[plausibilities]

A sound card w/ decent surround sound features (Creative <3), noise cancelling headphones, and good map awareness & position play gave me a far higher KDA in CS 1.6 and Source than practicing with the AWP til my eyes and fingertips bled.

The Shift key became infinitely more useful once my ears acclimated to the setup change.

In many ways it's not so different than billiards/snooker/pool. Being a good shot-maker helps but just about all the consistently performing pros focus first and foremost on position-play and thinking several shots ahead.

[JakeTheAndroid]

I find that open back headphones are better for this if you are in a relatively controlled environment without too much background noise. I can hear basically everything on the map with my sennheisers even compared to my friends who have the same closed backs pros use in tournaments (which they only do because they need full noise isolation for the competition).