Even in the face of a growing industry, we are often unaware of exactly how big of a deal this is. It’s not just about the money, but there is so much that says that esports is huge. Competing in iconic arenas, like the Madison Square Gardens or the Staple Center, have already been seen to elicit a strong reaction in the fans and players. The sentiment has largely been one of esports having arrived and that this is a good thing, but inevitably, there will be some people who understand, perhaps better than most, that esports has indeed arrived. And although they physically are there, they mentally have yet to arrive.

While making the largest transition of their esports career, the player receives very little help.

The transition that I am talking about is that of competing online to competing on LAN.

Players often receive little backing from the organization that they play for and an abundance of criticism from the community and punditry. While I am not saying that the criticism isn’t warranted, I am saying that it is one more reason as to why this largely mental transition takes out most of the up-and-coming talent. By the time these rookies get to LAN, they are probably shaking from the nerves as even the greatest players of sport have needed to overcome issues rooted in anxiety.

Bill Russell is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He is an 11 time NBA champion as a player (twice as a coach), five time NBA MVP, was an NBA All-Star 12 times. In addition to that, the NBA Finals MVP Award was renamed the Bill Russell NBA Finals MVP Award in 2009. If Bill Russell is anything, then he is a basketball legend. It wasn’t so easy for him though. In the beginning of his career as a professional basketball player for the Boston Celtics, he would throw up before every game. Coach Red Auerbach would not let the team go out to the court before Bill Russell threw up. It finally ended during a playoff game in 1960 versus the Philadelphia 76’ers, four years into his career as a pro basketball player. He didn’t have to throw up anymore.

Certainly, Bill Russell’s story of being able to play with such anxiety is amazing. However, Bill Russell’s ability to play through it and one day get over it is not naturally present in all players across sports. In fact, this sort of ability to cope with the pressure has even been taught in esports. The most notable example is a reigning Major champion: device. device, for the better part of his career, would carry his team to the quarter-finals or semi-finals of tournaments and go silent when he was needed most. He was frequently referred to as a choker even after Astralis won tournaments. All of that began to change just before the Major, after Astralis made it to two finals in a row.

Despite not having information about what exactly Bill Russell did in order to get over his anxiety, if he actively did anything, there is information about the work that device and Astralis have done to work on the psychological issues racking Astralis. device famously utilized heat maps of where he played so that he could alter his positioning in order to stay fresh and unpredictable. Astralis hired a sports psychologist who was present at the ELEAGUE Major. It is unknown what exactly she did with the team and device in particular, but others have spoken out about specifics regarding their psychological development via sports psychology, such as GeT_RiGhT. At CS_Summit, GeT_RiGhT said that the sports psychologist gave tips on how to effectively practice and how to manage emotions during a game. GeT_RiGhT also spoke to the sports psychologist’s ability to foster greater cohesion amongst the players.

Before getting into why sports psychology can benefit rookies struggling with the transition from online competition to LAN competition, it is important to understand what exactly are the psychological issues associated with this transition as well as why they have been neglected. All esports games have a large casual community centered around multiplayer interaction through the internet. Long gone are the days of LAN parties when internet connections were still weak and limited.

As well as losing LAN parties, we as competitive gaming communities have also lost out on local LANs where the purpose was to win and compete but the pressure was much less than that of a major tournament where thousands are watching in an arena. Nowadays, lower level competition is largely confined to the internet. Players rise up through matchmaking and hit a substantially high rank. Then, they might play in an online league like that which ESEA hosts. Players like Stewie2k have gotten to playing on a top team without any LAN experience whatsoever. Stewie played in total one LAN, Global Esports Cup, before attending the MLG Major, which was a predictably bad showing for Cloud9. Obviously, Stewie has gotten much better and won North America’s first Tier 1 tournament, but that doesn’t hide the fact that Stewie had trouble transitioning to playing in the LAN tournament environment. People can say GAMERZ this and academy teams that, and while some of these solutions do attempt to address the issue of transition, none of them get at the root of the problem.

Players go from playing in their homes with a perfectly functioning PC, perfect internet connection, and in an environment that can't get any closer to home as it is their home to a completely alien environment that is like nothing they have been in thus far. That means players don’t have to deal with jetlag, travelling sickness, bad food, and bad hotels when playing online.

When these things are taken away, many find it only natural to focus on those things that they don’t have, and their mind tumbles out of control. This is known as catastrophizing. Since the beginning of esports, these players with genuine psychological issues were just considered bad players and that the online competition where they showed what they were capable of meant nothing. You either had the champion’s instinct or you didn’t; there was no helping these onliners.

The underlying problem in all of this is that the impact of psychology on esports competitors is undervalued. People only started talking about sports psychology in CS:GO with the success of Astralis. And in League of Legends, there have been people like Weldon Green, but there have been questions on how much he contributes to a team. Like I said earlier, people’s approach to psychology in esports is that you either are born a champion or you aren’t. That approach is like telling people who are depressed just to be happy. It doesn’t work like that. People need to work through their problems, and psychologists are perfect people in assisting with that process.

The main way that I would solve this problem of transitioning to LAN would be to emphasize the impact and importance of psychology in a variety of areas not exclusive to the one that this article hopes to solve. If a team is arguing, a sports psychologist can help with that. If a player is having trouble focusing on the game or is struggling with personal things, then the sports psychologist can help with that.

A sports psychologist isn’t the miracle solution to an esports team’s problems, but it is a step in the right direction. A team doesn’t even need a sports psychologist to implement some of the strategies that a sports psychologist would have to offer. A coach, manager, or captain can do these things and have done so in the past. For example, on SK Gaming, GeT_RiGhT was told by his teammate face to play a certain style that became known as the hard-lurk role, a role that GeT_RiGhT didn't naturally take to but has since become inextricably tied to. At the rate that esports is growing, it would be expected that these people familiarize themselves with some of the relevant components of psychology, but anything that results in a greater emphasis and implementation of psychologically-based solutions would go a long way to resolving esports’ plethora of psychological problems, the online-LAN transition included.

This wouldn’t be an article if I just said go out and find a sports psychologist to all the teams and players with problems. Like all psychological issues, there isn’t any miracle drug or single solution that will help people get over their anxiety when it comes to competing in esports. Hiring a sports psychologist with many tricks up their sleeve is a good start, but the simple act of hiring them won’t do any good. Solving this issues is a long, arduous process with many roads for many different people, so I have looked into multiple areas of performance anxiety research to find different types solutions for different types of people.

It’s quite unfortunate that there is very little research in the field of sports psychology, particularly on the topic that concerns this article. The best analogue to esports psychology and, more broadly, sports psychology was testing anxiety, which is also form of performance anxiety. The first thing to understand with all forms of performance anxiety is understanding the criteria of the disorder. This kind of statement is important to all people performing diagnoses, but in areas like testing anxiety, where everyone gets nervous over a big test to some degree, it is imperative that we separate what is and isn’t testing anxiety.

Psychologist Brian Goonan, in his paper Overcoming Test Anxiety: Giving Students the Ability to Show What They Know, defined testing anxiety as “substantial limitations on the individual's major life activities (e.g., situational avoidance, disruptions to normal and academic routines).” Applied to esports this means that players are onliners when they play substantially worse on LAN than how they do online. In a previous article The transition to LAN for CS:GO's "onliners", I used both quantitative and qualitative analysis to a group of players suspected of being onliners. Comparing them against someone who was established as the epitome of onliners, chrisJ in 2015, I determined who exactly was an onliner and who wasn’t. While a coach, captain, or psychologist doesn’t have to go as deep as performing a statistical analysis on his players, it is important to establish whether a player has a problem that goes beyond simple jitters and is a truly crippling disorder.

Once it has been established that a player is actually an onliner, then treatment may begin. There are two ways that I have found to solve this problem. The first is relaxation. In the relaxation method, a player tries to make himself as comfortable and as calm as he can in the tournament environment. Specific techniques would include meditation or massage. Meditation does not have to be some crazy level of Buddhist meditation, nor does the massage have to take the form of acupuncture. In fact, I don’t see how either of those would be feasible in the tournament environment. By meditation, I mean that a player clears his mind and steadies his thoughts along a productive trajectory.

One of the beneficial things about a sports psychologist or someone similar is that they can teach these things, or a player can find resources for meditation online. Massages also have a way of relaxing the body and the mind. This could be done whenever a player feels nervous, including during the game. A timeout could be called, and while the team is discussing what needs to be fixed in-game or is just taking a breather, the player could rub and apply pressure on his wrists, neck, etc.

The other, more unconventional, strategy that could help players is desensitization. This involves repeatedly putting a person in an uncomfortable situation in order to overcome it. This is akin to making a person look at pictures of spiders if they have arachnophobia or to walk around in an airport if they have a fear of flying.

For a person scared of competing in front of loud crowds of people, a coach or psychologist may do something like playing loud heavy metal while the player practices or expose him to crowds of people. Opposite to the goal of meditation, a player could also be walked through his worst nightmare a number of times when they are removed from the competition. The whole point of this being to exorcise the player’s demons before the competition starts so that they won’t show up when it matters most.

The problem with implementing either of these two solutions is that there really isn’t anybody to implement them because most people don’t believe this problem exists. Again, this goes back to the belief that you are either born with the champion’s instinct or you're not, that it can’t be developed. There is also the subject of people who utilize the medium in which competition takes place. For example, players like what chrisJ used to be can AWP easier online because of the effect that ping has on a game. On LAN, such an AWPer wouldn’t have nearly the same advantage over his opponents because rifles are more effective with less ping.

There is also the issue of disparity of ping where one player has better ping than the other and gets game information with less of a delay. Not only are we dealing with the issue of mental health being a taboo subject that few people talk about or acknowledge, but there is also a convenient and, in some cases, real reason for why a player is unable to transition to LAN other than anxiety.

Instead of pursuing solutions that attempt to solve an issue that is rooted in anxiety, people have been advocating for solutions that only attempt to solve a problem caused by ping. Every time there is a discussion about how bad online Counter-Strike is, there is always someone recommending that we have an offline league like ELEAGUE, OGN, or LCS. However, what these people do not take into account, as Semmler has pointed out in his series Coffee and Semmler, is that it is not economically sustainable. For example, Riot use esports as a marketing tool, and money that would have been pumped into commercials is going towards esports.

Tournament organizers independent of game developers have their own interests to think about and cannot be running esports as if it were a charity or advertisement for the game, which Riot has done since they took over control of League of Legends esports from tournament organizers who would use online games to make money for the LAN events. The problem with using OGN as an example is that half of the Korean population lives in Seoul, which means that teams do not have to be flown from across the planet every week. Online leagues have become a fundamental part of esports. After all, these games were meant to be played online. The issues of online competition are justified but distinctly separate from the issue of performance anxiety.

Performance anxiety is a real issue that holds back players across esports and conventional sports. If left up to nature, some will overcome their problems and become extraordinarily great players like Bill Russell did, but others are unable to go about this psychological development on their own. Who knows how many stars we have missed out on in esports due to a lack of psychological resources? Who knows by how many exponents would they have elevated the scene by playing against other players and being innovators in the games they played in? That is why it is important to foster a greater acceptance and knowledge of sports psychology in esports so that there will be an understanding of and demand for people who can dispense specially tailored solutions for players struggling with psychological problems in general and the online-LAN transition in particular.

Image credit: Betway Esports

Follow the author for more on Twitter at @Bleda412.