We've all had that moment when we are warmed up and ready for a competitive match, and we que up... and something goes terribly wrong.

Since staying in a game doesn't seem like an option for me today, I wanted to take a moment to start a guide on what you can do to take a few extra steps to make sure your next competitive game goes smoothly. I mean the odds are good you might even be qued in with me someday, so I want you to do everything you can to make sure your system isn't going to dump your client while your watching my back.

The following sections are likely not for everyone, most of you that rank high in CS:GO may even have a good laugh at this guide. If in doubt, give it a good read and see if anything in the sections below actually apply to you.

Guide written prior to Counter Strike 2...


Ratings are appreciated!

Your internet service provider, or ISP, may be the biggest bane of your Competitive play time. This is actually a fight I lost tonight and decided not to lose any more points trying to get game time in.

You have to be the master of your own internet connection, and everyone has their own situation. If it takes a few hours of technical support to keep your line live, do it! It'll save you the headache of disconnecting just as your pulling off an epic flick.

One of the things I do to help beat my ISP into submission is power cycling my modem (unplugging it, and plugging it back in) before a game session, and then trying a warm-up in another game mode before entering a competitive match.

Yeah, if your not plugged into your modem or router... your setting yourself up for lag.

You will notice connectivity issues, glitched frames, and if you still have your kill cams on for some reason... you will also notice the playbacks are pretty much showing you in slow motion.

The further away you are from your box, the more issues you will have. So if at all possible, make sure your plugged into your modem or router for competitive play.

I know, this isn't always an option, so at least make sure your machine is running at optimal levels if you can't plug it in.

You know that moment when you start to see your avatar jumping through frames and freezing... you press TAB to check your ping and dare to hope your client doesn't crash. If you find that you are over a hundred ping, you are not playing on a decent internet connection. A few things may be influencing this, both on your system and on your network.

When I get those moments, I have everyone check their phones, and ask them to get off of wi-fi. I make sure that no televisions in the house are currently on Netflix or YouTube eating up bandwidth. If nothing else is working, I tab out of game and check to see what system processes are running that I may have overlooked. Worst case scenario, I power cycle my modem in the middle of the competitive and reconnect as soon as possible.

Once again, everyone has their own situation, depending on what system they are running and what internet service they are stuck with in their area. All you can really do is try to make sure you have a stable connection before you go into competitive play and ruin your own day.

On the typical windows system, press CTRL+ALT+DEL and click Start Task Manager to see what system processes might be running that you don't need. In example, you definately don't need any update programs running while your in a game. You can right click and end task any programs you don't need running whlie your online. Just don't go killing every application in the processes tab, at least know what you are shutting down before you kill them. If you don't know what something is, google it, and you'll be able to make a more educated decision on whether or not it needs to be running on your system.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not responsible for any damages you do to your system!

I did a hard drive defrag on my laptop because mouse clicks just didn't seem to register right away. Afterward I decided to play a competitive and I kept getting disconnected. I then saw the VAC message that told me I wasn't getting into a match until I fixed the issue.

This is a cropped screenshot of the error message that shows up in your browser after clicking on the in game popup.

So after realizing what happened and knowing that I was not making it back into that game in time... I decided to spend my half hour cool down timer adding this section to this guide. Any time you do anything that might alter the files on your game folder (defrag included) you may want to verify your game files before running your game.

This is a cropped screenshot of the local files window and verification process.

To get to the local files window, right click on your game in the Steam library. Then click on the button that says "Verify integrity of game files..." to clean up the CS:GO game folder and launch the game when completed.

You ever been in the heat of a firefight and suddenly your entire client minimizes? You hit that windows key didn't you! I recently switched keyboards and found myself doing this more then I used to, due to the placement and bulkiness of keys more then likely. Anyway, the other day I had to have done this like 3 times in one competitive match, and I had enough of it. I went through the game client and looked for a way to rebind the key, but that didn't work, it just tabbed me out again. Then I googled "disabling the windows key" for my windows version and looked for a walk through that would allow me to do it myself without downloading a third party program. After adding a quick binary string to my windows registry and restarting my system, I have not had an issue with the windows key since. It is officially a dead key on my keyboard for the duration of this system image. This is a bit of an advanced step, so make sure you are comfortable with what your doing before you proceed.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not responsible for any damages you do to your system!


Interesting side note for Acer Nitro5 gaming laptops: The NitroSense software has a settings option to disable the windows and menu keys, no registry editing needed!

If you have a keyboard that has back lighting built into it, you may have went with that to actually be able to see your keyboard in the dark without squinting at it! This was very true for me. Each back lit keyboard has its own software so you may or may not have any issues at all.

For my desktop keyboard, I have a BlackWeb Gaming Keyboard that I literally have no issues with (except that my kids like to randomly come up and press the buttons) as far as the back lighting.

However, I recently picked up an Acer Nitro5 Gaming Laptop and it came with a red back lighting. The only problem I had with it was that it had a 30 second timeout. So, every time I found myself waiting for the next round, I was having to hit a random key to "wake up" the keyboard. That can get real annoying when you only have so much time to buy before the round. I went online and did some research, and figured out that my Nitro5 already had the updated bios and software shipped with it, so it had an option to disable the timeout. It was simply hidden in the software settings.


As mentioned above, this screenshot shows the backlight setting on the NitroSense software.

If you have one of the Acer Nitro Gaming Laptops, you may or may not need to update your BIOS and go into the BIOS settings to disable the keyboard backlight timeout. This is a somewhat advanced user setting so do your homework before messing with any BIOS settings.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not responsible for any damages you do to your system!

Yet another irritating setting is the TouchPad. Fortunately, this should be an easy fix. Most of your modern Windows laptops have a setting to enable/disable the TouchPad in your system settings. This varies from system to system, so you may need to do a quick google search on what is needed to disable yours.


This screenshot is an example of what the setting looks like on a Windows 10 Laptop, in Dark Mode. If it is has the option to disable the touchpad it should be right at the top of the settings.

As you can see in the image above, you can toggle the TouchPad option if you are lucky. The TouchPad actually had to be completely uninstalled on my wife's gaming laptop, which is an HP Pavilion with Windows 10 installed. So you see, you may need to research what your own laptop needs to get the TouchPad disabled.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not responsible for any damages you do to your system!

Title says it all on this one... make sure your system sound, speakers, headset/microphone all work and are in the correct configuration before starting a match. Competitive matches are too fast paced to try troubleshooting sound issues between rounds. Make sure your mic is not muted also. If all of your drivers and your configuration are fine and your still not getting sound, check your cables and/or batteries for wireless headsets.

Mic Check!

There are a few things you can do with client settings, and there may be a few other guides out there that touch base on this. I'm going to focus on my personal annoyances so that your not going through what frustrates me when I switch clients.

As shown in the above screenshot, go to Options > Game Settings > and scroll down to Automatic Killer Replay. Select NO to turn this off... this prevents you from getting to a bot in a hurry if you have one on your team, when you need to get back into the action fast.

UPDATE: Now that bots are removed from competitive play this is no longer that much of an issue, but I'd still rather be watching my teammates then a replay of how someone shot me in the face across the map with a one-tap.

I think most of us play with wireless mice these days. If not, your fighting that wire every time it gets caught on something. The thing with wireless mice is that they run on batteries, so you'll want to check for that power light if your mouse has one, or simply peak at the bottom to make sure the laser is lit so you know it works. Also, I tend to keep batteries on a nearby shelf, just in case.

Last but not least, make sure all the buttons and scroll wheel are fully functional. If you slammed your mouse down in the last competitive, you might have some internal breakage in the mouse you haven't even noticed yet!

I jest. I usually notice right away when I break a mouse...

This step is really optional. I played with the default crosshair for years before editing mine. However, I noticed a crosshair that had no top bar once and I was intrigued, and I went looking for the settings in game to configure it as such. It blocks your field of view from whats on the other side of the crosshair less so you can focus in on head shots a bit better.

I have also seen crosshair editing software on steam, but I have yet to use any of them. Why not? Firstly, I presume CS:GO would consider it suspicious software. Secondly, it would take more memory away from your gameplay while running it.

It's good to get a warm up in before going into competitive mode. You can easily get into your zone by getting into an Arms Race or Death match, but stick to shorter game play sessions. You should play roughly 10-20 minutes, to get loosened up but not worn out.

Set Player Volume
Another thing I advise adjusting during your Competitive Match warm up session is the max volume of your joining team mates. I usually adjust each player down to 0.1 to 0.2 so that I can still hear my surroundings when they are making call outs, ranting, complaining, screaming ... you get it. You can't focus on what you are doing, much less what is going on around you, if you leave their volume at max.

Pistol Practice
The first round in competitive gameplay is always pistols only. Additionally, your likely going to have a round or two where you won't be able to buy another gun, or simply need to use a close range weapon for a clutch. For these reasons, I advise getting practice in with pistols on the warm up round, this way you'll have a chance at handling yourself well with a pistol versus other types of weapons.

UPDATE: With the new warm-up area in competitive matches, they square you off one versus one in a tiny boxed in version of your current map. For this reason, I tend to adjust player sounds as fast as possible then get my warm-up in, or quickly adjust player sound during the first few seconds of pistol round and show up fashionably late to help my team. Also, the new warm-up setup randomly gives you guns to practice with, so you can't focus on any one weapon type.

The new warmup area in Nuke!

Scrimmage maps and some of the older classic maps such as Office seem to have the old school full map warmup session, so please disregard the update above for these particular maps.

You may want to take the time to brush up on the spray patterns of each weapon, especially weapons that you don't normally use. If you avoid certain guns in competitive game play due your to lack of experience with them, give them a try during your warm up matches to get a better feel for them.

It is also a good idea to practice controlling the recoil of your weapons while in motion, and the precision of shift-walking and/or standing still while shooting them to get a greater understanding of how to accurately aim each weapon.

Leveling Your Gun: I often see guns pointing at the ground or some other random position when spectating other players. This frustrates me. Try to keep your iron-sights or cross-hairs level to where an avatars head or body would be, whether in a doorway or out in the open, so your ready for a quick flick adjustment to get first blood. Your not going to clutch shooting at the dirt.

If you have some real down time, you can also check out a free to play game I found on Steam called Aim Lab, it appears to have a few of the gun models that CS:GO uses.

In fact, I even published a guide for this game!
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2183349877

If you go into a competitive match not even knowing the lay of the land, your already putting yourself at a serious disadvantage. You'll want to spend some time on maps you don't know in casual mode before committing to a match that is on a Map you haven't explored yet. If you join in with a group, you can let the lobby leader know which maps you don't have any experience on.

Thanks for the Steam Awards!

I have been creating guides for the Steam Community for a few years now, long before Steam Awards were a thing. I love creating content for the games I play. In 2020, Valve decided to reward players that create content with the points shop system.

The Steam points are very appreciated, and certainly encourages me to create more content for the gaming community. I even spent a few of the points to give more space for Steam guides on my profile. This lets me present up to seven of them on my profile at once. If you want to see what else I've created, you should check out the Other Published Steam Guides section of this guide!

Previously, I listed the many CS:GO related guides I had created here. For simplicity, I have since opted to create what I call a CS:GO Guide Index. This is essentially another guide that points to the CS:GO guides I have created. If you like any of my other guides, please feel free to rate them up!

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2382246143&insideModal=0

You can check out all of my Published Steam Guides here, the following guides I feel are related in one way or another.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1350721090

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3122987327