Cardboard cutouts don’t shoot back © Gamebanana

In the heat of a heavy firefight it’s hard not to clamp down on your mouse button and just hope for the best. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s somewhat punishing take on the mechanics of firearm accuracy means that most attempts to spray and pray end up with bullets everywhere except their intended resting place.

Counter-intuitively, the best way to ensure your shots land when you’re under fire is to stay still and pop rounds off one by one. But honestly, who has time for that? When you absolutely, positively have to get all of your bullets out of your gun while simultaneously ducking for cover, you’re going to need to learn how to keep that recoil under control. After all, it’s how the pros do it.

To pull out anything close to as coordinated as this Krimz clip below, keeping Fnatic alive in ESL Cologne this summer, you’ve got to understand how CS:GO guns work. Learning about recoil is a bit of a double-edged sword, as there are equally important theory and practical elements to it, but thinking too much will eventually start to cause problems.

On the academic side of things, every automatic gun in the game has its own spray pattern, that is the “shape” of the recoil when you fire without pausing to reset. This shape can be seen if you fire bullets at a wall, keeping your crosshair in the same place. When you fire in longer bursts, your shots start hitting higher up the wall as your virtual rifle kicks back in your hands and rears up.

The trick to recoil, though, is that this pattern is the same every single time you go full auto Rambo with each gun. Meaning by memorising the pattern for guns you use most often – that’ll be the AK-47 and M4A1 – you can draw the “shape” in reverse with your crosshair and watch every shot land home on your original target. That’s where the practical play comes in.

Muscle memory is more than just the majority of skill at play in CS:GO. Twitch reflexes and strategy do their part, but the foundations that knowledge like spray patterns lay must be built on by literally days of practice or more. Once you know what you’re supposed to be doing, doing it is all that’s left. And what’s worse, thinking about what you’re supposed to be doing can completely throw you off while doing it.

A clever solution to this Catch-22 is uLLeticaL’s Recoil Master map. Available on the Steam workshop, this is a firing range fully equipped to help you learn any patterns you feel up to the challenge of. The map uses dynamic “ghosthairs” painted onto a target wall to show where you need to reposition your aim to continue hitting that sweet spot at head height.

The good news is that not every single gun is vastly different from one another. The SG-553 has a fairly similar pattern to the AK, for example, and for the most part pulling your crosshair down will do a lot for the first 10 or so bullets in a clip. You can play around with different guns and change the ghosthairs to only show the next leading shot once you’ve got a feel for them.

After that, it’s a case of moving onto moving targets and maintaining the flow. Never think about the flow. This kills the flow. You can use a moving crosshair inside Recoil Master, so you still get some ghosthair prompts, but when you’ve got the subtle flick of the mouse down it would be better to move onto more real scenarios.

Before running out into DM and spraying your way to success, there are more training maps that will give you a more constructive environment to practice in. Another uLLeticaL creation, Aim Botz , gives you a shooting range full of bots and environmental obstacles that prevent any lucky strays from chipping away at the body while you’re aiming at a head peeking over a crate.