How to master your CS:GO Spray Patterns

How does recoil work in CS:GO?

Unlike in most other shooter games, CS:GO's recoil is not random. It follows a fixed pattern, that is part of the skill a CS:GO player has to acquire to get good at the game. If you master the recoil in CS:GO, the accuracy and therefore the amount of kills you will get in game will increase significantly.

This graphic shows the exact spray patterns that you need to follow with your crosshair to control you spray.

What's the best way to practice those recoil patterns?

There are multiple ways to practice the recoil patterns:

The most common way is to open up an oflline game on a random map and set up a practice environment. If you don't know how to do that, this article will show you each and every step:

You can turn on "show impacts" with the command sv_showimpacts 1 to have better visible bullet holes like shown in the following picture:

From there you need to position yourself in front of a wall and just shoot the wall until your clip is empty. Try to control your spray while doing that. The goal is to ideally shoot every bullet onto the same exact location with the least amount of spread.

The more modern approach to this training method would be to use one of the countless recoil training maps that are available on the Steam Workshop. The most well-known out of these is Recoil Master - Spray Training by uLLeticaL. These maps are designed for this specific case and you can customize a lot of different settings like distance to the target for example.

If you are done with that, you can proceed to hop onto a Deathmatch Server and continue your practice. You should try to avoid going for bursts or taps and really focus on your spray. Try to spray as much as you can at any distance and if you are getting comfortable with that, you can proceed to try to transfer your spray from one enemy to the next one.

With enough practice you'll soon see a lot of improvement in your gameplay and eventually become a master of spraying in CS:GO!