanly. If you can get the bomb down with at least 4 players still alive, you have a high chance to win the round, due to the difficult nature of a B site retake. Since you should still have one or two smokes left at this point, it's important to use them to block window and doors. Although they only cost $300, they are invaluable for a retake situation.

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