A story from the Chinese gaming scene that deserves to be remembered and shared with the world. I’m a French Fry

I 2 a.m. CS2 ranked. 1v3 clutch. Then, from the enemy team’s mic, a song starts playing. Couldn’t make out the lyrics, just the melody. My teammate types in chat: “gg” I thought he was exaggerating. Three seconds later, I’m dead. Headshot through smoke. Never even saw the guy. Back to the lobby. Enemy ID: Aunt Juan. Profile picture: a middle-aged woman. Score: 27-3. My teammate DMs me: “Bro, you just ran into a Principal. Take the L.” You might be wondering: What the hell is a “Principal”? Chinese CF players reading this are probably chuckling, “This guy knows how to write.” Foreign friends might be confused. That’s fine—I’ll explain it slowly.

II Let me start with an old slogan. Back in the day, CF had this bold line in China: “The gunfight dream of 300 million mice.” Basically, letting 300 million people click their mouse and live out a shooter fantasy. The number was definitely inflated, but everyone remembered it. It wasn’t that CF was better than CS—it just arrived at the perfect time. CF launched in 2008, completely free, and ran on almost any PC. Walk into any internet café and it was already installed. CS 1.6? You had to find servers, install mods, tweak settings… by the time you were ready, half an hour had passed. So for that generation of Chinese players, our FPS baptism wasn’t on Dust 2. It was on Transport Ship, New Year Square, and Victory Square.

A quick word about CF CF has modes like Bomb Defusal, Team Deathmatch, and Free-for-All. Its success in China was simple: free-to-play, low system requirements, and available in every net café. At its peak, every screen in the café was running CF. There’s a story (I’m not sure if it’s 100% true, but a lot of people say it) that CF was the underdog—basically a bonus game when you bought something else. No one expected much. Turns out that “bonus” ended up introducing a whole generation to FPS and became one of Tencent’s biggest successes. The biggest difference between CF and CS? Almost every wall in CF is penetrable, ping is super low, and respawn points in Free-for-All are ridiculously dense. These design choices made one playstyle extremely effective: “Dry Pull” (干拉). No utility, no waiting, just peek and fight. Whoever reacts faster, pre-aims better, and has bigger balls usually wins. That’s the environment where “Principals” were born. The “Driving School” Analogy

There used to be a community tournament called the Hundred Cities League where veteran CS players and rising CF talents competed. Someone online described it perfectly (not my words, but I never forgot it): “The Hundred Cities League is like passing the basic driving test (Subject 2) and then immediately being thrown onto Mount Akina, where every driver is Fujiwara Takumi delivering tofu and actively trying to sideswipe you.” (Quick note for foreign readers: Subject 2 is China’s most basic driving exam. Mount Akina and Fujiwara Takumi are from Initial D. In short: you just learned how to parallel park, and now you’re racing pro drifters who are actively messing with you.) Out of this chaos grew a certain type of player. No utility, no callouts, no tactics—just raw gunfights. You think they’re reckless, but they keep winning. We call this “Dry Pull.” In CS it’s similar to dry peeking, but with one extra ingredient: zero fear of death. When these guys fight you, it doesn’t feel like a duel. It feels like a teacher grading your homework. That’s why we call them “Principals.” (I’ll tell you later what a world-class CS pro said about them. I promise it’s his exact words.)

III Some might ask: Are these guys just cheating? CF’s anti-cheat in China is actually pretty strict. Turn on aimbot and you might get kicked before your second kill. But honestly, Chinese players reaching this level isn’t about insane talent or advanced tactics. Let me tell you something funny. Early CF had poor optimization and plenty of bugs. Some people complained, but others just went with it—studying how to exploit bugs for better movement. The classic was “Ghost Jump,” like CS bunny hopping + silent steps combined, but way crazier in CF: you basically become invisible. Someone joked: “In early CF, movement was like traveling in basketball without getting called for traveling. So instead of practicing actual dribbling, everyone just perfected invisible traveling that the ref couldn’t see.” Even funnier: even a newbie with cheats can’t beat a real Principal.

Cheats only help you aim. A Principal knows exactly which box you’ll respawn behind, which way you’ll swing after smoking, and that your cheat won’t predict the guy wallbanging you from three angles. It sounds exaggerated, but it’s true: Principals understand the game’s design better than cheaters, better than the cheats themselves, and sometimes even better than the developers. How do you tell a real Principal from a cheater? There’s no perfect way, but old players have a simple trick—check if he’s playing that song. “The Me You See” (DJ version). The lyrics are actually pretty motivational:

“The me you see, the me you see What color am I, sad or happy? Maybe I’m a bit older now, my eyes aren’t as clear But the hot blood still boils in my veins…” Sounds inspiring, right? Now imagine: a fresh smurf account with the default character, blasting this song, then wallbanging you twice for an instant headshot. That’s the joke. The song is wholesome. The context is absolutely not. So if you’re a foreign friend wanting to try CF: don’t queue Bomb Defusal on a new account, and definitely choose the China server, not Vietnam. Otherwise you’ll have a very different “big brothers everywhere” experience. We also have our own special way of trash-talking, jokingly called “National Treasure” style. I won’t translate the details (don’t want this post taken down), but just know that while Principals teach you gunplay, they might also teach you a few choice phrases in Chinese. Because they’re so ridiculously good, they often get accused of cheating. Aunt Juan is the perfect example.

IV Late 2024, exhibition match. On the other side: donk, 17 years old, just crowned the 2024 best CS player in the world, with reaction times that look like cheats. Aunt Juan: 58 years old. At 3 minutes and 35 seconds, Aunt Juan instantly headshots donk with a no-scope flick. I was watching the stream. My first thought: pure luck? Then the organizers released first-person footage. Frame by frame—it wasn’t luck. The pre-aim, positioning, and read on donk’s movement came from thousands of hours of CF muscle memory. After the kill, Aunt Juan got flamed hard. “58 years old pulling that? Cheater.”

She didn’t argue in chat. Instead, she set up two cameras—one on the screen, one on her hands and keyboard—went live, no hiding. When chat asked what she was doing, she said: “You don’t believe me? Then watch.” She kept playing the same dry-pull, wallbang, flick style. The chat flipped from “cheater” to “holy shit.” Someone spammed: “60 is prime age for grinding.” That line became a meme. Not because a 60-year-old was still gaming, but because she responded to doubt in the dumbest, cleanest way possible: Come watch. I’m not hiding anything. Aunt Juan is just an ordinary person. She used to be a senior CNC technician—maybe that’s why her reactions are sharper than average. After retiring, she was bored. Her son suggested she try CS… and she got hooked. By the time she faced donk, she had over 7,000 hours.

She wasn’t good at first—she’d walk into walls. It was pure passion that carried her to that shot. Objectively, she’s a strong pub player, still far from pro level. That one flick against donk was love meeting luck. Someone might ask: You’re writing about CF, why talk about a CS player? Because in China, there are countless “Aunt Juan-style” players of all ages and backgrounds. In her, I saw the shadow of a true CF Principal.

V After all this, I have to admit: Principals aren’t invincible. Dry pulling works great in CF because of the specific conditions—low ping, tons of wallbangs, dense respawns, no need for teamwork. If you’re fast, accurate, and aggressive enough, you win. But it has clear weaknesses. Against a real tactical team throwing flashes, smoking angles, holding crossfires, and managing economy—dry pulling is just feeding. You peek, eat two flashes, and die before seeing anyone.

That’s why many CF Principals who switch to CS have insane aim but struggle against tier-2 pros. It’s not that their gunplay is bad—CS simply has more layers: utility usage, economy, information control. Principals know how to kill. They’re less practiced at winning when they can’t kill. This is the origin and limitation of dry pulling. CF taught us “fast,” not “smart.” We own that. (Quick side note: We Chinese players love this pure gunplay style, but we also know our weaknesses. We watch international CS pros and learn from them.) Even when busy, we squeeze in a few games. Serious CF players, no matter how many years they’ve played, get called “Ten-Year Veterans.” That’s another meme—maybe I’ll talk about it another time. Oh, and donk himself once said he’s a Ten-Year CF Veteran and enjoys playing and sharing tips with Chinese players.

VI If you really want to understand what a Principal is, log into CF at 2–4 a.m. and queue Victory Square Free-for-All. Almost every wall on that map is penetrable. Pros have the angles memorized better than their own Wi-Fi password.

Respawns are so dense that the second you kill one guy, the next is already shooting you in the back. There’s a saying in the community: “You think you’re a genius? On Victory Square, being a genius is just the entry requirement.” The matchmaking calls that rank “Expert.” But in the wee hours, the Expert lobby is full of people who shouldn’t be there—retired semi-pros, old net café warriors, and high-age players like Aunt Juan. We have a phrase: “Gold everywhere.” Late-night Victory Square is exactly that. Not everyone has the guts to queue at that hour. But if you dare enter, you’ll find: gold really is everywhere. Not the rank. Every single bullet tells you—you’re not fast enough. (In that environment, a KD above 1 means you’re a good student even in the eyes of Principals. The standard might not be objective, and foreigners might think it’s bullshit. But it reflects a very simple mindset: in gaming, whether your aim is hard or not—talk is cheap, just play a few rounds.)

VII After writing all this, I queued again. 3 a.m., Victory Square, Expert. Enemy plays a song. Couldn’t tell what it was. Three seconds later, I’m dead. Enemy ID wasn’t Aunt Juan. Didn’t catch it. I typed: “Playing music?” No reply. Next round, he plays the song again. Alright. Guess I’m not winning tonight. VIII Finally, something that has nothing to do with winning or losing, but I think is worth sharing. The most touching moment in CF wasn’t any tournament championship. It was a player called “Old K.” He got cancer. In his final days, he was still playing CF. After he passed, his old friends—middle-aged guys who had families and hadn’t logged in for years—came back online. When the devs found out, they made his ID stay online permanently. “Old soldiers never die” — in CF, that’s not just a slogan. A note about the Old K story I later checked, and the story I originally heard is most likely made up by netizens. There’s no official record or solid evidence. It’s a shame. But this story has been passed around in the CF community for years. Generations of players have retold it, believed it, and been moved by it. That fact itself says something. The story might be fake. But our feelings are real. My personal stance Honestly, I don’t hope the story is true. Not because it’s not touching. But because I don’t want to trade a real person’s life for a better story. Many creators would wish it were real, thinking truth has more power than fiction. I don’t see it that way. I hope it remains a warm, long-circulated lie. I’m willing to believe the emotion behind it is real, but I’d rather the player called Old K never actually existed. Because no story is worth a human life.

(To any old CF brothers who might read this: I’m not telling foreigners this to prove how amazing we are. I just think our playstyle and stories from these past ten-plus years deserve to be seen. If I got anything wrong, feel free to roast me in the comments. I can take it.)