{"id":390050,"date":"2026-05-13T17:18:55","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T17:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.skin.club\/?p=390050"},"modified":"2026-05-13T17:19:34","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T17:19:34","slug":"anders-blume-why-asking-the-right-questions-matters-in-cs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.skin.club\/en\/news\/anders-blume-why-asking-the-right-questions-matters-in-cs","title":{"rendered":"Anders Blume: Why Asking the Right Questions Matters in CS"},"content":{"rendered":"

In modern day Counter-Strike a lot of focus is given over to trying to find answers to questions. How can you defeat Vitality? Who is the best AWP player? How can you stop a well timed B-split on Dust2? These are all questions that may or may not have interesting answers, but I think unfortunately much less time is devoted to asking the right questions. In this article I will make the case that actually figuring out which questions to ask is sometimes harder than finding the right answers to those questions.<\/span><\/p>\n

For those of you who have attended school you might remember a guy by the name of Socrates who was possibly a bit crazy, but also had some interesting ideas. He also gave name to what is now known as the Socratic method, which in short boils down to the concept of asking questions to force a student to think critically for themselves. I think the lack of proper questioning in modern day Counter-Strike often means we end up basically answering the wrong questions. Which in turn means those answers don\u2019t really help us very much to understand the game further.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think the first time I really grappled with this problem myself was when I first wanted to make the original Theorycraft video series back in 2013. The concept for this was basically trying to find\u00a0 interesting grenades or tricks to deal with positions on various maps. Starting down this path I somewhat quickly realized that discovering a new way to molotov a popular position or coming up with some funky pop-flash actually isn\u2019t that difficult. In other words, if we asked a question like, \u201chow can we molotov the B-barrels on overpass?\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n

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That question has a lot of answers, but it doesn\u2019t really tell us anything about what kind of problem you\u2019re trying to solve by throwing any of those molotovs. If however you\u2019re a team that is looking to fake an attack on the B-bombsite, the right question might be something like \u201cCan we throw the barrels molotov, as part of a fake?\u201d That question might have an answer which looks something like this: <\/span>
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In other words, unless you put yourself in the mindset of what a team is actually trying to accomplish with some given utility set, you\u2019re very likely answering questions that mean very little in an actual competitive match. But this is also where things get very tricky, because going through the exercise of putting yourself in that mindset is anything but easy. In my opinion this doesn\u2019t mean that grenade videos without these questions are really worthless, but they often do present a very narrow part of the game while giving people, I think somewhat incorrectly, a sense that they\u2019re not fully up to date with what a team is doing.<\/span><\/p>\n

To use another example that was posed at the start of the article, how do you defeat Vitality? Any answer to this question is incredibly likely to be worthless, because it\u2019s simply too broad. A socratic approach might lead us down the road of asking \u201cHow could you defeat Vitality on Mirage?\u201d Asking this question might invite us to look at the stats for the team to figure out the next question that is worth asking:<\/span><\/p>\n

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It feels like at least part of the answer here might be to limit their success on their better CT side. These are the performance statistic for CT side Mirage for Vitality:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Narrowing our focus somewhat, we notice that Zywoo is their best performing player on the map, and his best role is AWPing on the CT side too. So now the question might be \u201chow can we shut down Zywoo on CT side Mirage?\u201d Which is a question that leads to us looking at what kind of positions Zywoo actually plays on this side:<\/span><\/p>\n

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What this screenshot shows us, is that Zywoo spends a huge amount of time in the highlighted blue zone near\u00a0 the jungle and window. Which I think finally gets us nearer a question that actually gives us a helpful answer. His other popular positions on the map are in order:<\/span><\/p>\n