17. The Theory of Pushing and Holding

Defending

First, establish a common site setup with your team, and agree on which holes and lines of sight you are holding. If you made a rotate into Elbow on Oregon Basement, someone needs to be holding it. Someone needs eyes on Freezer.

• Bring roamers to make the attack harder, and shoot drones early so they cannot identify the weakest part of your setup.
• Establish where the attackers could push from and how you would kill everyone coming through there.
• Fill that space yourself, or communicate so a teammate has eyes on it, so it is never overrun unseen.
• Rotate and move when the attackers commit hard to an area. Holding an angle for an enemy who is never coming is worthless.
• Hold the push spots, not the quiet ones.
• Understand whether the map needs a roamer at all. Not everyone should roam, and not everyone should anchor — unless the attackers only have one viable approach from outside.
• Understand when to jump out on an enemy who is too distracted to react. For Oregon Basement, a workable distribution is: one holding Main and Freezer, one at Freezer Hallway pillar, one in Electrical, one at Elbow, and the fifth either supporting Elbow or roaming for the push.

Where you hold depends primarily on where the push is happening and whether they are coming from anywhere else.

Attacking

Droning is what identifies the gap in a site. You are looking for the weakest link — the area with the least utility, where they have nothing to answer a push with.

• Run a fake team capable of drawing attention and potentially taking a kill. This pulls the defence’s resources to the wrong side of the map. Once that chaos starts, execute the real push.
• Either go quiet until you cannot any more, or go loud and swift. Choose one.
• Locate the area with the least utility, then coordinate the push into it.
• Communicate to create a distraction, or to overwhelm them outright.
• If a push fails but you know for a fact they have neglected a different area, rotate and attack from there, then fall back through the original approach. There is almost always another angle into a site.
• Distractions can also be vertical — enough noise above their heads will stop defenders roaming and pull them out of position.

The rock-paper-scissors of Siege: a fast push beats a default setup, a default setup beats a slow push, and a slow, disciplined defence beats a rush.

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