Damien Katz

Well, let's see..

1) you need 60fps constant for a twitch game like this. Use FRAPS to display an on-screen FPS meter in any game. Really helpful!

2) Follow other players. Don't run around by yourself if possible. 2 versus 1 is always sweet, sweet gun music.

3) Be patient! Impatience is the #1 killer of CS players, not virtua bullets.

That said, occasionally you will find yourself on teams that are horribly unfair, randomly stocked with newbies / awesome players, etc. Nothing you can do about it, just switch servers or wait for the map to end.

4) Get a nice mouse and a killer pair of headphones.

5) Outwit the 12-year olds: http://www.aminus.net/tactics/index.html

6) Check your ping to the servers you play on, anything around 100ms is unplayable. Between 50-100ms you should take the time delay into consideration: always aim a bit to where the target is going to be then. Under 50 you should be fine.

7) Due to the realistic weapon models the bullets disperse quite a bit in Counter-strike. If you want to learn to aim I advise to play some of the Quake series. (Which is even harder but the best preparation to learn the FPS craftmanship right).

I feel your pain. I even tried playing against BOTS on my own server and I still sucked. I did notice a difference however when I switched from an old wireless mouse to a less old plugged in one. I've never tried it with a true gaming mouse, but I don't doubt it would be better.

Ralph brings up some great points I forgot. Let me add my fiddy cent to them:

6) Yeah, I totally forgot about ping! Geez. Good point. You're good up to about 80ms, but beyond that, time to switch servers for sure. Lots of CS servers and everyone is on broadband, so there's no reason to even bother playing on a server where you can't get

I suck too man, but the above tips have helped. I bought a gaming mouse and now I am doing a lot better.

OKaY WrONg! listen to ME man! i was once like you and got pwned every round with about a 45 ping and CONSTANT fps. it takes practice and KNOWING what to practice! you CAN spray with the m4 (when u get good) but you have to learn how to control it ( HARD) in 1.6 but not that hard in css. you should aim at their upper chest, neck. shoot like 3-4 bullet spray while crouching. another strat is straffing! when u stop (when going the opposite way) SHOOT! 2-3 bullets go to maps like aim_ak-colt and practice! ^o^'

u think u can outwit those 12 yods ? ha c'mon man those kids know everything! they know the map like the back of their hand and they know how to shoot! plus they know strats! u have to simply learn to pwn!

I have been playing about a week now (after a few years break). I started out with a kill death ratio about 1:20, always dieing a lot more than killing. I am now at a radio of about 1 and have had some rounds with 20 kills to 3 deaths.

After reading around I read about shrinking the crosshair and changing the mouse sensitivity. I have a gaming mouse already, which helps. I set my crosshair (cl_crosshairscale, I think) to about 2200 through the console and my sensitivity is at about 1.6 I think. Change the brightness of the crosshair and I always use a colour of red.

I now spend a lot of time practising against lots of bots who are only armed with pistols. You might wonder why, the first trick to this game seems to be improving your accuracy (as they only have pistols I can tell when I am getting hit or shot at and practise my aim and not die quickly).

It seems if your first two / three shots from close - medium range miss then you are almost certianly dead against a good player. After 3 quick shots, your chances of hitting from anything other than close range are close to none. It also seems to take a second for the gun to steady itself again.

Aim high and get the head, I will often follow my own teams head movements for practise. After a few days I was getting a head shot kill rate of about 70% with the AK. The AK seems to be the only automatic gun with almost certian kills when shooting to the head, some guns take 2 shots to the head to kill depending on what seems to be luck.

The next step is learning the maps and playing as a team. I have head games when I have been 20 kills to 3 deaths, moved to the other team and ended up with 25 kills to 45 deaths...A good team appears to have a major impact on play.

It is mostly practise but there are still a suprising number of things you can read up on which will speed up the process. I actually don't think the difference between average players and bad players is that great. Afterall, in only a few days I am not totally embarrassing myself anymore.

I am still a complete noob and would welcome a game, email me if you wish.

It is absolutely ESSENTIAL at the higher levels to learn how to spray well with m4 and ak. (Obviously its harder for the ak). If you've ever watched the pros play, they do spray, and they spray very well.