A day on an esports roster: 9am to 11pm, and only half of it is playing
We spent three days with a Taiwanese team. Half the schedule is not the game.
Up at nine, conditioning at ten, tactics meeting at eleven, ranked from one to six, two hours of review after dinner, free practice from nine to eleven. That is a PCS roster’s day.
Of fourteen hours, about five are spent playing at competitive intensity. The rest is conditioning, meetings and review.
The two hours of review are the brutal part
The coach replays each mistake from the day and asks, in front of the whole team, what you were thinking. For players who are eighteen or nineteen that is a lot of pressure, and it is the most common reason people wash out.
Conditioning only became standard in the last two years, for a blunt reason: wrist and lower-back injuries retire a lot of players by twenty-four or twenty-five.
{"q":"People think we play games all day. Only about two hours of it is the game I would choose to play.","by":"A starter on the roster"}
It is also why teams have started hiring sports psychologists and poker coaches. Both fields have been studying decision-making under pressure for longer than esports has existed.
