Practising CS2 Lineups Offline

Reading a lineup takes thirty seconds. Owning one — being able to hit it while someone is shouting on comms and you have nine seconds of round left — takes a practice server and about fifteen minutes. This is the setup and the routine.

Starting the server

From the main menu choose Play, then Practice / Offline with bots, pick your map and start. Open the console with the tilde key — if nothing happens, enable the console in Settings under Game. Then paste the commands below.

The commands

sv_cheats 1 — required before anything else here will run.
bot_kick — clears the bots out of the way.
mp_limitteams 0; mp_autoteambalance 0 — stops the game moving you.
mp_roundtime 60; mp_roundtime_defuse 60; mp_freezetime 0 — long rounds, no waiting.
mp_maxmoney 60000; mp_startmoney 60000; mp_buytime 9999; mp_buy_anywhere 1 — buy anything, anywhere, forever.
sv_infinite_ammo 1 — grenades are not consumed when thrown.
ammo_grenade_limit_total 5 — carry every grenade type at once.
sv_grenade_trajectory_prac_pipreview 1 — picture-in-picture preview showing where your grenade ends up, so you do not have to walk over and look.
sv_rethrow_last_grenade — rethrows your previous grenade from the same spot with the same input. Bind it to a key; it is the single biggest time-saver here.
mp_restartgame 1 — applies the round settings.

Bind the rethrow to something reachable — bind "n" "sv_rethrow_last_grenade" — and you can fire the same lineup twenty times in the time it would otherwise take to walk back to the spot twice.

A routine that sticks

Pick three lineups. Not ten. Three, from one map, that your team actually uses.
Throw each one until you hit it five times in a row. Not five times total — five consecutively, so a lucky one does not count as learned.
Now do it without the reference open. Close this site, walk to the spot from spawn, and throw. This is the step people skip and it is the step that makes the difference.
Add movement. Walk in from where you would actually be coming from, at the pace you would actually be moving, and throw. A lineup you can only hit from a standing start is a lineup you cannot use.
Come back tomorrow and do step three again cold. One session does not build muscle memory; two sessions a day apart mostly does.

Practising the timing, not just the throw

Every lineup here lists its air time. Once you can hit a throw reliably, the remaining skill is knowing how early to make it. Stand at the throwing spot, throw, and walk towards the site at normal pace — where you are when it lands is where you will be in a real round. If that is three metres short of where you need to be, the throw has to leave earlier, and knowing that in practice is much cheaper than discovering it in a match.

Practising with a friend

Two people on a private server can practise the thing that actually loses rounds: the handoff. One throws the smoke, the other calls it and moves. Doing that ten times is worth more than either of you throwing a hundred perfect grenades alone, because the failure mode in real games is almost never the grenade.

What not to practise

Lineups for maps you do not play. It feels productive and it is not. Learn the map in your queue.
Twenty variations of the same smoke. One reliable throw onto a spot beats four you half-know onto the same spot.
Throws that require a position you can never actually reach. A beautiful lineup from deep in enemy territory is a demo clip, not a tool.
Anything you cannot execute in the round time available. Check the clock while you practise, not after.

Using the trajectory preview honestly

The picture-in-picture preview is the single most useful practice setting and also the easiest one to lean on too hard. It shows you where the grenade went, which lets you correct quickly — but if you only ever throw while watching it, you are learning to throw with feedback that will not exist in a match. Use it for the first few repetitions of a new lineup, then turn it off and confirm you can still hit it blind.

Practising in a real map, not a practice map

Community practice maps with pre-placed markers are excellent for learning that a lineup exists and terrible for learning to use it, because they remove exactly the hard part: finding the spot yourself. Once you know the throw, do the repetitions on the plain map from a normal spawn. The walk from spawn to the throwing position is part of the lineup, and it is the part that decides whether you can do it with twenty seconds left.