When you take a gunfight, you do not expose your whole body. The objective is to cover as much of yourself as possible so your hitbox is not fully available, which makes you harder to kill.
If you do not win the first exchange, do not re-peek at the same head height. That lets the other player simply prefire your original position for a free kill. Changing it can be as simple as moving to the other side of the room, crouching, or going prone mid-fight. As long as you are unpredictable and awkward to kill, you will win more 1v1s.
Standing on objects and fighting from behind cover are things people do not predict easily. Having teammates positioned to refrag you is what turns those fights into round wins.
You do not need to take every fight. Peek on information: audio cues, drone intel and teammate callouts.
Dry peeking Peeking without information. Avoid it. This is where learning the Shaiiko peek matters — it is what lets you gather whether a room is clear and where to aim before you commit your body.
Slicing the pie Fractioning a room and taking one angle at a time so you never face multiple targets simultaneously.
Like any online game, Siege has ping delay. The player who is moving gets updated to the server first, so a peeker naturally sees a stationary player before that player sees them. This is inevitable — it is how servers work.
The counter is to always be moving. A static player gives the peeker a long window to anticipate, predict and confirm that someone is standing there, before the defender has any chance to see them at all.
Always move when both parties know where the other is. If you are lurking, staying still is fine. If you are waiting for someone to peek, move — because everything in this game makes noise, and you should assume
everyone knows where you are.
Do not get prefired and then assume the other player is cheating because they knew where you were through audio. That is the most amateur assumption in the game. Work on your movement instead. Siege has a limited movement set and people still spend years improving it.
Know when to peek, when to hold, where to hold, and how the enemy sees you when they clear for angles.
Null movement Failing to engage after the enemy kills your teammate, or failing to react to a sound cue. That is the habit to break.
Always imagine the scenario you cannot see. If there is a gunfight on Chalet top Blue Stairs while you are in Basement, assume a flank is possible because they are occupied. Silence is not nothing — if it has been too quiet during a fight, and it is a 5v3 with two enemies engaging your teammate across the map, assume a flanker is already moving on you regardless of who they are.
Lower lobbies do not understand flanking, so they will all sit inside site without ever venturing out. Higher lobbies will punish you for the same assumption.
It is crucial to act on audio that tells you the enemy is occupied. Example: they are breaching the Garage wall on Chalet and there is no other indication of entry. Assume the rest of them are stacked outside that breach. Action: run out of the 2F Library window, hope there is no claymore, and gun them down.
Now apply that. Practise using your ears to make decisions.
Cover as much of the map as possible and eliminate roamers. If everyone on the enemy team is roaming, rush in, plant, and defend the site while they try to attack their own objective — defending is always easier than attacking, and you only need to know how to hold the site and where to anchor.
As an attacker your main goal is to get into the building unharmed. Roaming is straightforward to understand: they are moving around the map waiting for audio information, and the site is always the destination.
When a defending team brings no roamers, attacking becomes far easier, because there are no flankers or stray enemies to worry about. Every target is grouped together. That is exactly why a defending team needs a balance of roamers and anchors.
Stall time and hold as much map space as you can. As a roamer, your job is to take time away from the attackers, forcing them to become disorganised and to focus on the wrong objective.
Roaming means finding where the attackers are coming from and intercepting them, ideally without announcing your presence. If they are all pushing directly into site — say through Big Window on Oregon 2F Kids — you have no business holding Lobby, because nobody is coming.
Do not spend time in a place they are not pushing. Identify quickly where they are coming from and be flexible; your initial guess will sometimes be wrong, and the point is to correct it as fast as possible.
A team of all roamers has nobody contesting site. A team of all anchors has nobody stalling or flanking. Neither works.
Map control Do not barricade every door on site. Doing so hands the attackers the entire floor with no consequences.
Related: have your peeks reviewed on your own clip.
This chapter is from The Principles of Competitive Siege, a free guide by Szhutsen K. Liang. SiegeIQ puts the same thinking on your own clips: upload a round and get a breakdown of what actually went wrong. Try it free.