Introduction to Sacking in Sixes
When first learning sixes you'll hear people talking about "sack-ing." This is short for sacrificing. The whole goal of this is to sacrifice your life for something that is worth more than your life.
When starting sixes you will probably be confused about the point of it and when to do it, so let’s try and break down everything.
What Is a Sacrifice?
As mentioned, the point is to do a trade of your life for something more worthwhile than your life. The most common sac that you'll see is a soldier bombing through a choke onto the next control point to try and force the enemy team’s medic.
Soldiers often learn this early on but sometimes don’t even understand when doing something like this is an appropriate thing and when it’s not.
When Is It Appropriate to Sac?
In order to know when it is appropriate, you have to consider your current position in the game. In a lot of situations, a sac yields nothing—simply your death.
It always has to be the case that doing that still keeps your team in a good position. For example, if your team is trying to break last with even uber and you sac and force the enemy medic, then that's a good play. In the worst case, you lose a soldier, so you might not even get pushed off the second point that you're holding.
Whereas if the enemy team were to sac a soldier into you, this is really bad for them because now they’re down a soldier and your team can walk in and try to use that to your advantage. In their worst case, their sack does nothing and now they lost the game.
Making Smart Decisions
Thus, whenever you're considering if you should sac or not, you should be taking in the context about what’s currently going on in the game and determining if it’s okay to do.
Example: Holding Second on Process
It's beneficial to go over some more examples of sacking to understand when it's good or not. Suppose you are on cp_process and you just got forced while holding your second point. This is terrible for you because now the enemy team has uber advantage.
During the uber, you have to try and close the distance to the other team's combo and try and force them. But most of the time that’s a bad idea because by the time you get there your uber will fade and then they can just uber on you or just simply kill you without uber.
In either case, this will probably lead to the other team running fast to last and leaving a scout to cap your second while the team sets up for the final cap on your last.
Forcing as a Response
Given the above scenario, we can see that as a player on the team holding second who just got their medic forced, doing some sort of sacrifice to get the enemy medic to use is going to benefit your team so that they cannot get uber before you and use it to blow up your team.
Forcing vs Killing the Medic
Additionally, note that killing a medic is much harder than simply forcing a medic. If a medic perceives that they might die, they will use uber and lose all their advantage.
If you jump in on a medic that doesn’t have uber, then your only option is to kill that medic, which is much harder than forcing the medic. So you need to take that into account when sacking as well.
In general, you should sac when the other team has uber and losing your life will not substantially detriment the upcoming gameplay—if your medic has just died and you need to nullify their advantage before it comes into play.
The Importance of Prediction
The fundamental component of gaming is predicting what is about to happen. This is literally how we aim our weapons—we assume that for the next very small time period a player’s movement will either continue in a certain direction or their movement will follow a predictable pattern over the long run.
This information is used to tell us where to shoot and aim our rockets, and the way the game works at a high level is no different. When our medic gets forced, we send a quick soldier sac or keep a hider to force the other team’s medic.
If the other team knows about this, then they will look out and find you. Thus, being able to predict at a high level what a team is going to do allows you to take advantage and stop them from doing that.