Guide to Clutching: outgunned and outnumbered… but not outplayed!

Guide to Clutching: outgunned and outnumbered… but not outplayed!

Before I go into how to clutch I should first explain what it is. Clutching for the purpose of this guide and in my opinion is where your team is able to win a round against the odds, whether it is a 1v2 or a 2 v 5.

The ability to be able to clutch is an important element of being a good player. This is because on top of the standard benefits of winning a round it has an added benefit, Psychology. This effect is on two fronts.

1) clutching a round especially a 2 v 5 or a 1 v 5 can give your team a big boost and inspire the whole team to play better.
2)losing a round where your team has a big advantage such as a 1v4 can be very demoralising and in some cases can cause a team to fall apart as they start blaming each other etc.

The ability to clutch well can be broken down into 3 things.
1) knowledge of the map and how the opponent likes to play.
2) Time management
3) ability to split the opponent’s team.

1) Knowledge.

Knowledge is the first part of being able to clutch, first you need to have a good knowledge of the map, most importantly where the strong points are, where the common holding places are and how long it takes to get to places both running and walking. Second is knowledge of the opponent, what I mean by this is, how do they like to play, what guns are they using, how aggressive are they, where do they commonly play from. With this information when it comes down to a 1v3 you should be able to have a good guess on where they are and how they will rotate.  Then you can use this to your advantage. E.g. In the second half of war on inferno a while back I was in a 1v1 on CT side and the bomb was planted at B, I rotated through library and from the first half I knew that the opponent liked to play from graveyard so after walking along graveyard checking the site i threw a flash into graveyard and came around the corner to graveyard stairs almost pre-firing and killed him. The point of this, when you know what your opponent likes to do you can use that to get the upper hand.

2) Time management

Whenever you are in a clutch situation you should consider the clock with everything you do. On T side most important is that you don’t want to run out of time, but you also want to make the best use of the time you have left as well. When on CT side you want to be considering the time and what you think the opponent will be doing, using the time well on CT’s is just as important as on T’s especially when it comes to timing rotates just that couple of seconds you gained because you realised they had to be at the other site could be all you need to finish defusing the bomb and remember letting the time run out is still a win on CT’s. When on T’s if you have a lot of time left on the clock you should make use of it, if possible don’t just go plant the bomb straight away you are just creating a big beacon for the CT’s saying I’m here come gang up on me. Instead use the time to confuse them, make them guess where you are, this will force them to split their forces to guard both sites.  Turn an unwinnable situation into a winnable one. And this leads me to the main point of clutching

3)splitting the opponent’s team.

Whenever you have time your primary objective should be to break up the opponent’s team into smaller ‘killable’ chunks. Why? Because even if you’re playing a bad team it’s going to be easier to pick them off one by one then to take on three on more people at once. For this you need to take into account the knowledge I talked about in the first part and time management.  You want to use the map to split the team as best you can within the time you have left.  E.g. lets say that you are playing T’s on D2 and the strat called was a split, you are going short and the bomber is with you, your team begins to take the site and kills the 2 CT’s defending the site but all 4 team mates go down.  Now instead of running to plant the bomb you pick it up and walk to catwalk and wait for a few second to see if you can get a CT rotating too fast from lower or mid. Then you have an option you could quickly go to B and try to get the bomb down while they have rotated to A or you can try to fake them by hiding in short for 30 seconds before hitting A in the hope that they either think you went to B and start to rotate back or they split up to cover both sites as they realise they don’t know where you or the bomb is anymore.  What I was trying to demonstrate is the advantage of trying to do things that are unexpected, instead of always advancing to the bomb site try catching the opponent by surprise, try to kill the early rotators, occasionally fake a bomb site.

When on T’s the last part of clutching is often once you get the bomb down, and I’m going to break this down 2 situations.
1) when there are 3 or more CT’s left most of the time you are going to want to whittle down their numbers before they start the defuse otherwise they could have one defuse while the others can cover the few places you could be hiding( generally the only exception is in sites like inside on train where with a good plant there are more places to hide and peek the defuser then CT’s to cover them), often the best way to whittle the numbers is  to try and peek them as they rotate to the site.

2) when there are only one or 2 CT’s you have a much better chance you can attempt to hide then you can start your job of making it hard to defuse the bomb, do things like when you hear to defuse peek and kill the defuser, throw flashbangs, generally be an annoyance remember you don’t need to kill them all, you only need to make it hard enough that they can’t defuse the bomb in time.

In summary, to clutch: break up the opponent’s team into ‘killable chunks’ by making them guess where you are and forcing them to rotate to where you are not, within the time limit using what you know about how they play. When this is done well a 1v5 can quickly turn into a 1v1