We asked
Valorant coach

Joseph Tolu about Coaching valorant

With 6 years of e-sports experience, Joseph has played for teams like "KOI" and mastered FPS games like CSGO, Rainbow Six Siege, and Apex Legends, as well as titles like Elden Ring and Need For Speed. Passionate about coaching, Joseph is keen on developing player skills. Book a coaching session with Joseph on Fiverr.
1

What is your experience and level as a Valorant player?

I played in different e-sports teams for 6 years almost, I played in a team called “KOI” for a few months, and I play different types of games such as CSGO, Rainbow Six Siege, and Apex Legends. Those were my FPS games mainly but I also play games such as Elden Ring, The Division 2, For Honor, Need For Speed, etc. I always wanted to do coaching and wanted to build players for games so I was already interested in it.
2

What is your coaching approach in Valorant?

I always try to be a friend instead of a coach so they can talk with me much better than, being a professional player, each session we start with fundamentals, basics cause if you don’t understand basics it’s much harder to improve in the game and sometimes people don’t know correctly the basics or somebody teach them wrong, afterward basics we go in-game depth much more. When I’m teaching someone else sometimes people might be shy and can’t talk with you, I’ll ask them, if they understand it and needed to teach them again. If they tell you yes and you look in-game while they’re doing it, you’ll see they understand the thing you teaching them
3

How do you analyze a player’s performance?

When you watch the player in-game live you understand everything the way they do like Peeking, Strafing, Using movement, Utility usage, Predicting the enemy’s play style, and Predicting the enemy’s utility. Those things will immediately tell you about your player’s performance in-game and afterward, I teach them how things should be done and give them better ideas about how they should need to play. I review the games live but, if the client wants just a Vod review I also vod review as well and send them feedback about how to improve.
4

How can you help players improve their aiming skills?

I always recommend that players watch professional players’ streams and watch tournaments like VCT etc. Cause when you watch those things, you will see how players put their crosshairs for certain positions for certain maps and you can steal that, improve and use it in-game, other things that should be done is use practice range in-game, you don’t need fancy apps or things to improve your aim, cause that things are not same as in a game. Cause when you use another client the recoils for guns use the velocity of the character and are much more different compared to an actual game.

About improving aim, movement, and crosshair you have just to play a lot and watch Twitch streams and pro players, pls do not watch YouTube( cause a lot of YouTube videos are made for content it doesn’t help you a lot, and the things they teach either half correct, half wrong either full wrong, try to watch videos maybe from professional players if still want to watch it). And yes I’ll give personalized warm-up routines.
5

What strategies do you recommend for effective team communication?

Communication is one bad problem in Valorant, cause the lower your rank gets much more less communication experience you get most of the time but “you should be giving Information all the time”

The information is key to victory even if your teammates not giving, cause sometimes like in life, you need to take ropes in your hand yourself and control the team, cause most people don’t know what they’re doing in-game you have to be the leader. Always give suggestions for ideas, fewer ideas in-team means less chance of winning in-game. Being aggressive in-game depends on your agent, position, peeking advantage, utility, enemy’s utility, enemy’s position and can your teammates trade you while you fighting you have to consider all of those things before playing aggressively.

6

Can you share some tips for map control in Valorant?

Map Control is really important in-game as well cause, for example, enemy peeks into position, they get map control and get information about no one there, then here’s the important part, the person who’s playing with the site can now rotate the other site, that you are pushing with your teammates, that leads with more resistance in site with more people and you will lose more rounds, more games that why map control is really important to learn, I teach people about map control and how they can punish aggressive plays enemy make.

If you want to learn the maps look for these three things: 1-is it defense or attack-sided,2-is it a small or big map for aim fights, and which guns are better,3-how many entrances and which spots are important to take the map control.
7

How do you develop a player’s game sense and decision-making?

Game sense is the thing you can’t learn by just watching videos, you have to play different types of games to understand it. For example: If you play Csgo you will learn the mechanical game better compared to Valorant cause Csgo has 4x times harder mechanical gameplay compared to Valorant.

Let’s say: If you play Elden Ring for example, you will learn how to be patient cause Elden Ring takes a lot of time to play and learn, that will lead you to understand how to be patient in any game, technically when you learn different things from different games and you implement those things in-game you will have better decision making, game sense, utility usage and much more. That’s also why I have a lot of game sense in the game compared to other players.

But you can learn about decision-making instead of game sense, you have to just ask yourself in a game like this when you gonna make decisions: is it a good position to peek? if I peek what’s my chance of killing the enemy?, what’s the rate of success getting multiple kills?, what’s the rate of me losing the fight?, do I have a utility peek with it or should I wide peek it? Does the enemy has utility peek me? is the timing right to peek? How can I counter their utility, Those are the things u have to consider when u making decisions in-game there’s a lot more in-game still.
8

What advice do you have for choosing the right agent for a player’s playstyle?

The only thing that separates the amateur from professional players is having much more experience and maybe a mentality of always improving and learning new stuff that’s it. By the mean of experience I mean utility, Aiming, movement it’s all past things they learned after all every professional player was amateur at some point the only thing is changed is experience.
9

How do you help players adapt to new patches and meta shifts?

New patches mean nothing that much, it’s all about the players themselves rather than complaining about meta or patches, I believe “off-meta is always better than meta” like agents wise, Yoru is 10x better than Jett, people just don’t know how to play correctly that’s why and yoru agent itself is much harder.

Off-meta play style is always gonna beat meta plays cause of the unpredictable play style. I also give them my own special agent’s compendiums to my clients so they can have better ideas about agents.
10

What do you think separates amateur players from professionals?

Definitely dedication. Any person can become semi professional, it’s all about how much work you put into it. Hard work really pays off from my experience, I have coached few average players that later became semi professional.
11

How do you measure the progress of players you coach?

I measure players’ progress with how they play in-game, the way they play the game shows you everything you need to know about them and I’ll also use the tracker.gg statistic app to have bit more advanced measures for their headshot rates etc .
12

How do you create personalized training plans for players?

First of all, I give them basic training that is given to everyone, then I’ll give personalized training by their measured progress in-game live most of the time and recommend them few other things.
13

What success stories can you share from your coaching career?

Everyone who came to me ended up happy, there was a guy deranked from Plat 2 to Gold 3 in one day after, we did our coaching he was back to Plat 2 and reached out to Diamond in 2 weeks.
14

What is your top advice for players new to Valorant?

Before starting if you don’t know about basic fundamentals, try to learn them so you have common knowledge about how to play in the game, never stop learning always learn new things, improve, watch tournaments and pro players how they play, and implement into your game.
15

What basic player level do you recommend before seeking professional coaching?

If you don’t know how to improve and you get kinda bit hardstuck about how learn new things or about in-game, then afterwards you should get coaching, don’t try to give up that easily.
16

What tools do you use to facilitate Valorant coaching sessions?

I use tools like Discord for the streaming session, tracker.gg for getting information on in-game stats of clients, twitch tournament streams that’s it, and my own special agent’s compendium.
17

Do you offer coaching through Discord, and how does it work?

I do not offer any coaching sessions from discord, I’ll always like to have make my session trusted websites like Fiverr.