This article is part of a series of PUBG Mobile mini-guides from your eGGcellent friends at eGG Network, to help level up your mobile battle royale prowess with bite-sized tips that are quick yet nutritious to digest.

It's unsurprising that professional players use smoke grenades abundantly, especially in high-tier PUBG Mobile esports tournaments like the PUBG Mobile Global Championship Season Zero (PMGC 2020). After all, they truly are one of the more valuable pickups available in PUBG Mobile, vital to one's Winner Winner Chicken Dinners. Thus, it's high time we gamers learn from their utility of choice (aside from frag grenades, which we'll cover another time) and learn how to utilise it more.

Plus, to make this guide even sweeter, we figured we should ask Team SMG's resident support/grenadier player, Bard, to chime in with his expert opinion on the subject. After all, Team SMG PUBG Mobile did get third place in PMPL MY/SG Season 2 and represented Malaysia in the PMPL SEA Finals Season 2.

Let's get a bit technical first before we dive into our tips:

The nitty gritty

Cook time: Seven seconds
Fuse time: Three seconds
Approximate diameter of smoke: 10 meters (yes, we measured it)
Weightage: 14 spaces

Unlike frag grenades, regardless of how long you cook a smoke grenade (which is when you hold the Throw button without releasing), the fuse time remains the same. Weight-wise, smoke grenades are the third heaviest utility after frag grenades (18) and Molotov Cocktails (16).

Beware when you smoke up

The most common way that everyone uses smoke grenades is to conceal oneself, as well as teammates. This comes in handy in a multitude of scenarios you'll find yourself in, such as:

• Reviving your downed friend(s) in the heat of a battle
• Looting in the safety of thick smoke
• Healing up in the middle of gunfights
• Running across an open area without risk of exposure

However, because these are so commonplace, you may give away your location and encourage enemies to shoot into the smoke, which you've probably seen what pro players do from time to time. Despite its setback, this method still works more often than it doesn't, and it's good to be mindful of what could happen and be prepared.

Prone to healing

When you're healing while hiding in smoke, one way to counter the above issue is to lie prone on the ground while doing so. This reduces your hitbox (the area where you receive damage) drastically, letting you heal up safer. Although you still risk getting hit by enemies, at least this makes you a bit more unpredictable than by standing or crouching.

Use low toss

Even though High Toss is the default setting for throwing grenades, smoke grenades are arguably better deployed using Low Toss instead, as it gives you more control and releases it closer to you. That's because you'll be using them more often to conceal you and your squadmates, and you'd need your smoke nearby to do that; Low Tosses reduce the bounciness of your throwables too. Even so, this is purely situational, and it's up to your preference as well.

This idea is courtesy of Riggs Gaming on YouTube.

No more hiding

Or if you want to up your IQ, why not use smoke grenades for other purposes than obscuring yourself? You can use it to trick enemies by:

• Surprise!: Making them think you're coming from a certain angle and instead flank them from the other side.
• Escape: Create a smoke wall towards one direction and exit another way that's not enveloped in smoke.
• Confuse: Release more than two smoke grenades in random areas so that enemies don't know which smoke you're exiting from.

Take note that these would require you to use more smoke grenades than usual, so it would be wise to have more than a handful with you at all times.

What the pro does

Bard personally holds five to nine smoke grenades in every match, so he can help his team pull off any plays. "My main purpose for smoke grenades is to prevent enemies from attacking my team," by blinding and confusing them - he favours lining up his smoke grenades in one line to create a smoke wall too. The Team SMG grenadier advises to "use your smokes wisely, never waste them in just one area" and spread them out.

What other ingenious smoke grenade tips do you have? Share them with us in the comments below!

For more info on Team SMG PUBG Mobile, check out their Facebook page.