A pro-level breakdown of how the woodpile smoke and pit fire work together to create a one-way timeline in Inferno's B site—not as a rush signal, but as a tempo weapon.
Banana isn't a lane. It's a timetable that utility keeps tearing into pieces. Every smoke you throw tells the opponent one thing: for the next five seconds, you move on my clock, not yours.
Woodpile Smoke and Fake Timing: The First Smoke Isn't for Entering
Most players treat the woodpile smoke as a starting gun—pop it, swing. But on Inferno's B site, the first smoke's real job is stealing the defender's audio anchor.
When the woodpile smoke lands, the defender usually does two things: back off toward the rear of the site and call "woodpile smoke." Between those two actions sits a window of roughly 0.8 to 1.2 seconds—he's moving, and his footsteps mask the sound of you hugging the wall. If you don't swing the instant the smoke pops, but instead wait until the smoke edge starts to fringe before you move, you enter Banana just as he settles—his pre-aim not yet locked.
Player notes often say "three steps after smoke." That doesn't mean walking three steps inside the smoke. It means counting three footsteps after the pop before you commit. That timing gap is more reliable than any flash.
Pit Fire: Not for Burning Players, but for Burning the Retake Route
The real problem with the pit isn't someone crouching there—it's that retaking players can trade directly through the pit window. So that fire isn't meant to kill anyone. It's meant to cut the vertical retake in two.
Drop the fire in the wall-side corner of pit and you force the defender to either jump down or rotate through church. Jumping down makes landing noise; going through church costs four extra seconds. Those four seconds are your plant window.
A finer point: don't throw the fire too deep. At the wall base, the flame spreads along the wall and blocks the window's line of sight. Too deep, and it burns in open ground while the window player still peeks freely. Fire is for cutting sightlines, not for burning HP.
Overlapping the Two Timelines
Put the woodpile smoke and the pit fire on the same rhythm and they stack into a one-way timeline:
- Smoke pops—the opponent calls it and backs off.
- Fire ignites—the pit retake is severed.
- You enter Banana—the opponent is still waiting to see if the smoke has faded.
- You plant—the opponent's retake route is already one short.
The key isn't how accurate each piece of utility is. It's the gap between the two. Too short, and one turn of the head sees everything. Too long, and he re-holds his angle. That "three seconds" in player notes isn't mysticism—it's the breath between the smoke fringe and the fire spreading.
Banana's utility line, in the end, is about writing two timetables for the opponent: the one he thinks he's on, and the one you handed him. Whoever reads the wrong clock loses the player first.