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     Date Published 3/11/2008 5:14:05

Questions to the Community, GreenFrag Featured Articles by Akbar Shah -What makes a good strat?.....

-What makes a great strat caller?

After speaking with several professional and amateur players I wanted to venture my ideas on what makes a good strat caller. Maybe I’m “totally off my rocker” and I’m way off in left field; or perhaps I am dead on. Either way I’d like to explore and get some feedback from the community on the topic of calling strats.

First of all, what is an effective strat?
While the question may seem odd to ask, it is important for us to understand the definition. I think a good definition transforms a strat from being “3 go here and 2 go there…” to a powerful strategy. So here is my personal definition for what is a good strat in a competitive.

Video gaming:
A strat is a clear plan of action with a specific purpose of creating and maximizing opportunities to gain and/or maintain the advantage.

Let’s break that down into two parts: First, a good strat is a clear plan of action. It is clear in the sense that the end goal and secondary “back-up” plans are in place. This means players know their parts and know what to do in case things change. This is especially important with more risky/aggressive strats, because if you wrongly predict your opponents’ moves, the seconds transitioning from Plan A to Plan B can make the difference between winning and losing. A
well planned strat has zero confusion as to different possibilities. Many times I’ve seen a Plan B executed just as well as a Plan A due to proper preparation. Other times I’ve seen a team just fall apart because one thing went wrong and left them in confusion.
The second part is the “why” of a strat. I believe this is most overlooked aspect of strat calling. In game you might tell players to do specific actions, but if you or your players don’t know the “why” behind the “what” then they don’t know the end goal to gain the advantage. A strat without a clear purpose isn’t nearly effective as one with a purpose. The power of an effective strat is that it is designed with clear goals in mind. Once I heard a professional player say after winning a championship that “every single action of each of [their] strats [had] specific purposes for taking the advantage. Every flash, every [grenade], down to every movement is designed and engineered to give [them] the advantage.”

Now that we’ve defined what an effective strat is, how can a player take their “strats” from being just general directions to specific plans to gain the advantage? While I don’t know everything, I’ve put together a list of three things I believe are most crucial to