3 Mental Hurdles of Esports

Esports has grown at a rapid rate over the past couple years. The biggest spike Esports saw was over Covid, which happened to be when I started. The great Shaquille O’Neal was once quoted saying “I do consider pro esports as athletes. Fifteen percent of the game is physical, everything else is mental. If you guys say you’re athletes, I believe you because I can’t do what you do.” So since esports is 85% mental, what are those mental hurdles that Esports players have to deal with? I’m going to list three of these mental components that I had the hardest time tackling, and for reference, I started playing competitively in the summer of 2020. I have played NHL Esports from 2020-24 and achieved a second place finish in North America at the All Star Open tournament in 2023. I also finished top eight in North America twice in the Gaming World Championships. Over these couple years, I was grateful to experience two in-person events (otherwise known as LAN) and multiple online tournaments. Here are some of the mental components i had to deal with:

Confidence

A line that has stuck with me from when I started was “Confidence is earned”, and for me that couldn’t be more true. For some, confidence came easy, for myself I needed evidence of myself either improving or just playing really well. This led to some tournaments not going as planned, white proving myself in others. How I developed my confidence was how I was doing against the other best players in the world. Looking back I couldn’t tell you if this was the healthiest way to do it, but that’s what worked for me. I was widely known in the NHL community as someone who was always down to practice, I would play at any time against anyone to measure where I was amongst my peers. For example, the time I felt most confident in myself was when lined up against the G.O.A.T in NHL Esports named Regs. He had won the most tournaments out of anyone in NHL Esports history, and for some reason I was confident going into our series. That was because of how well my practice games were going. I was consistently beating players that were viewed very closely to Regs, allowing me to believe that I could take him down. To wrap this up, I didn’t win. I did give him his hardest series of the entire tournament, and sure enough, he went on to win the whole thing and took home over $30,000. This was just one case of what confidence can do for you, and everyone deals with it differently.

Focus level

Obviously, focus level is one of the most talked about points of the mental side for esports, but not a lot of people understand the distractions it may come with playing in these esports tournaments whether that’s playing in person or online. You have tons of distractions maybe from your friends, your family, or even from the actual game itself. For me personally this was the easiest one to control because there’s no other place  I wanted to be outside of that moment. I wanted to be up on that tournament stage and play my best, so I knew that I couldn’t play my best if I wasn’t focused.  I did a lot of pregame rituals, like giving myself a moment to listen to music and sit there and relax, even meditating. Sometimes I had a pregame ritual where I would wash my hands before every game I played. This led to me having a better grip on my controller, which was probably just a mental thing, but it also allowed me to give myself a second to remember where I was and how happy I was to be there. I think I can speak for most esports players and say that once you get up on that stage, your focus level is at highest and it should be because we all just wanna be there but this can definitely be a mental hurdle that is hard for people to get over.

Nerves

This was the one that I definitely had the hardest time dealing with. All my time playing any sports, the number one thing that I dealt with was nerves. For me, the nerves never came with trying to play in front of thousands of people or even the hundreds that are in person, it was more trying to please myself with my performance was the number one thing I was nervous about. Some  people were nervous that thousands of people were watching online or the crowd that was there at the in-person event or even just the money that was at stake. Sometimes we were playing for thousands of dollars and for a lot of people, that money could really help their lives. When  you play video games, maybe just for fun or even if you play competitively, when there’s something at stake like that, there’s no way to beat around the nerves but for me it’s always about controlling it. I always felt that if I can control my nerves better than my opponent, it would give me the advantage and hopefully enough to win. 

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