Visual walkthrough
One Valorant round, broken into seven phases. As you scroll, the streamgraph on the right tracks the cognitive load of the active phase, what they were thinking, where their attention went, and when they stopped talking entirely.
The fight cells (Approach, Engage, Aftermath) are recursive in real rounds: a single round often has multiple fights, especially when an engagement doesn't resolve in a death. The walkthrough below collapses them into a single averaged sequence; the per-participant pages show every fight cycle in order.
Scroll down to begin. The chart pins to your viewport.
00 · before the buy timer ends
Before a single shot is fired, the is firing on all four attentional . Roughly 5.4 codes per round live here, making it the densest of the round.
Most of it is externally focused: , , calling the execute. Elites notably engaged in collaborative planning predominantly and drew on to inform their decisions.
cell · pre-round × no-combat
00 · before the buy timer ends
Before a single shot is fired, the is firing on all four attentional . Roughly 5.4 codes per round live here, making it the densest of the round.
Most of it is externally focused: , , calling the execute. Elites notably engaged in collaborative planning predominantly and drew on to inform their decisions.
cell · pre-round × no-combat
01 · off-spawn, taking map control
The barriers are down, the round is live, but the participant has not encountered an opponent yet. Verbalisations are concentrated around information-gathering and . Attention spreads outward, checking minimap, listening for footsteps, comm'ing util usage from the other side. Active planning that leverages explicit calculation is not as prevalent and intuitive decision-making takes over.
(game-state awareness) and dominate this . The internal critique is far less cognizant. This is also where the cohort lands between fights, when the round restarts its breath after a trade or a poke.
cell · mid-round × no-combat
02 · taking site, the approach
A fight is imminent. The participant is about to encounter another player; this phase is characterised by , of the enemy position and behaviour, and brief cost-benefit evaluation of taking the fight. Notably there was very little mechanical or aim-related thoughts; a key theme is trust in their own execution.
dominates this . Talk shifts from broad map awareness to specific tactical commitment: "he's heaven", "flash short", "I peek on three".
cell · mid-round × pre-fight
03 · clicking heads, comms cut
Roughly 0.13 codes per round across all four combined. By a wide margin, the quietest of the round, the moment callouts go from coordination to one-syllable confirms or nothing at all. Typically verbalisations here are incidental (participant was mid-thought when they were swung).
This collapse is reinvestment theory playing out. Pulling thoughts up to the surface during execution disrupts the procedural skill underneath. Elite players know this instinctively. It's also indicative of cognitive load capacity being dominated by total focus on the fight.
cell · mid-round × during-fight
04 · trade made, the aftermath
Within a beat of the duel closing, cognition spikes back up. (did I peek too wide, was my crosshair off) and (where did he come from, did we trade, where were my teammates) light up at once.
This is the real-time post-mortem , and the cohort uses more distinct code categories here than anywhere else in the round.
cell · mid-round × post-fight
05 · last man standing, round closer
Often a round ends with the participants' engagements or their teammates' fights shortly after. These codes are largely concentrated around immediate outcome reactions followed by that bleeds into the next round's buy phase: what should I have done differently? Where should I have been positioned? What utility should I have used? Was that my fault or my team's?
Volume drops sharply from the mid-round aftermath . There's less to process and no supportive callouts can be made.
cell · post-round × post-fight
06 · spike planted, round closer (calm)
Verbalisations here typically represent when the round is resolved by the participant's teammates. It is noticeably quiet, likely because their cognitive load was already spent earlier in the round.
If the buy phase is the loudest , this is the second-quietest. The interesting cognitive work in a Valorant round is front-loaded. This may suggest a "what can I do?" rather than a "what went wrong and right?" type of thought process in elite players. A "go next" mentality, if you will.
cell · post-round × no-combat
Buy phase
5.44 codes/round
Codes that peak here