CS:GO: What Exactly Is "Baiting", Anyway?

“You baited me!” shouted angrily into a microphone, usually followed by a stream of expletives. We’ve all heard variations thereof regularly from teammates while playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Is baiting necessarily a bad thing? Is there even a general understanding of what it is?

Why so negative?

The negative connotations around baiting are understandable. Nobody wants to feel like they’ve been used against their will. However, for many players in matchmaking it’s become a convenient excuse for making poor tactical decisions. It’s far easier to blame teammates for not providing backup to foolhardy aggression that wasn’t communicated properly, than to take responsibility for it. Baiting has evolved into a catch-all term for “I’ve failed, but it’s your fault.” There are of course more egregious versions of baiting. It is rarer than many players would like to believe however. The worst kind of baiter is often an extremely passive player that generally plays a lurking role. The bad kind of baiter is premeditated in their actions and is not interested in the objective. This selfish player will routinely allow teammates to die without providing any sort of backup in order to pad their own stats with easy kills on distracted enemies.

So explain it!

There are two main forms of the good kind of baiting from which all the minor variations stem. The first and most common form of baiting is coordinating an action with a teammate in order to trade a kill. In other words using your teammate as bait to give yourself and the team an opening to complete a frag or series of frags. It is a fundamental aspect of Counter-Strike. Within CS:GO the number of players alive on either team matter a great deal towards a potential round win or loss. If a teammate goes down, as the nearest player it’s up to you to make sure their death wasn’t in vain. You need to get a kill in response to even the numbers and keep your team in the round. Baiting to trade frag is integral to this.

Baiting to trade frag

The primary role of the Entry Fragger on the Terrorist side is first information, then distraction and then, if possible, a kill. Not the other way round. This player’s job is to go into the bombsite first on attack. The Entry draws the enemy fire and calls out the enemy positions for the teammates following close behind to clean up the kills. The Entry is acting as bait and essentially dying to set up his team to trade frag. Being bait is ideally always communicated and with your consent.

Baiting out a response

The second main form of baiting. This could be to perhaps sell a fake for your team on the T side so that they run into a bombsite with less defenders by your causing some players to rotate. Or it could be to draw utility out of the enemy to make the bombsite ripe for the taking later in the round. How would you do this? Making noise by prefiring corners to keep the Counter-Terrorists focused on you is effective. You could throw smokes and flashes to make it look like a full site execute is coming. The objective is to bait a response from the enemy that sets your team up for success later in the round.

The verdict

There are of course many minor and not so minor variations of baiting that I could have included. This was just a broad overview dear readers. Yes, some people are dirty baiters. That being said, baiting is undoubtedly an essential part of CS:GO if done properly. So do it properly!