Want to learn how the professionals warmup and prepare themselves for competitive matches? In this article, we take a look at the top tips for mastering a CS:GO pro routine.
We’ll start by taking a look at what some of the top pro players do to warmup for a match. We’ll then look into their practice routine so that you can take pointers from the pros to improve your aim and reaction time. After that, we’ll have a look at some pro configs and an opportunity to try out different pro crosshairs.
Whilst details about the average CS:GO pro routine have yet to be shared, we do have some information from some professional players that have shared their schedule with the CS:GO community in the past. As you can imagine, the average pro player puts in a lot of hours every day. At the end of the day, playing Counter Strike is their job. If you wanted to mimic this kind of practice, you could simply spend less time on each part that is explained below. According to CajunB, a former member of Astralis, the old Astralis roster used to play 5 days a week, from Sunday to Thursday.
A normal schedule would consist of 8-10 hours of play. 2-4 hours of that time would be on individual play. (so aim maps, retakes, and general competitive pugs, for example.) The remaining time would then be spent together as a team. In the past, the old Astralis roster would start at 5PM with 1 hour of strategizing and practicing tactics. After that, they’d play from 6PM to 11PM and practice their tactics against other teams. The maps and teams they’d play would depend on what they decided they’d like to practice the most during the initial tactics hour.
If you wanted to run your own CS:GO pro team, we’d suggest using a similar format. Start up by getting some individual play time so that all players can warmup. After that, find up to an hour to go over some new tactics, and then go find some other teams to scrim against to test the new strategies for the rest of the evening.
Warming up is incredibly important. Not only does warming up get your aim up to scratch, but it gives you more time to build muscle memory and improve your aim overall.
There are many different ways to warmup in CS:GO, but how do the pros do it?
There are two major ways that CS:GO pros like to warmup their aim for the day. The first method is to fight against bots. Pros will use the aimbotz map found within the Steam workshop and use that to flick from bot to bot. Usually, pros will have a set number of kills they’d like to achieve before moving onto the next part of their warmup.
Another big part for warmups is to jump onto a deathmatch server. Pros won’t use the built-in deathmatch mode because the player count is too small and you spend too long waiting to respawn each time you die. Instead, players look for 128 tick community deathmatch servers. These servers have far more players on and allow you to respawn instantly. Sometimes, players will look for pistol servers or headshot only servers too.
That’s pretty much as far as it goes when it comes to warming up aim – the majority of practice comes from playing scrims against other teams.
An important thing to realize is that there is no perfect CS:GO pro config. Just because a pro uses a certain resolution, sensitivity, and crosshair style, it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it and find it beneficial to your gameplay. However, using pro configs can be a great way to get a good starting point. From there, you can tweak and adjust things to your preference.
There are three major elements of a pro config that’s worth considering – the screen resolution/aspect ratio, the crosshair style, and the mouse sensitivity/DPI.
The variance in mouse sensitivity between pro players is massive. However, many pro players sit within a certain range. If your sensitivity is higher than this range, we’d suggest choosing the highest option within this range, and vice versa if your sensitivity is lower.
Typically, the lower sensitivity, the more accurate you can be. If you move your mouse to aim at a target but overcompensate for mouse movement, your crosshair will have traveled fewer pixels on the screen when using a lower sensitivity.
You cannot go too low with your sensitivity, however. You still need to be able to quickly rotate your camera in case you are shot from behind. You also need to be able to do this in one quick motion, without running out of room on your mouse mat. Typically, pros find they’re happy with being able to do as much as a 180 degree turn in one quick flick of their mouse.
So, what sensitivity is best? The majority of pro players fall in between 1.7 and 2.5 sensitivity in game, and 400 DPI on their mouse. Here are the five most common pro sensitivities:
Pick one of these sensitivities and then run the check list below:
The resolution you use really only comes down to personal preference. Many old school CS players used to play on lower resolution monitors, so they’re still using old resolutions. For the most part, we’d suggest sticking to plain old 1920×1080, or choosing a resolution and aspect ratio from the top picks as indicated below.
The best way to find and test pro crosshairs in CS:GO is to download the crosshair generator map from Crashz.
Thanks for taking the time to read our guide on the best CS:GO pro routines, warmups, and configs. Let us know if this guide has proven useful. Do not forget to check our wikis about the best Counter-Strike crosshair and Counter-Strike ranking system.
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