How to Read a CS2 Grenade Lineup

Every lineup here is the same fixed sequence of in-game stills rather than a video. That is a deliberate choice, and knowing what each frame is for turns a missed throw from a mystery into a two-second diagnosis.

The frames, and what each one is for

Wide throw shot — where the throwing spot is, seen from far enough back to recognise the area. You use this once, to get to roughly the right place.
Throw position — the exact spot to stand on, close enough that you can match a floor texture or a corner. This is the frame that decides whether the rest of the lineup means anything.
Crosshair alignment — what your screen looks like when you are pointed correctly. Wide enough to give you context.
Alignment, zoomed — a crop of the same frame around the landmark that matters. This is the frame you actually match against.
Wide target shot — where the grenade is going, so you can confirm you are throwing at the right thing.
Result — what it looks like when it lands. If your throw does not look like this, something upstream drifted.

Older lineups have five of these instead of six: the zoomed alignment crop was added later, and entries submitted before it exist without one. The viewer adapts to whatever a lineup actually has, so nothing is broken — you just do the fine alignment off the wide frame.

Diagnosing a missed throw

When a grenade lands somewhere other than the result frame, the cause is almost always one of four things, and they are worth checking in this order because each is cheaper to rule out than the next.

Standing position. Being half a step off is enough on a long throw. Walk into the spot with shift held rather than running into it and sliding — momentum you did not intend is the single most common cause.
Crosshair alignment. Compare against the zoomed crop, not the wide shot. A wide shot at a different FOV or aspect ratio looks similar while being several degrees off.
Movement input. A running throw that you made standing still lands short; a standing throw you made while strafing lands wide. The technique list on each lineup names exactly what is required.
Throw strength. Left click and right click travel very different distances from the same spot, and a mis-timed jump-throw is its own category of wrong.

Field of view and aspect ratio

Counter-Strike does not let you change the gameplay field of view, so an alignment frame captured on someone else's machine matches yours horizontally. Aspect ratio is a different matter: a lineup captured at 16:9 and matched at 4:3 stretched shows the same landmarks in different screen positions. Match the landmark to your crosshair, not to a position on the frame, and the difference stops mattering.

Viewmodel settings change where your hands sit but not where the grenade goes. If a lineup frame shows a different viewmodel from yours, ignore it — it is cosmetic.

The metadata is part of the lineup

Each lineup carries the side it is used on, a difficulty rating, the air time, the movement technique, the CS2 patch it was last tested on, and verified / broken votes from members who tried it. The air time in particular is worth reading before you use a throw in a match: a smoke that takes three seconds to land is a different tool from one that lands instantly, and it changes when you have to throw it relative to your team moving.

If a lineup is wrong

Vote it broken. Everything here is submitted by members and reviewed by staff, but review catches presentation problems far more reliably than it catches a throw that stopped working after a map update. The broken votes are the signal that gets a lineup re-tested or removed, and they only exist if people cast them.

Finding a lineup from either end

Each map's radar carries every lineup twice: once at the spot the throw starts from, once at the spot the grenade lands on. Both are clickable, and which one you use depends on what you already know. If you know you want that corner smoked, start from the target. If you are standing somewhere in the middle of a round with a smoke and thirty seconds, start from where you are — that is the search almost no lineup resource supports, and it is the one that matches how rounds actually go.

From there the per-grenade and per-callout pages narrow it further: all the smokes on a map, or all the smokes that land on one specific callout. If a spot is hittable from three different places, that page is where you find out.

Why stills and not video

The frames are not a compromise for want of video. A lineup is two or three static reference points, and video is a bad container for static reference points: you scrub back and forth hunting the one frame that shows the alignment, and you cannot hold it on screen while you set up in game. Stills load faster on a bad connection, sit still while you match them, and can be zoomed into the part that actually matters. Where a lineup does have a video walkthrough, it is linked from the page as an extra rather than as the primary reference.