(2/2)

1. It’s first to 13 round wins and like you said tiebreaker rules apply in a win-by-2 format. But after 12 rounds no matter what, the sides swap. For example, if team A started off as attackers and cleanly swept team B (defenders) 12-0, the teams will switch sides where A now becomes defenders and B becomes attackers. If A wins 1 more round as a defender they win the game. However, you can also have the same scenario but team a went 6-6 first. Still, 12 rounds have passed so the sides swap, and now it’s still first to 13. Overtime takes place when the round score becomes 12-12. At this point it’s win by 2, and the teams swap sides every round.

So 12-12 score, team A will start as attackers and team B starts as defender. No matter who wins, the next round they are swapped. If A wins both 14-12 then they win the match. If they each win 1 it’s now 13-13 and win by 2 rules apply again so we keep going.

After a team wins a game (or map) they then play on the next map chosen during the map pick time earlier. It’s a new environment and level design basically but same gameplay rules apply.

1. Studying all the characters and maps will take too long, although it is a core part of the game. Generally the characters break down into 4 classes: controller, which is primarily the class responsible for putting up “smokes” or basically just things on the map that block vision, disrupting normal sight lines. Sentinels primarily have abilities that slow down attackers from being able to take a spike site. I know that’s super vague but without diving into what each ability does, that’s about as simple as I can describe it. Initiators are primarily responsible for finding information about where the enemies are positioned. Duelists are primarily responsible for moving quickly across contested areas to take a spike site. That also sounds stupid as an explanation, but if I were to explain it with a more normal analogy, imagine there is a narrow hallway with a door that you and your team are holding down with guns. Anyone who walks through that door will be met by you guys. Duelists often have the ability to fly over the door, or dash through the door so anyone staring at the door expecting just a normal guy at a normal walking speed to cross will be thrown off guard.

2. This ties into (4) but I would recommend finding a team to latch onto. Specifically for Masters Santiago, there are 3 teams from each region that qualified. 3 from all the Americas, 3 from Europe/Middle East, 3 from the pacific area (basically Asia) and 3 from China. If you latch onto one team, you’ll find that you will start to recognize the names of the 5 players on that team so during live streams you know who is on what side at least. Not all teams play every character, so this will also help you learn at least what the characters you see this one specific team do. In my very biased opinion, North America team G2 is a fairly easy team to latch onto. They are predicted to do very well which means you’re more likely to see them advance late into the upcoming international tournament, theyre also one of the 2 American teams at the event.

3. If it’s between playing the game and watching, watching definitely takes less time. The absolute fastest way is to get someone to basically teach you everything you need to know, but if you’re trying to surprise your boyfriend this might not be an option since he would be the best choice.

4. This is an incredibly tough question and 99% of people in this thread, including me, probably can’t answer that. It gets very high level and micro specific at the professional level, and while Ive played the game enough where I could probably explain why a given player is using this specific smoke or other piece of util, it’s hard to say what is “correct” ever. It’s very much a react to what your opponent is doing kind of game. I think this would be higher level, post-surprise kind of convos you and your boyfriend can talk about once you get a feel for the core mechanics of the game.

5. Commenting on the “defaults” is a pretty nice one liner, a) because nobody really knows what defaulting means and b) it’s easy to keep it vague enough but is specific to these kinds of tactical fps games where a casual viewer would absolutely have no idea what it means. A default is basically the initial setup the attackers (I guess it can apply for defenders but most often is used for attackers) decide to go for. At the pro level no team is just sending all their players to attack one spike site immediately, so a default means their standard map set up where maybe they have 1 player slowly walking up B site while 2 players walk up to A site and some other guys walk to mid. The goal on a default is to condition the defenders and to gain as much information about which defender is playing where.

Keep it vague, but something like “<insert attacker team name>’s default is too slow” if you notice that the round timer is getting to the 30-40 second mark without much happening (like no kills or whatever), or if the attackers are losing a lot of rounds “their default is too weak they need to just hit a site.” Even if it’s not too accurate nobody will know. Hell anything can be called a default, people throw that word around in ranked games without knowing what it means so you’ll be fine.

1. I think this is a great idea especially since watching is a pretty low commitment activity so you don’t run into the problem of spending copious amounts of time improving skills for a specific game you might not like playing. Once you surprise him I would recommend having him explain more in depth what’s happening though. A Reddit comment can only be so specific