The Subtleties of Esports Training

There are many facets to training for esports and some are more obvious than others. For example, every would-be hopeful esports athlete should dedicate time and practice to their chosen game. That much is obvious. What’s more, finding like-minded players, a team or a clan, to train with will also help you develop. Below we take a look at two less obvious factors that you should be training in. By putting time and energy into addressing your mental preparedness, and in studying the underlying mechanics and form of your chosen game, you will always find yourself at a distinct advantage over other players of a similar basic skill level who lack these insights.

Psychological Attunement

One core component to becoming an effective esports athlete is in cultivating the ability to focus for extended periods. Whether your chosen game is poker or Valorant, the principles that underlie how to optimize concentration to improve performance remain the same. Beyond this, though, there are additional facets to each game that you can tailor your training to. For example, Twitch based games require a different approach and attitude to slower paced, more strategic titles.

For those falling into the former category, the ability to react and respond under pressure and at high speed is essential. There are a range of reaction speed tests available online that can help you improve your response times. Of course, this is best achieved in unison with running drills in-game, so that your improved concentration has the best possible chance to integrate with your muscle memory. If your focus is, instead, on more strategic games, from chess to DOTA 2 , then training in a wide range of strategic titles is excellent preparation as it will enable you to approach fresh situations with the right attitude for problem solving. You may also want to consider using any number of the popular brain training platforms and apps, in order to give your grey matter the type of workout that will contribute to your ability to strategize on the fly.

Irrespective of the type of game you’re playing, having a balanced mental attitude is essential. For this reason, it is advisable to make use of the kinds of meditation and mindfulness training available on services like Headspace. Such training will mean that you can more easily calm yourself and enter flow state during gameplay.

Meta-game Knowledge

The meta-game is a term used to describe all components of a game that exist beyond or outside the actual frame of game-play . Often, you will see in games the emergence of distinct preferences for particular guns, classes and methods among the core of players. This is generally because these choices confer distinct advantages to the player over other options. Normally this is as the result of minute imbalances in the game’s format. Developers are always adding updates to gameplay in order to bring these imbalances back into harmony. This is often referred to as a nerfing - in reference to the idea that the weapon or character class in question becomes non-lethal as a result of amendments to its base stats or characteristics. While good players do not need to lean in to these favored builds, they will at least always need to know how to counteract the advantages they confer to their opponents. This kind of in-game knowledge is an indispensable feature of maintaining a competitive position.

Meta-game knowledge also takes the form of understanding the way game modes and maps are structured. Knowing the lay-out of a particular map, as well as understanding where natural choke-points and skirmishes tend to form, is important information to have at hand. Experienced players will also know the various spawn points throughout a map, both for players and for decisive power-ups and key weapons. Furthermore, at different stages throughout a game, the ideal tactical position, and correspondingly appropriate strategies to take, may shift as events unfold. A team winning at capture the flag may pivot to defensive gameplay in the latter stages in order to safeguard their advantage. Skilled players need to know all these caveats, as well as being good at the core gameplay, if they want to progress.