How to Improve Fast in Rainbow Six Siege: 18 Habits That Actually Transfer

NotJoeyBlack put out eighteen ways to improve at Siege back in August, and the interesting part is what is not on the list. Barely any of it is aim. Nearly all of it is refusing to take a gunfight on even terms, which is a decision you make before the fight starts and the one thing nobody drills.

We regrouped them by what each one fixes instead of keeping the original order, because half of them are the same idea wearing a different gadget.

One thing out of the way first, because the cover says Y11S2 while the rest of this site is on Y11S3. It was recorded before Operation Split Fire, so the footage is last operation's. We read the Y11S3 Designer's Notes against the list anyway: that patch moved the SMG-12, Kali, the two defender DMRs and Dokkaebi, and not one of them touches anything below.

Stop taking fights you have not already won

Swing an angle clean and you get peeker's advantage, which sounds like an edge and is nowhere near enough of one. Realistically you have walked into a fifty-fifty. That is not a plan, that is a coin.

So spend something first. Throw an Ela mine behind the player you are about to swing and one of two things happens: they turn to shoot it, which is a free kill, or it goes off late and still costs them a fraction of a second of not knowing what that noise was. An impact grenade does the same job with damage and screen shake attached. The gadget is not the point. The point is arriving at the fight while their crosshair is somewhere else.

The same logic upgrades trap operators from area denial to setup. Put a Fenrir mine on a beam near a doorway, hold one side of it, and wait. When it triggers the player on the other side is blind and backing up, which is not a fight, it is a cleanup.

Never show the same head at the same height twice

Re-peeking an angle you have already peeked is the most punished habit at every rank, because you have just told them where your head will be and roughly when it will get there.

Three outs, all free. Re-peek crouched and their pre-fire goes over your head while they flick down to find it. Or peek the other direction, which makes the angle new even though you have not moved. Or walk all the way back, get behind cover, and come out somewhere they were never watching. Any of the three costs you about a second. None of them costs you the round, which is what re-peeking costs.

Your crosshair is probably below their head

This is the cheapest tip on the list and the one most likely to move your numbers this week. Barricades have a buckle on each side, and the buckle sits at head height. Line your crosshair up with it as you walk through and you are aimed at a head instead of a stomach.

It works because it is a thing on the wall rather than a rule in your head, and things on the wall do not slip your mind at the exact moment you need them.

Cross the angle the fast way

Two mechanics here, and they are the same mechanic seen from both ends.

The first: every operator moves at the same speed while aiming down sights. A three speed like Bandit and a one speed like Gridlock reach the wall at the same moment once they are ADS, and the gap only opens up when they are not. Speed ratings buy you rotations, not duels.

The second is T-swinging. Your movement speed is a fixed number, but the speed the defender sees is the part of it that crosses their sight line. Walk diagonally into an angle and most of your movement is toward them, which is the part their crosshair does not have to travel. Walk straight across it and all of it counts. Picture their sight line as the stem of a T and draw the crossbar with your feet.

Stop spending flank util on flank watch

A Nomad airjab on the stairs behind you is the default use and it is the timid one. You have spent a charge to be told you are about to die.

Put the same airjab, or Gridlock's Trax Stingers, on the door defenders would come through to take back the hallway you just took. Now it is holding ground you cannot personally stand on, and whoever tries to retake that hallway arrives stunned or slowed into an angle you were already watching.

Open the wall without waiting for your team

Three pieces of tech, all aimed at the same solo queue problem: the hard breach never happens because the person holding it is dead in spawn.

A hatch with a Kaid claw on it is not closed, as long as there is soft flooring around it. Place Hibana pellets on the edge of the hatch, waiting for the little settle animation before you commit, and they sit far enough out that the electricity does not reach them. NotJoeyBlack puts the total at four pellets to take an electrified hatch down, in two goes if the first does not also kill the Kaid claw. Ace and Thermite do the same trick from the side.

On defence, the mirror of that is Bandit tricking, and it is worth more in solo queue than anywhere else precisely because the attackers are also solo queuing and cannot coordinate the EMP. The moment the wall is EMP'd and someone starts placing a hard breach charge, drop fresh Bandit batteries to kill it, then pick up the EMP'd ones and cycle them. The addition here is the part people skip: make your murder holes at an off angle rather than the obvious one, so when someone comes to punish you from below the window they are looking at the wrong hole.

And Maverick. Run the torch across the top of the reinforcement from one side to the other, then the bottom, and the wall is soft. The line most people never cut is the one on the far side of the reinforcement, which buys a head glitch: they cannot shoot your body through the reinforcement, and you can cover a teammate planting. Peek it from a different point along the line each time or you are just a stationary head.

Two kills they do not see coming

Unbroken glass on a barricade muffles the sound of a bullet going through it. So if the defenders left the glass in, rappel down, put one pistol round through the barricade and the next through the same hole in the glass, and you have a firing port that the player on the other side most likely did not register. Suppressed is better. A pistol is the minimum. Check nobody is standing right beside the window first, because at that range the trick stops working.

The other one wants barbed wire and a Nitro Cell. Sentry is the operator named for it, and Ubisoft's own page says why: Sentry is the defender with access to every defender secondary gadget. Wire a doorway, ping the wire so you can find it from the floor below, and stick the C4 under it. People punch barbed wire, and punching it is loud, and the noise tells you when to detonate. If you can guess which side they are coming from, offset the C4 that way.

Use vert to push people out of position

Opening a hole and staring down it hoping for a kill is how you get shot from below. Vert is worth more as pressure: breach a floor as far to the side of a common holding spot as you can get it, and you take the toes of anyone playing that window. They are not dead. They have to move back into the corner, and the corner is where anyone pushing the window kills them for free.

For the corners that vert cannot see, a breach charge placed to take out the floor and the wall under it opens a prone angle that did not exist a second ago. Mira in the far corner is a lot less comfortable when the floor above her has a slot in it.

Defenders are allowed to take gaps too

Everyone talks about taking space on attack. In the lower ranks, attackers routinely take a room and then stop watching it, and nobody on defence punishes that. Watch a camera or just listen, confirm the room is empty, and retake it. You do not need to hold it. Two seconds standing somewhere they think is theirs is enough to kill Lion from a direction that should not exist.

The attacking version is the same instinct applied to walls. If you are pushing a side and you notice the wall next to you is soft, go through it now rather than around. Nobody pre-aims a wall.

There is also a rush timed on one map at seventeen seconds from spawn to an angle on site. Treat that number as NotJoeyBlack's rather than ours, but the principle holds anywhere: the fastest route in is a route nobody is set up for yet.

Pre-fire more than feels reasonable

Around Platinum and below, most players hear Acesomewhere to the left, pre-aim the angle, and hold fire until they actually see him. That hands the Ace an even fight, with the sound of your swing thrown in as a warning.

You are making that noise either way. So shoot. Start firing before the angle opens and keep firing through it. You will waste a lot of ammo and you will also arrive at people who are already dead.

The two drills worth ten minutes before ranked

Two drills, both short, both before ranked rather than instead of it.

One or two free-for-all deathmatches as a warm-up. Nothing else puts that many people in a position to see you at once, so it drills the habit that decides real rounds: counting how many angles you are currently standing in and cutting the fight down to one of them. If you are winning free-for-alls, your mechanics are not what is holding you back.

Then five to ten minutes of Clear House on a map you do not know well, idle dummies, pings turned off once you have found them. Work through it angle by angle going for one taps only. What you are training is first bullet accuracy and head level crosshair placement while reading geometry you have not memorised, and that last part is the bit an aim trainer cannot give you.

I will admit I have never got past about three days of this in a row. That is probably the honest reason most people's crosshair placement never changes, mine included, and it is worth saying before a list like this reads as easy.

The last one, which is an anecdote and not a mechanic

NotJoeyBlack three stacks exclusively, never solo queues and never five stacks, and says that since switching there have been barely any cheaters in Champion and the win rate has sat around 75 percent. The reason given is that three of five players is enough to control the standard of the team.

None of that is checkable and none of it is a mechanic you can reproduce in a custom game, so take it as one Champion player's read on their own lobbies. The boring half is the true half: you control more of your team in a three stack than you do alone, and that is worth something at every rank whatever the cheaters are doing.

The tips on this page are NotJoeyBlack's, from NotJoeyBlack's video of August 25, 2026. We have grouped them by what each one fixes, checked the gadget claims against Ubisoft's own operator pages, and left anything aboutNotJoeyBlack's own results attributed rather than restated as fact. Tier placements read live from our list, which is built from 4 named creators' published rankings rather than from telemetry. Statistical data is based on external APIs and publicly available information. It may differ from official data.

Statistical data is based on external APIs and publicly available information. It may differ from official data.