I truly despise Counter Strike in every way, yet it's one of the few games I've played on and off in the last 5 years. So either I have Stockholm Syndrome or I like Counter Strike (readers choice).

I have roughly 2,300 hours in counter strike across various accounts. Now about 800 of those hours come from 14 year old me who, in true child prodigy fashion, lived in silver 2 so I'm not sure much can be read from those hours played, but the other 1,500 should be fair game for this topic. I picked up the game again in early 2021 at the request of a friend who wanted to play some games, sounds like a good time right? Unfortunately yes it was. So good in fact I actually wanted to play again, and then again and again and again. I was pretty horrible, I had a chunky MMO mouse with more buttons than my keyboard that weighed a tonne, a tiny mousepad and a 60hz monitor. I think I maybe scraped Silver Elite from my placement games.

My aim truly was abysmal, mechanics have always been my weakest point even after all the hours of practice, but I wanted to improve. I started looking up aim training on youtube, I came across KovaaK's and the Voltaic community and their routines. I decided to switch out my mouse for one with lighter weight, change to a new mouse mat that was more appropriate in size for a game like CS, honed in my sensitivity to a more reasonable speed and grabbed a 144hz monitor to top it off. I still sucked. I was however climbing ranks! Reaching the great height of Gold Nova 3. I never really felt like I had improved that whole time, I would beat my scores in Kovaaks by one or two points every few weeks but I was still fucking up all the time in game. I remember a specific round on Mirage, we were ct-side on b and I had a scout. It's a 1v1, last guy is kitchen window and I'm kitchen door. The clock has less than 5 seconds on it all I have to do is hide.

I peeked him.

To this day I don't know why I did it, I was never winning that fight. Maybe I just panicked or I didn't realise the time. I don't think I played for a week after because I felt so horrible about making such a stupid mistake.

And that's the part of improving that really sucks. You have to fail a lot.

I'm not very good at failing, I would rather not try to begin with than try and fail to do something. I see other people who have queued thousands of games of cs, playing 20-30 games in a week and the concept of it is just alien to me. The fear of queuing a game and playing with a group of 4 clueless teammates and losing my rank has always been very real to me. Sure I should just carry harder or queue more, they can't all be bad and with enough games you'll average out to your true rank anyway right? Probably, but I don't possess the ability to shrug off losses like that.

Maybe this is an incoherent mess that I will look back on in a few days and class as a failure! The problem with both improvement and failure is that they're so undefinable and are such specific and personal things but maybe that's not a bad thing. There is no universal constant that tells you what a failure is and if you should be bothered by it or not which leaves a nice middle ground for you to make up whatever you want in between. Perhaps that's the takeaway I have from this diatribe, gaslight yourself so that you can improve.

It took me two hours of writing to reinvent fake it till you make it

shoot me.