CS:GO Beginner’s Guide: Understanding Crosshair Placement

Crosshair Placement, is besides movement, peeking and shooting rhythms (spraying) one of the most important aspects in CS:GO. Loads of beginners tend to aim at the ground, which leads to them having to flick, thus relying on their aim. Your Aim will never be 100% consistent, there are way to many outside factors that can have a bad influence on it (not warmed up, general bad aim, not feeling well).

This is where crosshair placement comes in, you can always rely on your crosshair placement. Beginners tend to think that having great aim is the number on thing to focus on. In CS:GO you never want to flick, let the crosshair placement do the work for you.

You should keep the following aspects in mind to use crosshair placement perfectly:

Always have your crosshair at head height:

You always want to anticipate where your enemy’s head will be. Always keep your crosshair at headlevel. But where do you place your crosshair to be on headlevel exactly? It isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially for new players. Most aiming is horizontal. A rule of thumb you can use at the start: If the ground is flat, aim straight ahead in a 90° angle, this will put your crosshair on headlevel.

This is how your crosshair placement should look like: (note that this is more focused on pre-aiming certain spots)

But what happens when you have to aim vertically? Most CS:GO maps arent consistent in their vertical dimension, so you will have to train how to adjust your crosshair placement to that. Practising this over and over again will make you use this technique automatically.

Horizontal Aiming at Headlevel

Vertical Aiming at Headlevel

Keep your crosshair close to the wall:

Try to keep in mind that your crosshair should always stick to the walls you are running around. Note that you always have to have a small gap between the wall and your crosshair. This helps immensely against pushing opponents, because you don’t have to adjust your crosshair. You should also try to avoid peeking close to a wall, otherwise enemies can spot you way earlier than they normally would.

Leave a Gap between the Wall and Crosshair

Peek far away from walls

Pre-aim certain default spots that counter terrorists like to use (example dust 2 B-site):

An important thing to keep in mind is that a lot of counter-terrorists play default spots. From knowing all the default spots you an easily combine your crosshair placement into a route which includes shoulder peeking, pre-aiming and pre-firing for these spots. Remember to use the momentum you have while you profit from peekers advantage.

Back Plateau

Plateau behind Barrels

Left Side Double Stack

Under Window

Conclusion

From my experience I can assure you that crosshair placement is way more important for beginners than raw aim. I never really considered myself someone with really good aim and still reached The Global Elite, using this very method. Also, as mentioned earlier, it is something that works even on a bad day. Once you have learned this method, you will see your play improve drastically.

Thanks for reading!