Lurking is often considered a viable strategy in pro games where you can trust your team, but in matchmaking pugs many high level players recommend taking a more active role such as entry fragging to have a bigger impact on each round. If you’re anything like me though, you might struggle to play quickly enough to flick to heads, effectively transfer spray, or just find it difficult to win one on one engagements. By using map knowledge, positioning, grenades and other tools at your disposal to gain an advantage over your enemy, you can make up for an aim deficit making lurking a potential option when executed properly.

In its simplest form, lurking is essentially waiting for your team to push onto and take a site while you wait somewhere else to pick off the enemy team as they rotate to retake. While this can be an effective way to gain KD and indirectly hold a site after taking it when you’re in a Pug, there is no guarantee that your team will be able to plant the bomb. If they all die entering the site and you’re left alone without the bomb and out of position you’ve essentially done nothing to help your team for the round. Furthermore if you hide in the wrong spot, for example outside Banana on inferno, it is entirely possible that the CTs can come from another direction, such as Spawn, leaving you out of position to prevent a retake. Therefore, it is important that you take an active role to assist the rest of your team throughout the round rather than just at the end.

Don't be this guy, you're not being helpful

When a strat is called at the start of the round, you want to look at whether lurking would be considered a viable option in this scenario. If it’s an eco and your team is rushing it is probably better to go with your team and be there to force trades to at least get a bomb plant. On the other hand if you’re on a buy, playing slow and going for picks, an active lurking role can be invaluable. Let’s use Mirage as an example. Say you call a slow B take through Apartments. As a lurker, you can go towards AQ where you can throw a smoke and a few flashes to cause the enemy team to think it might be an A execute. To really sell the fake, you can attempt to pick a player and cause even more chaos. I like to smoke myself out to Tetris and use that position to fight players on Palace and peek towards Triple Stack. If you succeed, you can back off or you can continue to fight until your team takes the other site. The reason this is so successful is that players are always quick to call rotates in Pugs. It’s quite common for people to call ‘A/B execute, or All A’ upon seeing a smoke or having one person get picked. Use the lack of clear communication to your advantage. If unsuccessful, at least you have scouted for your team and you can inform them how many enemies are on the other site.

Pushing Tetris and going for a pick is an effective fake for Mirage

Another way to effectively lurk is to enter the site your team is taking late or from a different angle to take a positional advantage. Once again, using Mirage as an example, during an A execute you can hold Underpass and Mid until your team is on the site. From here it becomes simple communication. If the enemy pushes Short, you can get an easy pick. If not, then wait till your team calls Stairs or Jungle and you can push Connector and kill them before they even look at you. From this point it becomes a simple task to hold the site and win the round.

Use communication to work out where the enemy is and get behind them

A final potential tactic when lurking is to be aggressive rather than passive, using their rotation against them. One of the best ways to get kills on the enemy team is to push through the site they have evacuated after your team has taken the other site. Everything going well you’ll be behind the enemy who should be too focused on your teammates giving you the ability to easily frag them while also being in a position to defend the site from CTs coming from a different direction. The advantage of this is that you are able to easily help your team unlike when playing more passively where you may be out of position. It is also risky as a player who rotates late or expects your flank can easily hide and turn the tables, picking you off when you expect the area to be clear.

Nobody expects a Terrorist in their spawn

The key skills of being a successful lurker are map knowledge, timing and game sense. Anyone can sit in a corner and hope someone runs past them but to truly help your team you need to be able to decide when to be aggressive, when to fake, when to push and when to play passive. Given time, an understanding of strategies and observing your enemies tendencies during a game, you’ll find that, more often than not, you’re in a position that your enemy isn’t expecting or that you're able to open sites for your teammates without even participating in a push.