So You Want To Be A Sniper? Final part – positioning and AWP handling.

I know I´ve been kind of lazy writing this. My initial idea was to release this short after the first part, so you would not be stuck with a bit of the “course”. Oh well, I guess things does not always come out as planned.
When writing this I am on an airplane on my way to Korea and Seoul to compete in the e-stars tournament, alongside X7-Hacker, mibr and eStro. With the pre-tournament adrenaline pumping, I hope that I will be able to give you guys valuable insight on positioning and aiming with an AWP.

Where you position yourself do really matter!

My first and most basic advice for a fresh sniper would be to (a) always think about if the position you are in will allow you to hit an easy shot; and (b) if the position you are in will allow you to fall back if you miss a shot. The mentality when figuring out where to position yourself should be the same as with USP vs Glock -- you generally want to be positioned for long distance combats, due to the fact that the USP is much more accurate and does a lot more damage than Glock at long distances. When you get into close combats -- no matter if you are playing with an AWP facing rifles or with an USP facing Glocks -- you will be in a very unfavorable position. I´m not saying that you will never be in situations like these, because you will. When having to rotate towards a planted bomb is one thing that comes to mind. All I´m saying is that if you try to put a lot of effort in trying to avoid them, you will do a lot better.


When you get to the level when you start to play against very good teams, you have to mix up your play a lot more, and thus you cannot just take defensive positions because your game will get too predictable. But if you are not feeling that the opponents pick up on such things, do not try to make offensive plays that are a little more risky just to make your opponents keep guessing.


When discussing CS with my fellow AWP:er and friend, Brian “hpx” Christiensen from NoA, he made some really interesting points about how he plays his game. He said that while he might not be the best at hitting every shot, he played a very smart game and really stressed the importance of team play. Team play is the key to successful Counter-Strike and there cannot really be any argument made about it. Make sure that you really put time in figuring out how to make your AWP:er as efficient as possible. Make sure that the rifle players can back him up properly and vice versa. Every player is like a dancer on a theater -- everybody needs to know their moves in order to make the show as good as it can be. I hope this makes some sense at least.


At the highest level you have to think carefully about positioning all the time. Before the final at GameGune 2007 cArn and I decided to adjust our AWP tower (boost) down in the middle as CT on dust2 a bit, because we knew that cogu knew about our tower, having played them only weeks before at ESWC and we also knew that he was very good at, pixel by pixel, get himself in a position where he could kill me easier than I could kill him. By adjusting our tower by very little, I managed to kill him a couple of times in the final from our “new tower” , being a lot less likely to get killed myself, and we got the extra rounds we needed to come out on top in a very tight game.

Old tower:



New tower:



Personal development versus motivational issues.

I get tons of questions about how you improve yourself technically in Counter-Strike. Most of the questions I get are about aiming and there´s nothing wrong with asking such questions. I don´t think good aim is the most important feature of a good CS-player, but at the same time I can´t really deny the importance of being able to hit your shots, so I´m going to give it my best try.


I think one of the most important things is to have a steady plan. One of the things I recommend doing is setting up a goal for how good you want to get. A strong mind can usually overcome most obstacles. When I started to play CS back in the days (god, I feel like I belong in a museum or something having played for so long) I didn´t really care about getting good. It was all about having fun. I was one of the best, if not the best, player at the café I started to play at, but that didn´t really mean much. When I started to play in clans and moved from LAN to Internet I started to feel that I was quite good at the game and during a period of time, when I was around 14-15-16, I played a lot and felt that my game started to improve rapidly. The rest is, as the cliché says, history.


Nowadays I almost exclusively play CSDM, outside of the ordinary practice with the team. I feel that CSDM fits me perfectly, as it´s a very fast paced way of training and also a lot more intense than ordinary public, which tends to bore me pretty quick. One other thing that I find quite useful is to just try to imagine different scenarios in your head and play them out, imagining clicking at your mouse as fast as you can. If you play the same scenario in your head for a couple of times, you will notice that when you do actually get in a situation like that, you will be faster than usual, because your brain has repeated it happening when you thought about it.


I recorded a demo a while back for this blog. It´s not the best of demos but it will give you a glimpse of my training, when I was playing CSDM under the nickname “890”.


I hope that you can pick up some useful things when watching it. It might give you some good ideas about aiming, even though I´m mostly fooling around.

Download the demo here.

Get professional coaching from me.

Last in this blog I would like to give you guys the opportunity to win a two days long coaching session. This means that you can send me demos that I will watch and comment on, and we can talk about mentality in general and more specific about how YOU can improve your game. It will be a lot easier to give good advice when I´ve seen you play. We can also play some games if you live in Europe and have good ping to servers I have good ping at. You have to understand English, otherwise I don´t think you will get anything out of this.


The thing you have to do to enter this contest is to answer the following question:


How many DPI does the Razer Deathadder run at?


Just send your answer in a private message to me (“dsn”) at the Fnatic site. Write your answers with the subject “Deathadder DPI contest”. The winner will be announced the last of August. Good luck guys!

Thank you for reading,

Harley, "dsn".