Preparation –Time spent before joining the match server

MSL for North

The very first type of preparation a team needs to do is to create a base of tactics and defensive setups to build on. Often this means at least setting up a slow default tactic on the terrorist side, agreeing on roles in standard executions, and defining everyone’s defensive role. But once the basics are done and a team starts practicing, how does one develop new tactics and setups to bolster a team’s arsenal? In other words, how do you keep adding, improvising and improving to not stagnate and avoid running the same tactics and setups forever?If you can read the game at all – and I will elaborate more on that later – you can probably tell during a match what kind of tactic would work, even if your team has not gone over it or cannot execute it on the fly. The easiest way to decide what tactics to add is to figure out, either during the match or after reviewing demos, what would have worked so that next time in a similar situation you will have a practiced tactic ready to be executed successfully. Obviously you cannot add 1,000 tactics because it will be impossible to practice all of them, so focus on the most important ones – and realize you can add far more as time goes on. In fact, I would argue this is the biggest strength of long-tenured teams such asSecondly, often teams – whether on purpose or subconsciously – figure out what kind of tactics would beat them, and then use those on the terrorist side. Intuitively it makes sense: you are trying to break a defense, and the defense you know best to model tactics based on is your own. As a side note, keep this in mind when studying teams. Alternatively, sometimes you simply see a good-looking tactic ran by another team, and want to copy it. Often this will be an execution, with set smokes and flashes, but at times you will also come up with mid-round ideas, and in those cases it is impossible to understate the importance of not copying like a dumb student: make sure you understand what you are copying, if you choose to go down that route. Review enough demos to understand the contingencies; what to do when anything goes wrong – or make your own plans. They will develop with time, but players will appreciate having a better view of what is expected to happen, and going over the contingencies will give them a chance to voice their own opinions.You will also need to watch demos – unless you can relegate this job to your coach or analysts – of your opponents, as well as your own matches. Especially watching your own games is a severely underrated task which can solve problems faster than practicing or just about anything else, which is why I recommend doing so as a team. In a team-setting it is much easier to agree on what the problem is, what to change, and decide on a course of action going forward. You could also clip mistakes you see made and show to players one-by-one, but in either case it is important the players actually see what is going wrong, or they might simply think you are shifting blame. This becomes less of an issue as time goes on.For reviewing opponents, I have found the best way to be a brute-force approach, such as the one I used within preparing them for the IeSF grand final againstin 2016. If you watch five good demos of every map you might play, and then write down everything your opponent runs in those demos, odds are you will know 90% of what they like to do – and begin to see clear patterns. I used to separate rounds by fourth round, force buy, full buy and desperation buys, to categorize the team’s ideas – that makes it much easier to remember all of it. It is also important to understand if a certain tactic is likely to be opponent-specific anti-tactic, or a mid-game adjustment that is not likely to be used against you, and not focus on those.Once you are otherwise ready to go, make a mental plan for the coming match. I learned at a young age from sports the power of visualizing games before they take place – trying to imagine all scenarios you could conceive happening in the match, and how you would react to them. Not only will it make those split-second decisions in the match seem rehearsed when they happen, but you will also be able to think through what calls make sense in each scenario and improve your decision-making ex ante. I have also found that my teammates reacted positively to announcing as much of a game’s tactics to them in advance as possible: I would tell them which pistol rounds we will run, what we will do after a won/lost pistol round in different scenarios, and what tactics I planned to call. It also served as a brainstorming session to get everyone’s opinion – and thoughts especially if we had played against the opponent previously, whether in practice or matches – and to walk everyone through all relevant tactics once more.