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Mind game: How eSports psychology can help you win
How mastering the mind with sports psychology can make the best gamers even better.
Mind game: How eSports psychology can help you win
© Shutterstock/Blizzard
Back in March, eSports giants SK Gaming revealed it had brought in a sports psychologist to improve the minds and playing of its League of Legends team – and to great success. The team managed to rise from the bottom of the EU LCS standings earlier this year, to the top, improving their playing consistently in the process.
It's not the first time a sports psychologist has been brought into eSports though. Team Liquid has enlisted the aid of eSports performance psychologist Robert Yip since early 2012, and he's currently working with Dario 'TLO' Wünsch, among other Team Liquid StarCraft II pros to raise their game and help them get to the top.
Psychologists typically conjure up images of a bearded character wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, complete with a leather lie-down sofa. That's not what we're talking about here, as just like in real life sports, eSports has seen a growing need for its competitive players to have their brains 'massaged', their fears dispelled and a clear mental structure created to hit their goals. And that's where someone like Robert Yip can step in.
With a background in mainstream sports coaching and physical training, as well as a master's degree in sports psychology, Ireland-based Yip is well equipped to handle the mental and physical needs of any athlete, and thanks to his knowledge of StarCraft II, that extends to cyber athletes too.
So, what exactly does he do?
"I work with individuals and teams, getting them tournament ready for a specific date and time, or working on planning their training regime, over a course of days, weeks, months, or even a year," Yip tells Red Bull. "I always had an affinity with gaming. I've played games since I was a kid, but I didn't really know the eSports scene to begin with – I was always very casual. I got into it with StarCraft though, watching the 2010/ 11 MLG games, when my friend said to me 'this is a game you would love.'
"I started watching more MLG games, Day[9] casts, and lots of streams. My friend then started explaining to me about pro teams, and pro players. I'd look at the South Koreans and their play style, and then Terran-based TLO videos. I'd watch other guys like IdrA play, and I started to learn more and more, and I also started to learn about the structure behind eSports – how a team was made up, what the structure was and how that team integrated with the overall scene."
After Yip had finished his master’s degree, he wanted to use his knowledge to actually get into helping out pros, so he reached out to Team Liquid, and as luck would have it, he would find himself speaking with StarCraft II pro and Terran player Dario 'TLO”'Wünsch on his own digital sofa. What started as a simple message to Robin 'Bumblebee' Nymann, Team Liquid's current player/ manager, managed to turn into Yip speaking with Victor 'Nazgul' Goossens, one of the owners of the site, and an ex-StarCraft pro to boot too.
Yip tells us, "I asked him if there were any players who would be interested in [receiving psychology sessions] and he said, 'you know what, Dario ['TLO' Wünsch] might be interested'. Dario had actually posted on his Facebook page a few months before looking for a sports psychologist to help him with his mental side, so that ended up being pretty much perfect – that's how I got involved with Team Liquid and TLO."
Yip has been working with TLO tirelessly since early 2012, starting before Wünsch moved over to South Korea for extensive training with top pros over there, where the talks cooled down for a bit. Yip says, "I guess when you're in Korea, you tend to do your own thing, and you kind of copy those around you, because they're the successful ones." But once TLO was back in Berlin, things ramped back up just in time for Dreamhack Valencia 2012 in September, where Yip actually met up with TLO for the first time.
"I feel it's good to maintain a good rapport by meeting up face-to-face," Yip says. Evidently, the sessions have been paying off: after a lacklustre year of disappointing results, TLO managed to reach as far as the round of 32 at the Valencia event, and performed even better at Dreamhack Bucharest the following month, only losing in the round of eight, and taking out Fnatic’s Harstem 2-1 before losing to Team Acer’s Nerchio 0-2. That was followed by a round of 12 finish at Dreamhack Winter, while the year would wind down with a play-off finish in HomeStory Cup VI, narrowly losing 2-3 in a best of five series against Kang 'Symbol' Dong Hyun.
Originally, Yip didn't help out with grand projects such as getting players tournament ready, it started off with some smaller things. Yip says, "Initially it was purely just helping out with the mental side of things – say for example a player comes to me and says he gets an adrenaline rush when he plays, and when he's winning towards the end of the game, his hands start shaking and he loses his concentration. So I'd work with him on some relaxation techniques and try to find out why he's getting the rush to begin with. Is it because he's winning? Is it because he's holding his breath, and his heart rate increases?"
“So that was what I was doing with Dario, and the more I spoke with him, he taught me about how other players were doing things, and I realised it was more of a systemic way of players practicing that was really counter productive to how they should be practicing. Like, from a sports coach's perspective, if I was looking at how they were practicing, it didn't really line up with the stimulus they'd have to face in a tournament. It was a very casual based practice, but, the tournament setting, when they went there, they weren't prepared for what they were facing.”
“So, there was a whole load of variables that they didn't really have the knowledge about. Stuff like what they should be eating, how important sleep is, breaking up practices, and how important preparing for a tournament is - and not leaving anything to chance. I think in sport over the last ten years, you'll see that teams have invested a lot of money into making sure that everything has been taken care of - that there's no stone unturned, in terms of that players go in as close to 100 percent as possible. It's not left to chance, there's so little luck in the preparation for sport, that when you come onto the field or the court, you know, sport can happen - things can happen that are random - but if you're prepared, everything is taken care of. It's almost like the opposite with eSports at the moment, but there's so much growth that could happen in training.”
“It'll eventually happen,” Yip is certain, “but there's not really much of a sporting background in eSports at the moment, so players can't be expected to know these things.”
Dreamhack Valencia 2012
© Peter Gruy
Still, it's hard to quantify success when it comes to the actual psychology. Mental changes are not statistics you can quickly reference: you can’' say that a player's concentration has improved by five percent each day.
As Yip tells us, "you don't want to sit players down with concentration tests every day. Instead, you need to look at what you can measure: consistency. Look at the players, and see if they're being more consistent. They don't have to play a lot, but their downtime has to be more involved with the sport. They may practice six hours a day, and then take a day off, maybe a second day off follows after, and then a few more hours of play – that's all very inconsistent."
"If you see a player becoming more consistent, that they're investing more overall time – not necessarily time spent on the computer – but looking at replays, exercising, or eating well, I would add all of that together as time spent improving."
Before you think of eSports training like some sort of Rocky montage filled with endless scrims and clan wars, training itself also draws parallels to the real world: you simply can't train all the time, so it comes down to something known as the 24-hour athlete – a mindset Yip finds works well for pro gamers too, and wants to help instill in cyber athletes around the world.
Yip says, "For a lot of real life sports, you can't spend 10 hours lifting weights in the gym. You can only spend an hour, an hour and a half, tops. So you may spend an hour doing yoga, or an hour eating well, or an hour with the physio – it all adds up to the blueprint of the 24-hour athlete, and every hour of every day, you can be focusing on improving in your sport. That's not necessarily just on the field or in the gym – those 24 hours all help to make you the player you're going to be when you're actually playing at a tournament."
Still, eSports psychology is very much a niche area, and in fact, Yip only knows of one other person in the same field – that being SK Gaming's recent addition sports psychologist Lukas Schenke. Still, if Yip does get his hopes of even more real-world sports personnel assisting with the digital game, it's going to take education on both ends to get raise the field.Real-life sports psychologists need to understand eSports too.
Yip tells us, "IdrA [formerly of Evil Geniuses] was set up with a sports psychologist, maybe a year and a half ago, or more, and I don't think he had many sessions. I think his main grievance was that the sports psychologist found it very strange that gamers could make a living out of playing video games, and she was surprised by it."
That in itself is a problem, Yip says, and it's key to have an understanding of what pro gamers go through: "As long as you have an understanding of what's associated with being a pro gamer and what you have to go through, it's a lot easier to connect with people. Even if you're sceptical as a pro gamer about sports psychology, physical training and how they actually help you play in the game, as long as you can show that understanding, they'll be a lot more open, and that's where you'll start to see the improvements happen."
Yip wants to see eSports gradually adopt more and more real world sporting parallels, and with each year, the differences are slowly melting away. We've seen gaming pros travel on actual athlete visas and League of Legends invading Los Angeles' Staples Center – an arena dedicated to sport, not to mention the upcoming EU LCS stop at London's Wembley stadium.
Yip can also see himself lending his knowledge and expertise to League of Legends or Dota 2 too, and he's not just limited to MOBA or RTS-style games either – he says he'd love other gamers from other disciplines, such as first-person shooters to simply ask him questions – but it's ultimately down to the players themselves, and whether they can admit they need that guidance.
Yip tells us, "players don't seem to be asking questions like 'what can I do to get better', as if they ask that, they're basically highlighting that they're doing something wrong. So, no one's really willing to admit that."
Still, Yip’s work is another step towards eSports' mainstream acceptance. If you're willing to ask those questions, you could go a long way. Want to be a pro gamer? The doctor will see you now.
