Some Important Tips After Dozens of Hours Murdering in 'Battlegrounds'

I'm not a pro gamer. I don't have any sponsorships, I don't have a streaming schedule, and my YouTube page is mostly dedicated to talking about the game Baldur's Gate. However, I have achieved a goal that once seemed impossible to me: I have won a game of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. More than that, I have won it in every game mode (solo, duo, and squad). I am the proud eater of four "chicken dinners" or first-place finishes.

As a mere mortal human who has achieved this near-impossible feat, I am now going to give you some tips that will get you that dinner. I deserved the dinner, and you do too! Everyone needs a dinner!

First, as I wrote in my previous article on PUBG, you have to get aggressive. You've gotta make sure that you're figuring out how the guns work, and not just in a numerical "the KAR shoots further than the SCAR" way. You need to collect guns and fire them at moving targets.

It's only in those high-stress scenarios that you figure out exactly what the bullet drop on the SKS is at the range of an 8x scope or exactly how long your bursts should be for the UMP. You have to develop some embodied knowledge.

Second, you need to understand the value of the different grenades. A well-placed fragmentation grenade up some stairs can save you a risky fire fight. Throwing the five smoke grenades you have accumulated over the course of a game when there are fewer than ten players in a small circle can buy you a lot of time to make decisions.

On the other side, understanding that you shouldn't panic when grenades are thrown at you is also important. Realizing that I should let a stun grenade drive me out of cover got me a lot further in the game, and knowing that a little bit of cover between myself and a frag grenade goes a long way has saved my life more than once.

Third, you need to know which actions are risky and which ones aren't. For instance:

• Driving a car? Better to drive a Dacia because it's faster, but all cars are risky because of noise. If you're thinking of driving a motorcycle, think again because they're death traps.
• Crouching by a tree in a big field paints a target on you, but lying prone beside a tree can make people pass over you without a second thought.
• With the help of a single painkiller, you can walk around in the first blue circle for a long time.
• While that painful blue wall is meant to herd players into certain areas of the map, realizing exactly how much you can push it (and thus prey upon the players who don't realize they can push it) is a huge boon.
• The opening ten minutes of the game allow you to take your time, and making sure you are getting the right gear in those moments before the game gets hectic is critical to success later on.

It's important to realize that defeating other players in combat is a way of looting. Killing and looting another squad after fifteen minutes means that you've inherited fifteen minutes of total loot time; in a squad of four, you've inherited an hour of searching for items.

Rather than sneaking your way to the endgame and simply killing one or two other combatants for the crown, being very aggressive means that you are shortcutting your way to much better equipment, which makes winning those final battles that much easier.

Finally, I would suggest that you scream as much as possible while playing. Charging a room with a Vector and knowing that you might meet your death is either exhilarating or calming (based on your temperament, perhaps). If I am playing alone and no one else is home, I tend to let out a yelp or two to get myself going. Look, every competitive game is about edge cases, and I think that screaming probably gives me at least a 1% uptick in capability.

There are lots of other small things, of course. Learning how to jump across a doorway and shoot through it seems to be an important trick that I haven't managed to quite learn. Being able to regularly land on a rooftop with your parachute is paramount at this point. Knowing that you can hold down CTRL to sneak and avoid pesky footfalls probably generates a non-zero percentage increase in wins. And I am sure there are infinitely more things to learn. [You can zoom a little bit even without a scope by holding down Shift while aiming down sights! -Ed.]

Master these things, and then meet me on the battlegrounds. I'm going to be screaming the entire time, but I am also an unkillable god among mortals, so good luck coming after me.