Unlike many other competitive games, CS:GO requires an incredible amount of hours of practising and perfecting some of the basic mechanics of the game. So much so, that many professional players spend countless hours honing their craft at the most basic level. Sure, you might know the spray pattern of the AK-47, but can you consistently outshoot your opponent? Can you mentally distinguish when it's ideal to spray or to tap down your opponent? Are you playing sluggish in your first game of the day? I'm going to explain some of the easiest ways to warm up and practise your basic mechanics in CS:GO and their benefits.

Where to start?

It's a good idea to refresh your memory of how each of the main weapons handle themselves and to know their spray patterns. Luckily these days there are custom maps available from the workshop which can show you these patterns and they are great for learning how each gun handles when spraying. I personally use Recoil Master and spend around 30 minutes practising with the main rifles I like to use in matches.

The next place to go should be another custom training map called Aim Botz and this time you will be faced with harmless bots. The idea here is to warm up your reflexes and increase the speed in which you can hit headshots without really thinking about it. This will improve your hand-eye coordination which is absolutely vital in a game like CS:GO. I would suggest spending about 15 minutes per weapon on this map. Aim Botz allows you to customise different aspects of the map and increase the difficulty of hitting the bots. You have the ability to make the bots move from side to side, adjust the speed at which they strafe, or even make them stand on uneven ground. There are endless possibilities with this map to train your basic aim and practise techniques you may have learned from the Recoil Master map.

Now you're ready for Deathmatch!

With the amount of deathmatch servers running 24/7, there really aren't any more excuses for not warming up your aim and movement before going into a competitive match. It's very easy to go into these servers with no real objective though, which can actually be counter productive and I would always advise deathmatching with a specific purpose. The most important thing here is to ignore your K/D ratio. That stat couldn't be more meaningless in these servers, everyone playing on those servers is there to practise their aim with different weapons. You want to try and frag opponents in different ways with each weapon. For example, I like to use the M4A4 first and, for the first 10 minutes or so, I will only try to spray my opponents down. Then, for the next 5-10 minutes, I might try and spray a little less and look for short bursts and long range tap downs. I will sometimes do this with the main rifles for roughly 30-40 minutes, and you will find that if you play the first two custom maps before going into deathmatch, it will feel much more productive than if you would have gone into deathmatch right off the bat.

To summarise

I cannot stress how important it is to warm up before playing CS:GO, following this simple guide will allow you to get the best out of your time and to avoid some of those groggy, sluggish first games of the day and will hopefully help you improve in the long term and climb the matchmaking ladder, good luck!

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