You are playing Counter-Strike on a public server. It is your favourite map! de_dust2. You really enjoy rushing in the middle and owning every newbie who cannot buy their weapons as fast as you do. But this time, tough luck! A nasty awper snipes you as you cross the double door.
Oh no, I'm dead!
As frustrating as it can be, you should really not take off and get a snack. You should take this chance to observer better players and learn from their aim, their moves, their grenades, their timing... You don't have to be the best if you just play casually, but getting better won't hurt and only brings more fun.
I began gaming with UT and Quake3. I struggled a long time to learn playing, because my friends were better than I was and I strove to trade places. But, when I finally reached my goal, they all stopped playing...
I thought there were ways to get better more quickly. The first thing that came to my mind was to use replays of better players. I learned the basics for Starcraft and later Warcraft 3 by watching replays of top players, and then trying my strategies against random online players. Yes, in the beginning, I would get better faster. But this method capped my fun and made my learning boring : half my playtime was analysing the cookie-cutter strategy, and other half was practicing it...
This is wrong. A replay or two, why not? But you have to discover strategies by yourself to understand how, why and when to use them, in order to keep it fun and refreshing. This applies to most fun things in life...
I recently found in one of my oldies crates a game called Battle Realms. This game is one year older than Warcraft 3, and still has most of its concepts, with noticeable innovations for a 2001 rts : 3D, uncapped units grouping, automated production with rally points, four balanced races, four tiers... There are unique concepts : peasants are produced automatically, faster if you have few units. If you want soldiers, you have to get your peasants through training, and trainings can be combined. For example, if you put a peasant through archery and chemistry, you will get a cannoneer. There are also things that could have been better off copied by Blizzard : towers are capped (one per tier, rebuildable) and don't shoot unless you have a unit within it; you get less experience (yin/yang) if fighting in your base.
In short, it is a nice game, and I believe that if it wasn't for its non-existant marketing, it would have been a great success. But you have to learn it by yourself : there is absolutely no 'replay' function ;)
Back to Counter-Strike : you would never have thought what was actually making the game fun was getting shot dead every round ;)