How to Use the Scoreboard Effectively

The Counterstrike Scoreboard

In Counterstrike 1.6 and source, the scoreboard is an imperative tool that many experienced players utilize to gain an edge over their opponents. You may be thinking that the scoreboard is only good for one thing, showing your kd ratio (kills vs deaths) and where you stand in the rankings relative to other players. This is where you're wrong my friend, there are many more uses for the scoreboard than you think, let's take a look at a few of them.

It's all in the numbers

Take this for example, say you’re pubbing and are distracted by something that needs your immediate attention (your car is being jacked etc) and you waywardly leave your computer to deal with it, upon returning, you’ll probably be watching the game from spectator mode, DEAD as a doornail. If however, by the off-chance that no one found or managed to knife you to death(afk knife mm) , by using the scoreboard you should immediately  be able to obtain how many players you are against and how many of your team mates are still alive.  This information is absolutely vital as in any first person shooter, awareness is an incredible skill. Combine this info with observations from your radar and you’ll be back on your game in 2 seconds flat.

Scoreboard methodology 101 (Pubstarin)

There are many different scenarios that can arise from the information gathered from the scoreboard; however rather than getting too deep, I'll keep it relatively simple and summarize them into three main categories (most of these apply to public games as match games you should be communicating via ventrillo or some other voice chat):

The first is when the teams are even, both sides have equal or near equal amount of players alive, such as 5v5, 5v4 etc. In this scenario there is no specific action that needs to be taken, however by checking the scoreboard you can be instantly reassured that your team is still alive and you’re not going to be outnumbered unknowingly.

This brings me to my second situation. If you look at the scoreboard and discover your team is completely dead, then now it's "go time", silencers go on, stealth becomes a bigger factor and it's time to clutch. Furthermore, if you’re outnumbered but still have a buddy alive then you might wish to try to regroup with any of your remaining team (hopefully you're using vent, this point mainly applies to public games).

The final thing that can be obtained from looking at the scoreboard is when your team outnumbers the opposing side. For example if you look at the scoreboard and see that there are eight members of your team alive, but only two players on the other team alive, and you can see two enemy players on the radar, then you should know its safe to equip the knife and run or bunny hop that location to help kill them in ultimate humiliation.

By combining information obtained from the scoreboard with that of the radar you will have maximum awareness even when times are a bit chaotic. Remember that by default the scoreboard is key bound to Tab, however if you wish to bind it to another key then choose another key to bind it to using the variable "+showscores".