At International tournament, $25 million is up for grabs
Imagine playing a video game in front of a packed arena, with hundreds of thousands watching at home and about $11 million on the line.
Competitors in Dota 2’s major tournament, The International, are in the thick of this. Underway at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, home of the Canucks, the current total pot is just over $25 million — and growing, thanks to its crowdsourced origins.
Not many competitors, in sports or otherwise, have to perform with such a substantial amount money at stake. For comparison, the entire purse for The Masters PGA tournament this year was $11 million and Patrick Reed’s win was worth $1.98 million.
Team Liquid has been a mainstay in the tournament and last year, they won their first title.
Unlike top-tier athletes in traditional sports, today’s esports players were not groomed from a young age to be celebrities nor to compete in conditions that might rattle even the most experienced NFL quarterback or NBA point guard.
So what is it like for a player to be thrown into this kind of environment after a lifetime of gaming at home or in much smaller venues?
Lasse Aukusti Urpalainen, 23, a player for Team Liquid, went through this gauntlet for the first time at 21, an experience he called “frightening.”
“I was quite overwhelmed of the high pressure and couldn’t perform well,” he said in an email, adding that the tournament is something that teams prepare for the whole year.
“You can have excuses for bad performance during the year but TI is the final showdown to determine who is truly the best,” he said.
Only two years later, Urpalainen helped his team claim the top prize.
Team manager Mohamed Morad said some of his players dealt with the pressures in different, though perhaps expected, ways such as listening to music or spending time by themselves, but that others, “Try to talk it out with me or [team captain] Kuro [“KuroKy” Salehi Takhasomi].”
Urpalainen credited visualization techniques with helping him surmount the onslaught of pressure at The International. “I personally imagine the upcoming moments beforehand so my brain is adjusted to the actual moment we play,” he said.
These sort of mental and psychological techniques — talking it out and visualizing success — have been used by many pro athletes. These tools deployed by esports players reflect some of the benefits that have been introduced by management as the industry has grown.
Last year was the first time that Team Liquid’s Dota 2 players worked with a sports psychologist, according to team co-CEO and founder Victor Goossens.