This article is some basic thoughts and ideas about grenading in Counter-Strike Source. There are a ton of different ways and angles to throw grenades based on your map. I’m not going to go over individual maps and angles but to give the reader the basics about grenading to their full potential!
Flashing
The difference between a decent team and a good team, a lot of times, is their flashing. Counter-Strike: Source is all about entry kills to make a 5 v 4 situation. The item with the greatest impact on entry kills is the flashbang.
Flashing Offense
The terrorists have a disadvantage a lot of the times on cal maps (mainly cbble, inferno, and nuke). To overcome that disadvantage you need to flash well. There are a few rules you should live by when flashing on offense. The first rule is to never flash an area by showing your body so that the enemy can shoot you. If you die while trying to throw a flashbang you are throwing it incorrectly. Most of the time it is an awper that will pick you off if you show yourself.
The second rule to flashing is to use your flashes! It seems simple enough but a mediocre player can go from mediocre to good if he uses his flashes smart. There should never be a round where you have left over flashes.
The third rule to flashing well is to know when not to engage a flashed enemy. A good flash towards an enemy defender will make him nervous that they are attacking his area. This will buy you a few more seconds that he will not rotate. The flash no attack technique is even more important in defending the planted bomb. You are making the defenders time to defuse that bomb smaller and smaller. A key flash on a defender trying to overtake the bombsite will make the defender go into a panic mode due to time constraints and make mistakes. After you kill the initial site defenders you should always have a teammate throw a flash to the area where the “middle man” or “first rotator” will be coming from. For example, flashing over the B wall on Dust2, flashing connector on Cbbl, flashing connector/library on inferno with a B plant, and many other flash points on all the maps.
The fourth rule to flashing is to use your angles by throwing flashes off walls. You can do one of two things with this rule, watch some high level players throw their flashes in demos or practice with your teammates and see if a defender gets flashed or not. I would recommend watching the demos of some good flashers, mainly a srctv demo so you can see all the flashing a team does. The majority of the time your flashes will be off walls, over things, or traveling in the air.
The fifth rule to flashing is to keep the nade in the air for as long as possible by throwing it earlier. This works best when you are throwing at a different angle than the enemy is coming and not facing each other. Throwing a flash like this will give the enemy less time to turn around.
The final rule to flashing is to be a team. Know who is flashing and where they are flashing. It takes a lot of practice but getting your flashing down on dry runs before scrims/matches is very important. There will be a lot less team flashing.
Defensive Flashing Grenading
Defensive flashing, in my opinion, takes more skill than offensive flashing. A good defensive flasher has to use all the information that is given to him to make good decisions when flashing. Before I dive into that more here are the rules you should follow as a good defensive flasher:
The first rule to a good defensive flasher is to know your maps with your eyes closed. This might seem like an odd suggestion but closing your eyes and trying to navigate your way around the map with your eyes closed will help you tremendously. Just like if you walk around your house/apartment with your eyes closed you could navigate around the house with fair certainty you should have that same level of perception in CSS. The reason you need to know this is you have to be able to counter-flash well and the majority of the times when you counter-flash you are blind yourself. Even if your own flash blinds you, you are still disrupting the enemy’s strategy and entry kills. You then need to maneuver yourself into an area for cover while being blind. The goal to counter-flashing is to be able to blind the offense so that when the fighting ensues either it is on equal footing or you flash the enemy and take the advantage. This is the main reason you need to have your nades bound so you can just pull the one up you want to throw, a second means life or death when counter-flashing.
The second rule to being a good defensive flasher is entry flashes to the bombsite you are covering. A lot of T strats work on the position you get when you spawn to rush a bombsite before the defense can dig in. A good entry flash will take away that spawn advantage that the offense had.
The third rule to being a good defensive flasher is to know the time it takes to get from one point to another. By using your radar and death messages you can estimate the amount of time it will take the enemy to get to the point you want to flash. Knowing this will help save your team rounds as you can easily make a 5 v 4 disadvantage into a defensive advantage by taking out 1 or 2 flashed offensive players.
The fourth rule to being a good defensive flasher is to use your nades so that the enemy terrorists cannot use your flashes against your team. More times than naught the flashes the offense uses to defend a planted bomb are flashes they pick up from entry kills. If you are defending an entry point with significance on having a 2:1 kill ratio, especially if you are rifling, you need to use those flashes. Especially if you are clearly outnumbered, just dump those flashes and try to get kills. For example if you are playing long A defense on dust2 a first entry flash will stop them from rushing you. You then want to get an entry kill or two without an over-abundance of risk to yourself. You then hide around a corner or in the pit and flash the remaining players and try to kill them. If you find yourself defending a lot of areas like this you must be decisive on throwing your flash or the enemy will get to close to you.
The fifth rule to being a good defensive flasher is when you are over-taking a planted bomb you must have a quality entry flash. Without that entry flash your team will get bogged down in shooting matches that will waste your time. Let your team know of your entry flash so that they know how to behave based on the flash.
He Grenading
HE grenading is pretty straightforward. If you shoot an enemy twice with a rifle and he goes for cover throw a nade where he took cover. Use the third rule of being a good defensive flasher by knowing how long it will take for an enemy to rotate to the spot you want to throw your nade at. Make sure your teammates let you know if their health is low for a good pre-nade. Pre-nade spots enemies like to sit at the most without even knowing they are there or not. More on nading for information later in this article.
Smoke Grenades
Offense
Smoke grenades on offense are important to any strategy. Lets first go over the things not to do with a smoke grenade on offense. The first thing to not do with a smoke grenade on offense is to smoke an area that you would have had the advantage to rush based on your spawn. The second thing to not do with a smoke grenade on offense is to throw it in the area that you are going to walk through before you get to the choke point, you will die. For example throwing a smoke ON lower ramp B on train. The third thing not to do when smoking offensively is to use the smoke as a means to “fake” but actually not engaging the enemy. Good teams will not fall for that. The last thing is to not use smoke grenades carelessly, you must take your time when throwing a smoke or have practiced it enough that you know exactly how to throw it.
Now a smoke grenade used properly is a great asset. First you need to know how to throw the nade far enough to block your entrance into an area but to not block your team’s vision when entering the area. The best way this is used is to create a wall of smoke but not to walk through the smoke but to have the smoke thrown far enough out so that you can go to the side of the smoke and get positioning. For example on train smoking lower B ramp, to have it far enough up the sidewalk to stop an awper on top of the Z/connector hill but close enough that you can walk to the side and take the bombsite with an open air fire-fight. Practice flashing through smoke to the defender’s positions is a great strategy to when you are ready to engage the defense.
Defense
Defensive smoke is something rarely used but can be quite effective depending on your position. One of the best CS players ever, 3D-Rambo plays Bombsite B on Dust2 with a defensive smoke. He will smoke the entrance corridor and play up close to the entrance. Then using flashes/nades he will be able to push into the corridor or to fire on rushing people through the smoke by popping out. By throwing a smoke into their path you can totally upset a team’s mentality. Another great use of a defensive smoke is to add more smoke to the enemy’s smoke. This might seem contradictory but a smoke thrown behind the enemy’s smoke will cause the enemy to have to walk through your smoke first with less vision and then maybe their own smoke. This would be the equivalent of if your own team on offense through a smoke too short and you would have to walk through it. I have seen this tactic used in mid on Inferno quite a few times. Defensive smoking is all about your play-style and how you can handle seeing through smokes, give it a try if you are a rifler.
Information based on Grenading
To be honest this part of the grenade article is the reason I wanted to write this whole thing. I got the idea from seeing the same title of a prime account article on gotfrag and realized I do this much more than I realize.
Offense
Getting information based on nading may seem like a waste of a nade or a flash but you are also nading the enemy for damage or flashing them if they are there. Getting information on offense based on your nade is an educated guess of where you think the enemy might be. You throw your nade to an area you believe an enemy is at or possibly rotating through and if you hit them you will hear the difference in the noise that it makes. This lets you know if the enemy is there or not and to react accordingly. If a defending player gets flashed he has two options: 1) run to a spot blindly for cover or 2) stay quiet so that the enemy doesn’t hear them move. If he chooses the first option you will be able to hear him retreat but if he chooses the second option you should still have him because he will be blind and closer to you. Getting information based on the enemy’s nading is extremely important as well. If you know that they will rush in as soon as they throw the second flashbang you can react accordingly.
Defense
Figuring out where the attack might come from is the first way to use nades as a gathering tool for information. For example if you are playing mid B(source) on Inferno and you throw a nade into the middle and off the wall to where the large hay wagon is you can use the sound it makes when it hits to inform your team that there is an enemy there and that bombsite A % of being attacked has gone done some. I don’t recommend rotating based off of the nade sounds unless you hear a ton of people move fast after that. Knowing how many flashes an enemy will throw on a particular choke point will also let you know if they are attacking that point or if they are faking. The best way to use your nades on defense is to find out if an enemy is waiting outside a certain entrance. For example a terrorist team likes to delay outside of B tunnels on Dust2, a quick nade throw off the wall and hearing the sound it makes will tell you if they are out there or not.
Be warned that sometimes the he grenade sounds don’t trigger properly if you don’t hit them well enough.
This is the end of the grenading article. I hope that you as a reader have realized that your grenades are just as important as your rifle or pistol when playing. Practice makes perfect, so always practice your grenading in Counter Strike Source no matter how you are playing.
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