The Best CS:GO Maps for Beginners
CS:GO is a first-person shooter that requires years of training to master. We sometimes see 16-year-old prodigies like Ilia “m0NESY” Osipov, who make it look easy. But if you look at his profile, you will see that he spent between 15.000 and 20.000 hours playing the game intensively to reach his level.
One thing you can do to speed up your progress and climb the ranks faster is focus on one map at a time. Master one map and then go to the next one. But the question is: what are the best CS:GO maps for beginners?
Characteristics of CS:GO Maps
To start knowing best CS:GO maps for beginners, whatever your initial map choice, pick something from the Active Duty Map Pool. The 7 maps used in professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and most of the community plays them. They’re all fun and can teach a lot about the game, but some are more difficult than others.
For example, if you start your CS:GO journey with Nuke, you’ll have a hard time. And that’s because this map is very complicated. The number of callouts is immense, and you will need months to understand the options from both sides.
CS:GO is a game of tactics and strategy. But to formulate a winning strategy, you need to understand every map’s possibilities. If you don’t have a mental map of the map you are playing, you won’t even know what corners to check when trying to recapture a bomb location.
The best CS:GO maps for beginners are like Nuke are made up of many boxes, pathways, and entrances that test your skills even if you’re a good player.
Professionals, who have spent thousands of hours on each map, will no longer feel the complexity. But for someone who’s just beginning to play CS:GO, being forced to look in three directions at every given time is unpleasant.
To improve at CS:GO, you need to analyze your experience and figure out why you won or lost. If you can’t tell why you got shot in a particular situation and how you could have positioned yourself better, there’s no way to optimize your decisions.
On some maps, the analysis is very complicated because it involves a decision tree with too many branches and variables. But others are fairly simple.
The Best 2 Maps to Learn as a Beginner
Dust II and Inferno are the best 2 CS:GO maps you can learn as a beginner. Both of them are very basic and involve a small number of paths that lead from one location to another.
As a Terrorist, it’s very obvious what you can do to win the game. And as a Counter-Terrorist, it’s easy to predict the T-side’s options based on very little information. Because of this, Dust II and Inferno simplify the game of Counter-Strike and turn it into a purer guns battle.
In turn, this allows you to focus on mastering basic skills such as shooting, positioning, communication, economy, etc. If you need to spend 80% of your focus just on the map alone, you won’t learn much Counter-Strike. Of course, you could potentially know even under those circumstances, but it’s more likely that you’ll be overwhelmed.
Having too much information to work with is really bad for a beginner. Ideally, you want to start with simple scenarios that allow you to learn the basic principles and focus on developing core skills. After you’ve acquired those lessons and skills, you can increase the complexity by trying more sophisticated maps.
Dust II
Dust II is one of the most popular maps in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and versions of it exist in previous iterations of the game. If you talk to older players, they may tell you about de_dust. Dust II is a more modern version of that concept, which integrates everything people learned about Counter-Strike in over a decade.
Dust II was included with the game launch but had to be refined over many years. The valve incorporated a lot of community feedback when designing and optimizing this map for competitive play. Its elegant design will give you a deeper understanding of the famous CS:GO meme “rush B!”.
On Dust II, there are only 3 possibilities: A, B, and middle. This 3-street location with very little complexity will give you an appreciation for the more sophisticated options.
When you play on Dust 2, make sure you choose a position and stick to it. That will allow you to learn the map even faster. When you’re playing as a Counter-Terrorist, always hold A or B. But don’t mix it up at first. The goal is to master a small number of game elements, so you can win more often.
Deep knowledge will help you rank much faster than wide knowledge. In traditional sports, players focus on a particular role within their team. They don’t learn everything there is to know. The same thing applies to CS:GO.
If you want to be an AWP player, use this gun as often as you can and play in those positions that are well-suited for it. If you want to be a rifler, use the AK-47 or the M4A4 as often as possible and go where you need to go to help your team.
Inferno
Inferno is very similar to Dust II, in that the pathways connecting the T spawn to the two bomb locations are both small in number and don’t give much room for sophisticated tactics.
Battles are often decided in pure duels, and gun mastery prevails. Positioning and map awareness are important, but you can be a good player without being a master of every corner and positional tactic. This does not apply to other maps, such as Nuke. Such maps are much more challenging to play.