Getting headshots in Overwatch, Counter-Strike CS GO, Fornite or even Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 doesn’t come easy. It takes years of practice, a fast machine capable of providing smooth game play and finally… skill. Yet, even then, there are guys who seem to have all of the above and still can’t get consistent headshots.
Here’s why:
The golden concept: What you practice, you get good at.
Remember that.
If your idea of practice is to jump on a public server and get as many kills as fast as possible… then you’re only harming yourself in the long run. “Pubbing” (just playing normal ladder games) does not build skill. So if you’re looking for how to get headshots in CS GO, Fornitne, Call Of Duty and Overwatch, then this is what you’re going to want to practice.
Why?
Because when you play random games servers, you’re matched up against mediocre players. So even if you miss a lot of your shots, as long as you shoot first, you’ll usually end up winning the battle.
Training the Unconscious Mind
Unconsciously, you train yourself to shoot first without aiming. That becomes part of you… even if you don’t want to. If you’re used to playing with the “shoot first, aim second” because you play on pubs a lot, then that’s what you’ll AUTOMATICALLY do even in match situations.
As I previously mentioned, what you practice, you get good at… even if it’s something that doesn’t help you.
Concentrate on that, and you’ll be practicing perfection.
This is one of our best Counter-Strike headshot tips…. and it applies to all games such as CS:GO and Overwatch.
Practicing Perfection
After a while, you’ll re-train yourself to automatically aim for the head before shooting. You’ll become a human aimbot.
A fair bit of warning, the first time you try this, expect to die. You’ll be taking a lot more time to aim than usual, so it will throw your rhythm off and consequently, you won’t get kills that you would of normally gotten by spraying. However, with practice, the time it takes to aim will decrease and your headshot percentage will go up.
Eventually, you won’t even have to think of it and you’ll naturally spend the required time to aim for the head. If you ever find yourself slipping and start shooting too quickly, make sure you do this exercise again!
Here are my top practicing drills (Straight out of my book, Fragging Fundamentals)
Prediction Practice
One great skill to have is to be able to predict where your opponent is going to go. If you’ve never really thought about it before, you might subconsciously do it on a certain level. It’s rare that people don’t predict at all where their opponent will go, but on the same token, it’s rare that they fully exploit this to its maximum.Practicing prediction simply involves playing a scrim in which you concentrate exclusively on predicting where your opponent is going to be.
Don’t try to mix prediction practice with anything else, do this one separately because it requires your entire mental focus.
1. As you run thought the map, imagine seeing your opponent through the walls, as if you knew where he was at all times.2. When you turn around corners, predict where he’s going to be and look there before you turn. Now, you’re obviously going to be wrong a lot of the time, but it’s likely you’ll be surprised at how many times you’re right.
The more you concentrate on predicting where your opponent is, the more you will develop this skill.
This is more a mental practice than anything else. I recommend practicing this for a few days at a time, then move on to another practice. When you train your mind to accurately predict where your opponent is (and is going to be), aiming becomes easier because you have more time to react. Ideally, you’ll want to practice prediction twice a month.
Aim Practice (Visualizing)
It’s really easy to get caught up in the game and to simply shoot as fast as possible whenever you see your opponent. Many gamers get into this automatic mode when they get tired and their mind stops trying. This leads to missed and inaccurate shots that otherwise could have been direct hits.
Now, if you’re missing because you’re tired, then you should rest. There’s really no way around that.
If you’re still missing just because you’ve gotten caught up in the game (and we all do that), then visualisation practice is what you need to keep you mind in focus.
1. When you play, concentrate on seeing your ammunition hitting your opponent slightly before it does. Every time you get into a battle with an opponent, there’s always a slight delay from the time you see him to the time you actually aim and shoot him.In that split second it takes for you to aim, I want you to actually SEE your shot hitting him in the exact location you want it to hit. This works GREAT for headshot practice. If you can see the headshot happening before it happens, the odds of it actually happening go up hugely.
The real benefit of this is that you’ll force your mind to concentrate on always aiming for the head. Eventually, this will get wired into your mind and will become automatic.
Because our minds all need reminders once in a while, practice this once a month for maintenance.
Practice – Perfection
Visualizing is really a great exercise to get your mind thinking about a specific area you want to target in the heat of the battle. After you’ve done sessions of visualizing where your projectiles are going to hit, you’ll want to do what I call perfection training.
A lot of the time, our minds just throws shots away. We tend to shoot a lot more than we actually need to and this harms our game more than anything. For example, it’s common to shoot 4-5 bullets before your cursor is on your opponent, and even 2-3 bullets after. This is commonly known as spraying and it’s something you’ll want to avoid doing.
Instead, in this practice, you’re going to be concentrating on using the least amount of bullets as possible to kill your opponent.
1. Go on a server and take as much time as you need to aim, even if your opponent is going to kill you, just make sure it’s perfect every time. Remember, the objective is not to win here, it’s to improve. It’s perfectly acceptable that your opponent kills you, just make sure that every single shot you take is a perfect one. If you’re playing a game with headshots, aim for 100% headshots. If you’re playing a game that involves rockets, make every rocket hit. It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with it.This exercise will feel weird at first, that’s because you’re completely throwing off your internal rhythm and taking longer than usual to aim.
Just keep concentrating on making every shot perfect and the time it takes to do so will eventually diminish.
This should be done once a week followed by the rhythm exercise.
Practice Rhythm – Aim-Boom Technique
Now that we’ve completely disrupted your rhythm in the previous exercise, it’s time to get your groove back.
It should sound something like this.
You see someone: A-A-A-A-A-A-B.You seee another person A-A-A-A-A-A-B, another person, A-A-A-A-A-B.
Start with more aiming time, more A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A and then work your way down little by little.
This exercise should be short, simple and fun.
1. Play completely normally and when you see an opponent, say ‘A’ while you’re aiming and then ‘B’ when you shoot. (B can be BOOM)
The objective is to be consistent and have the same length of A-A-A-A-A.
What you don’t want is A-A-A-B, A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-B, A-B, A-A-A-A-B, A-A-B.
1. So start off with A-A-A-A-A-B, A-A-A-A-A-B, A-A-A-A-A-B, A-A-A-A-A-B, A-A-A-A-A-B 2. Then move on to A-a-a-a-B, A-a-a-a-B, A-a-a-a-B, A-a-a-a-B, A-a-a-a-B, AaaaB, AaaaB,
3. Then to AaaB, AaaB, AaaB, AaaB, AaaB, AaaB, AaaB, Aa-aB,
4. Eventually working your way down to AaB, AaB, AaB. (this might look better formatted like I started above… but not entirely sure)
Remember, A if for aiming, B is for when you click the mouse button to fire. Think Aaaim-Boom, but physically say Aaaa-B.
What this exercise does is develop your rhythm, so that every shot is done in a consistent way. That way, your brain knows how long it has to aim before you click. You might want to do this when no one’s around. It’s one of those weird exercises that work really well, but people might think you’re a little weird if you do it around them.
Do this once a week, after the perfection exercise.
Practice Playing With a Handicap
When you’re trying to get better, you have to make things harder for yourself. One of the best ways to achieve this is to play while giving yourself a handicap. This can effectively be done in two ways.
1. Every time you spawn, start a round; make sure you self-inflict some damage to your character so that you have less than full health right from the start. This can be done by hitting yourself with a rocket, a grenade or even jumping off a high area.
You’ll want to have approximately 75% of your health right from the start. This exercise is GREAT because it forces you to really think about outsmarting your opponent instead of simply going in head to head and relying on your aim.
Because you are starting off with little health, you’ll work really hard to keep it that way. As you progress, give yourself an even bigger handicap by lowering yourself to 50% health
This is similar to lifting increasingly heavy weights and will greatly improve your game play over time.
2. Restrict your weapon usage. One of the most fun things you can do while practicing is to restrict your weapon usage so that you’re using a smaller weapon than your opponent. In most games, this can be the equivalent of using a pistol when your opponent is using a fully automatic gun.
This makes it much harder for you and provides you with satisfaction when you kill your opponent with the smallest gun in the game. A little warning, players often react badly to being killed by small gun when they know you could be using another one. They might often think that you’re just making fun of them and not playing seriously.
Note: A small gun does NOT mean melee weapons! This should be done at least once a week.
Practice Stayin’ Alive
The last individual practice you’re going to want to do is to practice staying alive for as long as possible. Although this seems like the obvious thing, too many players are overly aggressive and throw away their life too easily.
This exercise teaches you restraint and patience, quite possibly one of the hardest things for a gamer to learn.
Practice this daily.
1. While playing a normal game, concentrate exclusively on keeping your character alive for the longest amount of time.
Training Your Muscle Memory
So remember, if you practice shooting quickly, that’s what you’ll do in the match.
If you practice perfection, you’ll be accused of cheating because you got too many headshots! Life’s tough.
Did you know that having cold hands can also affect your aim? If you enjoyed our headshot article, then check out our report on cold hands, it might be the missing ingredient to unlocking your full potential.
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