Spray, Burst or Tap - How to Actually Shoot

Two separate systems are making your bullets miss, and most players only know about one of them. Recoil is the deterministic part: the AK-47's 30-round pattern is identical every single spray, which is why wall patterns are learnable at all. Inaccuracy is the random part: a cone that widens with every round you fire and shrinks again on a timer, whether or not you keep shooting.

Spray, burst and tap are three different answers to the second system. Recoil control alone will not save you, because a perfectly compensated spray still draws each bullet from a cone that you made bigger by firing.

Recoil and Inaccuracy Are Not the Same Thing

Recoil moves your aim point. It is a fixed sequence per weapon, indexed by shot number - shot 7 always pulls the same way. You cancel it with mouse movement.

Inaccuracy is a spread cone your bullet is randomly sampled from. It grows from firing, from moving, from being airborne, and shrinks when you crouch or stand still. You cannot cancel it with mouse movement. You can only wait it out.

That distinction explains the most common frustration in the game: you traced the pattern correctly, your mouse path was clean, and bullet 15 still went two player-widths wide. Your recoil compensation was fine. Your cone was enormous.

You can watch both happen. In an offline server run sv_cheats 1, then sv_showimpacts 1 (default 0) and sv_showimpacts_time 10 (default 4). Take a long angle, fire one round at a wall, wait two seconds, fire another - they land in a tight pair. Now hold the trigger for ten and watch the impact marks scatter well past where your crosshair actually travelled.

The Recovery Clock

The AK-47 fires at 600 RPM, one round every 0.10 s. The M4A4, Galil AR and FAMAS all run 666 RPM, one round every 0.09 s. The M4A1-S is 600 RPM.

Your gun can fire ten times a second. Your accuracy cannot recover that fast, and that mismatch is the entire subject of this page.

• Tapping at long range means roughly one round every 0.3 to 0.4 seconds - about three shots per second, a third of what the trigger allows. Fire faster than that at distance and shot two is a coin flip.
• Bursting means two to four rounds at the gun's full rate, then a pause of about 0.25 to 0.35 s, then the next group. The pause is what makes it a burst instead of a slow spray.
• Spraying means accepting that after roughly the seventh round you are trading accuracy for volume, and betting the range is short enough that volume wins.

Recoil resets on the same clock. It is a decay, not a switch: a 0.15 s pause gives you a partial reset and the pattern picks up part-way down the climb, while roughly half a second puts you back at shot one with a fresh, near-perfect first bullet. That decay is the mechanical reason bursting works - each burst starts from the bottom of the pattern instead of continuing up it.

Range Bands

Units are easy to calibrate against: a standing player model is 72 units tall, and a crouched one is 54. If a target's model looks roughly as tall as the gap between your crosshair and the bottom of your screen, you are spraying. If it is a smudge, you are tapping. To measure an angle exactly, type getpos in console at each end and subtract the coordinates.

The general principle: the further away the target, the fewer rounds you should commit before letting the cone close again.

How Many Bullets You Actually Own

• AK-47, 30 rounds. The first 7 climb almost straight up - pull straight down. Rounds 8 to 15 sweep left and then back right. Past 15 the group opens badly. You own 7 reliably, 15 with genuine practice, and the back half of the magazine is a lottery.
• M4A4, 30 rounds. Tighter pattern, opens more slowly, so 10 to 12 rounds are usable. That extra control is not free: at 33 damage and 70% armor penetration the M4A4 needs five armored chest hits to kill against the AK's four, so it spends the extra controllable bullets paying for lower damage.
• M4A1-S, 20 rounds. Similar controllable window, 38 damage, no tracers, and ten fewer rounds in the magazine. Less room to be wrong.

Working rule: if the fight needed more than seven AK rounds, you should have been bursting. The full pattern breakdown is in the AK-47 spray pattern and CS2 recoil patterns, and the drills for actually building the control are in how to improve spray control.

What Subtick Changed, and What It Did Not

CS2 records when you clicked rather than which tick you clicked in. On a 64-tick server, each tick covers 15.625 ms, and the old model bucketed your input into the nearest one - so identical mouse work could produce slightly different outcomes purely from where in the tick your click landed. Subtick removes that quantization from the input side, which means the 0.35 s gap you deliberately leave between taps is the gap the server actually uses.

What it did not change: recoil is still deterministic, inaccuracy is still a random draw from a cone, and you are still only accurate when stopped. If your taps miss at long range, the netcode is not the reason. Valve's own description of the system is on the CS2 feature page, and the practical limits of tick-rate arguments are covered in CS2 tick rate explained.

Building the Practice Server

Load any map offline with the console enabled and paste this block:

sv_cheats 1
sv_infinite_ammo 1
mp_buy_anywhere 1
mp_buytime 60000
mp_maxmoney 60000
mp_startmoney 60000
mp_freezetime 0
mp_roundtime 60
mp_warmup_end
bot_kick
sv_showimpacts 1
sv_showimpacts_time 10
mp_restartgame 1

sv_infinite_ammo 1 removes reloading entirely; set it to 2 if you want infinite reserve ammo but still want to practise reload timing. Everything above defaults to 0 except the money and time values, so nothing here carries into a real match once you restart the game.

Two viewing settings are worth adding while you practise and reverting afterwards:

• viewmodel_recoil 0 - stops the weapon model kicking, so nothing visually obscures the impact marks you are trying to read.
• cl_crosshairstyle 2 - the classic dynamic crosshair. It opens and closes with your actual inaccuracy, so you can literally see the cone grow as you fire and shrink as you wait. Switch back to your match crosshair before you queue; more on that in best CS2 crosshair settings, and on console setup generally in CS2 console commands.

A Twenty-Minute Loop

Four five-minute blocks, one rifle only. Use aim_botz by uLLeticaL from the Workshop for the last three.

1. Wall block. Stand close to a wall, empty 30 rounds into it, and look at the shape. Fire again while pulling against it. Target: 15 rounds in a group the size of a player's head.
2. Tap block. Stationary bots, back yourself against the far wall of the range. One round per target, counting "one-and" between shots - that beat is roughly your 0.35 s. When you miss, the fault is almost always cadence, not aim. Slow down before you adjust anything else.
3. Burst block. Move to mid range. Two rounds, full reset, two rounds. Deliberately do not let the third out. This block trains the pause, which is the part everyone skips.
4. Mixed block. Bots on strafe. Walk between three distances and force a mode change at each one. This is the only block that trains the actual decision, and the decision is the skill - the other three train the execution.

Track it afterward. Tapping more at range moves your headshot percentage up; bursting at the correct range moves your damage per round up without changing your aim at all. Fold the loop into a wider practice routine rather than doing it in isolation.

Diagnosing It From Your Own Deaths

Open a demo and label every lost duel with two things: the mode you used and the range. Three patterns turn up in almost every low-rank demo.

Spraying at tapping range. Rounds 4 and up land nowhere near your crosshair and it feels like your aim broke. It did not - you spent rounds 1 to 3 building the cone that made rounds 4 and up miss.

Tapping at spraying range. You hit the first shot for 27 damage, then wait 0.35 s out of habit while the enemy sends ten rounds a second into you. At close range the cone is small enough that volume simply wins.

Firing before you have stopped. This is a movement failure wearing a recoil costume: the first bullet already missed because you were still sliding when it left. Fix counter-strafing and movement and accuracy before you blame the pattern.

Fix them in that order - movement, then range discipline, then pattern memory. Most players work backwards, grinding wall sprays for weeks while losing long-range duels to a habit they could break in an afternoon. And when you are on a Galil or FAMAS, tighten every band by one step: those rifles lose damage and accuracy over distance faster than the guns they replace, so the range where bursting stops working arrives sooner.