Valorant player shows an incredible way of dealing with smurfs in the game

Smurfing in Valorant is often as bad as hacking in CS: GO, and on certain days it’s even worse.

From the abysmal queue times in higher elos to next-gen boosting strategies, there are indeed several factors in Valorant that goad a significant portion of its player base to create an alternate account in a lower rank.

Smurfing issues have been compromising the competitive integrity of the shooter for some time now, and it ruins the fun of the game on more levels than one.

Even with Riot implementing the new “Win 10 matches” system to counteract much of the smurfing problems, it honestly doesn’t seem to be working. And in return, it is just forcing players to throw matches, thereby making things even worse.

However, a Valorant player came up with a strategy to counter smurfs whenever they pop up in the enemy team.

In a recent Reddit post, the Valorant player who goes by the handle of soomuh1 told a story of how he was able to effectively outplay a smurf by leveraging his status as a “low elo player.”

He quoted the YouTuber TheKingLive and said:

"Sometimes low elo players do things that are so stupid they catch good players off guard."

Playing unpredictably is one of the best methods of countering a smurf in Valorant, and soomuh1 did just that in this instance.

Valorant player counters smurfing with unpredictability

Smurfs in Valorant or any other game, for that matter, primarily play for kills. They honestly don’t care if they win the match or not. But, they do prefer a loss more than the win in the competitive mode, lest they accidentally boost the rank of their alternate account.

Hence, playing unpredictably is one of the best ways to counter a smurf in a game. Doing things that a player will not normally do can throw them off their game, and in soomuh1’s case, even make them rage quit.

The Redditor wrote:

“I noticed that the Raze (the smurf) was playing mid, and when we made our location known, he would rush over, throw his grenade, and blast pack to us and mow us down while we were distracted by all of the utility. I told my team to make their presence known at A site (we were on split) and to quickly rotate.”

soomuh1 further added that the Raze pushed his team and realized that they were rotating. So, she tried to rotate through the sewers in the hope of flanking them once they got to B main. But, soomuh1 was waiting there (because he initially didn't want to go with his team) and later killed the Raze.

Image via Riot Games

Smurfing is all about getting a higher than average kill count, and the very fact that the Valorant smurfs like to chase kills helped soomuh1 set up a very good counter.

Instead of playing aggressively from the very start of the round, the Redditor and his teammates played it passive and made the smurf chase kills all over the map. They camped spots near their spawn area and outgunned the Raze every time she showed her face.

Soomuh1 said:

“Moral of the story is that smurfs always chase kills and get tilted easily; use that to your advantage. We also 9-way reported him for text chat abuse and throwing the game. Hopefully, he gets banned.”

The smurfing pandemic in Valorant doesn’t feel like it will be going away anytime soon, but players have already come up with some innovative ways of countering the problem.