The tournaments are running on Tuesdays throughout April with proceeds going to charity. Looking for something to do while under quarantine? Check out the Shutdown Showdown! It’s a charity APEX Legends tournament benefiting No Kid Hungry. Tune in next time when we’ll break down Overwatch! I hope you enjoyed our Beginner’s Guide to Counter-Strike. Tournaments are typically carried live at their Twitch channel, with highlights and reruns available on Youtube. You can find a schedule of tournaments to watch here. Instead, Counter-Strike’s season is a collection of tournaments where teams earn points to qualify for the championship. It’s not like League of Legends or Overwatch where there is a set schedule of weekly matches.
How to watchĪs for when to tune in, Counter-Strike shares a lot in common with Golf. This is likely born out of the long life-span of Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike is fortunate enough to have some of the best casters in all of esports. As with learning any new sport, you should endeavor to pay attention to what the casting team is telling you.
Players seem to operate on instinct, knowing exactly where they need to go and what to do. The winning moment of Team Liquid at ESL One Cologne 2019 against Team Vitality.ESL: …Ĭounter-strike is a very intimidating game when you first start watching. Team Liquid CS:GO winning moment at ESL One Cologne 2019
More commonly, they run for a full weekend or even a week. A tournament doesn’t typically run for just a single day however. Given that tournament play is typically best 2 out of 3, you should expect to watch between 90 minutes and 2 hours. An average match of Counter-Strike lasts about 45 minutes. While it’s not the three to four hour marathon that Football or Baseball can be, it’s definitely long.
What should you expect when watching?Ī full game of pro Counter-Strike is not a short experience in terms of esports. After 15 rounds the players switch sides, and their economy is reset. Managing your bank of money (called economy) is key in Counter-Strike.
A death means you must purchase everything from scratch. If you survive the previous round, you get to keep your gear. Players must purchase the equipment they wish to use at the beginning of the round. The strategy comes from the fact that what happens in one round will carry over the next. Cox/Getty Images)īased on that, Counter-Strike would seem to be a very simple game. ATLANTA, GA – JANUARY 29: A general view of play during the ELEAGUE: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major Championship finals at Fox Theater on Januin Atlanta, Georgia. The counter-terrorists can win by either defusing the bomb, or eliminating the terrorist side before the bomb is planted. The terrorists win if they can eliminate the counter-terrorist side or plant a bomb and have it detonate. So what does a round consist of? Two teams of five play as either terrorists or counter-terrorists. In tournament play, teams typically have to win a best 2 out of 3, or 3 out of 5. There are up to 30 rounds in a match, and the first team to win 16 rounds claims victory. On the surface, Counter-Strike is a very simple game. The game has gone through many iterations, and today it’s known as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. If you remember a group of guys in college wiring their computers together to play a game in the 2000’s, it was probably Counter-Strike. Minh Le and Jess Cliffe created the mod, which quickly took off in populartiy.
One of those mods was a simple two team game, where players either played as terrorists or counter-terrorists. Half-life marked Valve’s first major breakout hit, and the modding community was quick to develop new concepts for it. It’s worth noting that Valve was new to game development at the time Today, we know Valve best as the creators of Steam, a virtual platform that millions of people use to buy, download, and play games.
It was born as a mod of the popular game Half-Life, which was created by Valve. The franchise has a storied history running all the way back to the year 2000. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say you could write an entire series of articles on Counter-Strike by itself.
Today, we tackle one of the oldest esports out there with a beginner’s guide to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.Īny beginner’s guide to Counter-Strike must start with the game’s rich history.
To help welcome the uninitiated, we’re running a series of primers to get you ready to watch. In the absence of traditional sports, many people are finding esports for the first time. Sports fans have really been left out in the lurch with the NHL, MLB, NBA, Golf, MLS, and NASCAR all on hiatus during the lockdown. With COVID-19 forcing many of us into quarantine, lots of people are scouring the internet looking for entertainment.