Team Phrike

How to practice lurking

If you’ve decided that you want to be the lurker on your team there’s a lot of work to be done. The main area that I think you should focus on is your gamesense. Watch a lot of demos from your own games to find out how players on your level react to the things you do. How do the players on a certain site generally react to a flashbang thrown in a certain spot at a certain time. If you notice a pattern you should try to figure out what triggered the response.

The best way to learn these things is to play a lot of games. Preferably against other pre-made teams, so that you know that they will communicate. It’s even more important that you focus and try to figure out how a specific opponent plays during the actual game and how you can use that knowledge to your advantage. If your team goes for an A-push and you throw your flashbangs and a smoke towards B, how long did it take for the B-players to get to A? Is it possible for you to play in a certain way to trick them into doing what you want them to do?

Because of the nature of your role, you should spend a lot of time on deathmatch servers. It’s crucial that you get good at winning those aim duels. It’s like that old Bruce Lee quote that’s been cited almost too many times: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times”. If you spend more time working on the basics of the game than your opponent, you give yourself a greater chance to come out on top of any given situation.

When you play games for practice purposes you should try to mix things up as much as possible so that, over time, you build a solid repertoire of plays that you can use in different situations. However, it’s important to remember that when you play matches you can lure your opponents into a false sense of security by going for the same exact play every single round. Usually those plays involve a smoke and two flashes. It’s important that you’re able to stay alive once they know what you’re up to. After a few rounds they might think that they’ve figured you out and when you throw your utility grenades they “know” that you’re alone. All of a sudden you show up with your entire team and the CTs haven’t started to rotate in time. GeT_RiGhT might not have been the player who came up with that style of play, but he sure was the one to make it famous. He’s able to pull it off on a professional level because of his raw individual skill. Like I said, put a lot of time into practicing the basics.