The price to pay for the path to becoming a professional gamer

When we talk about esports, people often think anyone can participate if they give it their all. This way of thinking is partly correct. There is no limit to fitness in esports. Anyone can click the mouse and type on the keyboard. There are many esports today: FPS, RTS, MOBA, Battle Royale, fighting games etc… esports is very stable and the tournament organizers are operating at their full capacity. They wanted to make sure there were no barriers stopping the players. As long as you play well, you will find yourself at the top of the world. But there’s a lot you have to sacrifice, as well as hard work, to become an esports player. Everything has its price.

In order to understand what has been said above, we will start by explaining a typical training day. It depends on each game, each tournament, but in general, the number of training hours is from 6 to 12 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. Depending on the esports, a professional player can train for 9 to 12 months a year. What’s more frustrating and frustrating isn’t just playing games or climbing ranks, but reviewing matches, communication, tactics, personal conflicts, motivation, and fatigue. Everyone has their own stamina to engage in a single activity for a long time. If you join it for too long, you start to feel ‘bored’ and don’t want to exercise. A good example is Starcraft: Brood War or League of Legends, where the average player’s career lasts a quarter or half a year if they’re a CS:GO, Dota 2 or fighting game player.

Then we talk about the cost. With 6-12 hours of exercise a day and 8 hours of sleep, you have very little time for anything else. In addition, professional players also have ties to sponsors, teams or streams. We have yet to include the time required for official matches (online in CS:GO or league play in Overwatch or League). Then the constant travel time will disrupt your biological clock. When you move, you get sick more easily, your sleep gets worse. As for the players, things get tense in LAN tournaments, because that’s where everyone wants to shine.

Also, when we talk about esports, we usually think of young gamers. Young players absorb faster and don’t get stuck. That’s why we see young talent constantly emerging. The problem is, it all has a price. When a young person does these things to get better, they have to make sacrifices. They lose the opportunity to attend school or socialize. That’s why we see many pro players shy or afraid of crowds. While people live a normal life, they focus on being the best gamer. Relationship balancing becomes harder when they don’t have enough experience to balance their work life, so gamers often focus on one thing too much.

If you do all of the above, it’s still not certain that you will succeed. Here’s what happened to Shawn “witmer” Taylor. Witmer is a professional North American CS:GO player, but he just announced his retirement from the game. You can read his blog here. In the blog, he describes his love of the game and what it has taught him, but also the pain he has to go through, especially when he has never been as successful as he hoped. In the end, he understood that life is more than just competition and he wanted to transition into being a streamer, analyst or coach.

He is one of the lucky ones because it seems that he has a plan to go from where to where and what to do after hanging the mouse to compete. For gamers from smaller titles, this decision becomes more difficult, Park “Rain” Seo Yong was a former Starcraft 2 player. Although not famous, he had a career from 2010-2012 and was in to the finalists of the GSL Finals 2010. Soon after, he retired and 6 years later, he blogged about his life after retiring from the game.

“All the Korean boys I meet here are younger than me, and have completed their military service. And that made me ask myself what I’ve done with my life. Yes. I wasted so much time trying new things and seeing if I could do well. I tried working at WCG for 6 months and I realized that working for a Korean company is not what I want, I used to want to be a League player right after I retired, and it didn’t work out either. . I took a break from school to become a professional poker player. I should realize that I’m not young enough to take risks with my life.”

Rain gave us a real look. Rain is a player who moved to the US after taking a break from professional football, and he is also someone who never thought about what he would do after that. He got into the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne and is studying to be a programmer. But now, after all these years, he is still stuck in his mind with his Starcraft 2 career. He feels he chose to go to college and is now struggling to find motivation and reasons to continue. He hasn’t done his military service yet and the young Koreans he always meets make him think about what he’s doing with his life.

“All the Korean boys I meet here are younger than me, and have completed their military service. And that made me ask myself what I’ve done with my life. Yes. I wasted so much time trying new things and seeing if I could do well. I tried working at WCG for 6 months and I realized that working for a Korean company is not what I want, I used to want to be a League player right after I retired, and it didn’t work out either. . I took a break from school to become a professional poker player. I should realize that I’m not young enough to risk life.

Someone asked me what I really wanted to do after college, and I wasn’t ready to answer that question at the time. I answered vaguely that I would be working in the lab, and I knew what I said was not going to happen.

Yes, I feel lost. I don’t know what I really want or can do. I have no motivation for anything. Starcraft is the only thing I really enjoy and I don’t want to think that I wasted my life playing Starcraft. It remains one of the best experiences of my life.” – Rain

This is the price players have to pay to be the best. Rain is one of those people who can be honest about his experience and hopes what he tells explains the dangers of such a profession.

Even when you reach the top of the world, you may still feel dissatisfied with the achievement. Lee “crown” min-ho is the mid laner of KSV esports, the team that won the 2017 World Championship. This is the highest you can achieve in League of Legends, but when interviewed after the win, he was quite upset.

“To be honest, after Worlds, I thought about retiring because I wasn’t satisfied with my performance. Even if I win…how should I say…I feel like I don’t deserve it? I feel like I don’t win with my skills. My team won, but I lost. I don’t know how to describe it, and to be honest, I don’t know what made me think that way. It feels like the team won the match for me.”

Crown defeated Faker, but he refused to accept that victory…

Jaedong himself is one of the most successful and popular players in any game. Even Jaedong has to pay the price. This time it was a physical matter. As ESPN reports, his body just couldn’t take it. The doctors advised him to rest, that the damage to his wrist would not be cured. But he can’t because he is someone who doesn’t give up easily and he will suffer before he succumbs to fate. The most successful players of all time still have to pay a price, whether it’s emotional like Crown or physical like Jaedong.

Therefore, before starting your journey to become a professional gamer, you must understand that, there will be sacrifices. That you will pay the price with other opportunities in life and at work. This profession is not for those who are not brave enough. Daigo Umehara once said in the book Motivation to win mine:

“I don’t want future gamers to be blinded by fame, status, and bonuses. For every success story we hear, there are hundreds of other dreams that have been shattered. But even in those defeats, whether it’s losing, that tournament, that experience, those moments, it’s all meaningful. Deciding to go pro will change us in ways we can’t understand and possibly make the decision that will make you smile or possibly the biggest regret of your life. This is the price of being a pro, it demands a lot from you but doesn’t guarantee you anything.

Source: VPesports

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