Clearing angles: why you die to the second enemy

You enter a site, check the first corner, find nobody, and turn your attention to the next one. Someone was in the spot you passed while you were looking at the second corner, or in the spot you half-checked on the way. You died to an angle you thought you had cleared.

Clearing is the act of looking at every position an enemy could hold, one at a time, in the order they could kill you, without exposing yourself to a position you have not looked at yet. It sounds obvious. It is one of the hardest habits in the game, because it requires patience at exactly the moment adrenaline is telling you to hurry.

Most deaths on entry are not aim. They are being seen by someone you were not looking at. Every unchecked angle you walk past is a free shot for the enemy, and at the ranks where aim is roughly equal, free shots decide matches.

Good clearing also makes your crosshair placement work. Placement tells you where to aim on a corner. Clearing tells you which corner to be aiming at right now. A perfect crosshair on the wrong angle is no crosshair at all.

1. Learn the positions on the two sites you play most. Not every position on the map. The eight or ten spots on each site that people actually hold. Watch a few professional demos of the map and note where they check. Write the list down if you have to.
2. Order them by threat. Which spot can shoot you first as you enter? Clear that. Which one after that? Clear it next. The order is almost always the same for a given entry path, and once you know it you stop thinking.
3. Slice the pie. Move around a corner in small steps, revealing a little more of the angle each time, keeping the crosshair on the edge of what you can see. You are checking the angle a slice at a time rather than swinging it all at once. The enemy sees a sliver of you, you see a sliver of them, and you were already aiming at it.
4. Do not move on until the angle is cleared. Half-checked is unchecked. If you did not see the whole position, someone can be in the part you did not see.
5. Use utility to shorten the list. A smoke removes an angle from the list. A flash removes it for a few seconds. A molotov clears a position without you looking at it. The fewer angles you need to clear, the faster and safer the entry.
6. Split the work. With a teammate, you take the left angles and they take the right. Agree it before the round. Two players clearing the same corner is one player clearing nothing.
7. Review entries in your demos. Pause at the moment you die on a site. Ask where the shot came from and whether you had looked there. If you had not, that death goes on the clearing list, not the aim list.

Speed comes from knowing the order, not from moving faster. The players who seem to clear sites quickly are doing the same slow sequence you should be doing. They have just done it a thousand times.