For background, this is my first FPS game, although I've used MNK my whole life and I started Valorant 10 days before act 2 ended.

I had no idea what act triangles were, and I just saw you needed 10 wins to get one, so I played comp until I got 10 wins to get the dorito. To this day when I play, people ask if I am smurfing when the game starts.

Act 1 Badge Rank

Act 2 Bade Rank

Current Rank

There are countless posts about improvement, so I want to use this post to talk about some of the stuff that isn't talked as much in the other posts.

I want to start by categorizing the 3 areas that will help you improve and win more.

1. Attitude
2. Game sense
3. Aim + movement (this is talked about the most, so I will not go in depth here)

The first thing that you can [easily] change is your attitude. Are you toxic? Stop being toxic. Be nice to your teammates, give decent comms and I guarantee that you will start winning more. Almost everyone I play with on a day to day basis is through games I met through solo queue, sometimes even on the enemy team. If you are nice, people will want to play with you, and you can get better/nicer people on your team. It's a self reinforcing positive feedback loop.

Don't tilt/give up. Just think back on how many games you have won after being down 10-2, or on the flip side, how many games you have lost after being up 10-2 on a half. Anything can happen in Valorant and comebacks happen more often than not, especially in solo queue. You will see that some teams just completely fall apart on attack/defense. If you feel that you are tilting, take a break and play later.

Second thing is game sense. If you use your brain, this can be an easier thing to improve than just raw aim. I feel that my game sense is generally on par/better than my aim for my level. I can say for a fact that over 70% of my gun duels are won due to a positioning advantage, or they didn't even know I was there, or I used my abilities better than the enemy, although there are days where I pop off and my aim is just great.

Here are a few tips that are easy to adopt and hopefully can help you win some games.

On Defense

1. Don't rotate too early. Use your minimap. Did only 1 or 2 people show up on the other side? Did they even [try to] push onto site? Don't send the whole team to that site, maybe 1 person can go.

2. Get as much information as you can safely. Jiggle an angle constantly to see if people are coming.If you are just sitting back on a corner with no information, you can get snuck up on and just die, as well as not providing any benefit to the team.

3. Position yourself so that you can fall back if you are not confident you can hold the site. It is much better to be alive and retake as a team, than to potentially just get traded 1v1 or just dying without even trading.

4. If you see the team constantly rushing a site as 5 (happens more in low elo), push out when the round starts and go for the early flank. Timing is huge in this game, and while attack generally has someone watching flank, if you can make it before they think someone might be close, you can get an easy 1 to 2 kills this way and punish their behavior. Be careful of the enemy team having a lurker expecting you though, so always be ready to shoot at any time.

On Attack

1. If you are playing an entry agent, don't be scared and take site. Tell your team to follow you if you need to. Your job is to create space.

2. Lurk. Many [lower level] players rotate at any sign that attackers are committing to a site. If your team can push with 3 or 4, you can probably lurk up behind them and try to get 1-2 frags and open up the map for your team. This only works if your team is half decent and not just dying.

3. Play around your good players. I often don't top frag in my team, so on attack, try to be bait for your better players, if you can get the frag, that's great, if not, its better that you died than your better player. Flash for them, use your util for them, make it so that they can carry the game.

4. The job is to make the bomb explode, not to kill the enemy team. Post plant, don't go chasing kills and just hold down the fort. Hold the good angles, set up cross fires, don't peek if you don't have to, and play time. I have taken part of as well as clutched many 1v3 or 2v4 rounds when they should never have been winnable.

Aim. This is probably the hardest part to improve of the game, but with time and practice, you can get better. I will skip over what everyone talks about (crosshair placement) and more about movement/positioning.

As you play more, betterr CH placement becomes pretty natural, but as I have ranked up, and also in the games where I encounter smurfs (on either team) or just good players, I notice that some of them are so hard to hit, despite having good crosshair placement (not holding too close to the wall, head height, etc).

The few tips I have for movement/positioning is

1. Start jiggling angles and using that technique to clear angles. Load up a custom game and just try to replicate how you peek angles regularly. Take a look at how much of player is exposed and how many angles you can be shot from. You are probably wide swinging more often than you think.

2. If your opponents have seen you/know where you are, you need to reposition, otherwise you will just get pre-fired and die. If you confident to take the duel and the enemy is feeling the same way, try to re-position yourself so that when the enemy re-peeks, you are playing an off angle or somewhere they are not pre-aiming.

3. Kind of a combination of 1 and 2. Start pre-firing common angles. If you know someone plays showers/bathroom every round, just fire where the head is around the time when they will peek out. You will surprisingly get kills this way. Or if someone always holds a certain angle, wide swing it after clearing the other angles and just start shooting.

My practice routine. Improvement doesn't come easy and its definitely not free.

1. 1 Hour of Kovaaks a day. Feel free to DM me for my playlist
2. 2-3 DMs before comp. Some nights if friends are not online, i'll just grind out 10 DMs in a row and just try to improve

glhf gamers!