Top 5 biggest mistakes in FACEIT & Premier matches

Good players make mistakes, great players learn from them. Improving in Counter-Strike requires practice, self-awareness, and a lot of repetition. When developing any skill, it's important to focus on the basics and optimise your habits—which ones are helping you, and which ones are hurting you? After analysing over 6,000 FACEIT and Premier games, we found the five biggest psychological and in-game mistakes that hold players back. Here they are, in order of importance:

5) Not buying armor on pistol rounds

If you feel useless in pistols, look at your buying habits first. The map is Ancient, you're the B anchor, and the first round is about to start. What do you buy? Maybe a molotov to stall the enemies if they rush? Maybe a smoke and kit to try and ninja defuse? Maybe a Five-Seven or a Deagle for a firepower edge? Based on the data, the right answer is the simplest one: just buy Kevlar. Always. On all maps, for both sides, buying armor is the best strategy for winning pistol rounds. The trend is linear, so the more players on your team that have armor, the more likely you are to win.

But if it's so simple, why do professional teams buy utility for their pistol strategies? Unsurprisingly, this trend only applies to FACEIT and matchmaking games; it disappears in pro matches and at the higher levels of the ESEA League. When well-structured teams play against each other, they cannot just run the most obvious strategies, because their opponents can easily counter them demo by watching a few demos or by adapting to the meta. Luckily for casual players, your opponents will never have the level of coordination required to anti-strat you—they'll be lucky if all five players have a working microphone.

4) Trying to IGL

Speaking of coordination, most of the players on your team will have very little. Many of them will only play in solo or duo queue and learn through sheer trial and error. They may be speaking a second or third language to communicate, if they communicate at all, and a majority have no intention of playing on a structured team. Even in FACEIT level 10 lobbies, players rarely practice anything beyond the basics. It doesn't matter how awesome the latest NartOutHere execute you've memorised is. The best tactics are the ones your teammates can execute correctly. If that means "smokes A", rushing B, or defaulting every round, so be it! Statistically, the best pug teams are the ones that keep it simple, execute the basics correctly, and only play differently when the default stops working.

If you want to win games more consistently, become a better soldier, not a better commander. It's best to lead your team from the front. Make aggressive plays and create space on the map. Use your spawns to go for opening picks and free up your teammates to make plays themselves. If you always find yourself playing the "support" role, constantly throwing utility and ending up the last one alive, then you are not having enough impact on the game. This can happen for a few reasons, but most commonly occurs when a player doesn't trust their mechanics. If that's the case for you, we recommend you take a look at the following live coaching session. Your teammates (and ELO) will thank you!

3) Blaming your teammates

Unless you play exclusively with friends, you'll find teammates so awful that the game will feel almost unwinnable. You'll wonder if they paid for a boosting service, bought their account, or started playing with a steering wheel. Considering how many games start one-sided and end in a draw, these nightmare matches are the exception. As a thought experiment, ask yourself, "If my favourite pro player entered this game in my place, would he complain about my teammates or would he drop 30 kills and win?" You are the only constant variable in every map you play, so your ELO depends on your average performance. You will always have sub-optimal habits that can be fixed with a demo review. You will always have some weaker area of your mechanics that can be trained with Refrag or various free workshop maps. If your ELO is bad, it's likely because you're bad. And that's okay!

It's a hard pill to swallow, and there's over a decade of psychological literature explaining why: people don't like to admit when they're not as good as they'd like to be, so they take their frustration out on others to protect their self-image. Interestingly, the better we think we should be (compared to our current ELO), the more toxic we become. "It doesn't matter that I struggle to reach a 1.00 K/D! It's my teammates' fault for not listening. Or I'm playing against cheaters/smurfs. Or it's the game's fault." Remember, the only way to succeed at anything is to focus on what you can control (warm-up, practice routines, demo analysis) and ignore what you can't. So if you want to rise to the top of the rankings, embrace your mistakes and climb the leaderboards faster.

2) Changing your positions

When you play on a map, you should always have a favorite position. Some players prefer to go solo and bomb. Others prefer to move to the center of the map and participate in all the action. It is easier to charge from positions where you participate in more firefights, so it is recommended to choose one of these spots and try to dominate it. But no matter where you play, try to always go to the same position on the map. This is the only way to get consistency, learn the timing and find the right solutions in different scenarios. If you often have very good games followed by very bad ones, specializing in a certain area of the map will speed up the development of consistency.

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1) Search with the SHIFT/W key.

The main mistake we see is that players search incorrectly when entering new areas of the map. <more></more>