Become a Pro Gamer (eSports Athlete)

The purpose of this course is to give the aspiring pro eSports gamer a mindset in order to confidently make that transition. Jumpstart Your Pro eSports Gaming Career will provide you with insights, inspiration, advice and tools to gain a concrete vision on what it means to become a pro eSports gamer. It covers:

• Strategies for improving your pro gaming career focus, goal orientation and approach;
• How to create a supportive environment around yourself for realizing your pro gaming dreams;
• Tools to develop a success mindset, defining your pro gaming dreams, and your goals and targets to realize those dreams;
• How to make the right moves in the business of eSports;
• Pinpoint common mistakes young aspiring pro gamers and teams make;
• Practical tools to maximize your gaming performance
• Tested methods for overcoming common problems in human relations and team dynamics.

Before getting into what relates specifically to the gamer who wants to go pro, in this lesson we will look into the fact that eSports and video gaming are massively growing industries. The purpose of this detour before delving deeper into the amateur-to-pro gamer transition is to:

• Increase your confidence as a gamer. You will get facts showing you that the area you want to grow yourself in is expected to continue booming into the future. eSports will present many more and newer opportunities than what is available today.
• Provide you with a knowledge basis that you can use to convince doubters in your immediate environment. This will help you gain support on your chosen career path. For example, if your close family and friends do not yet understand what kind of a massively growing industry eSports and video gaming is, and are doubtful about your desire to head into it full time, then you can use this chapter to present them with some facts that show how much the industry is blossoming. It should give them some confidence in your choice to head into this industry as a lifelong decision.

Everything that does not support your goal to become a pro eSports gamer needs to be dealt with, otherwise these sources of interference will work against your goal. You need to define what these sources that disturb you from reaching your goal as a pro gamer are, and strategize how you can at least minimize them as much as possible, or better yet, eliminate them... or best yet, invert them into sources of support.

Are your parents a source of support, or a source of interference, to your pro gaming dreams?

There are many examples of gamers who have support from their parents, and gamers who lack that support, and also gamers who, in the beginning lacked support from their parents, but after proving themselves by winning tournaments, and consequently prize money, had their parents switch to become their biggest supporters.

If your parents do not support your eSports gaming dreams, then that can definitely make it harder for you to progress. However, as with all problems, it should be dealt with, and if you could make a 180 degree twist from non-support or indifference to support, that would be the best option for helping you in this situation progress toward your pro gaming dreams.

Well, this is the classic disturbance that most people in the world, not only gamers, come up against. As an aspiring eSports pro gamer, it can definitely be the place that tears you in two directions, and it has shown itself to be the disturbance that causes a lot of gamers to leave their practice time honing their skills as an eSports athlete to work menial jobs to be able to survive.

Now this course is here for those of you who do not want to simply be part of the extras on the set, who end up saying, “Well, that's life, what can you do about it?”... but who are thirsty to make your pro eSports dream a reality.

The basics you need to know about how to setup your online presence. Learn the principles behind why you need certain online properties like a website and all kinds of social media accounts, and how to approach them so that they work for you like currency. Many people setup their online presence without any strategy, and become disadvantaged in the future when they can't reverse all kinds of things they setup from the beginning. Don't be one of them! Apply these principles and reap the rewards of a strong online foundation to develop upon.

In this lesson, you will gain success mindset tools to:

• Take charge of developing your pro gamer online presence.
• Create a plan that illustrates your dream, as well as goals and targets in order to realize your dream.

One of the interferences many young aspiring gamers undergo in the transition from being a hobby gamer to following a pro eSports athletic dream is the need to “be like everyone else,” to have fun, hang out and party.

In other words, as a hobby gamer, you might be gaming a lot, but then you still have time to hang out with friends whenever you want, go to a party or two every week if you want to do that, and literally have a life outside of gaming. If you are planning to go pro though, these activities will start becoming interferences that you will need to deal with, and a tight athlete's schedule will mean that your whole life will revolve around gaming, and everything you do will have to somehow respond to “How does this improve me as a pro gamer?”

To cut to the chase, the solution for this is simple: Find like-minded people, teammates and/or other competitive gamers in the same game/s you are involved in, who also share your dream. Then, throw yourself into them.

If you are aspiring to become a pro gamer in a team game, then don't waste time: join a team as soon as possible. If you are not playing a team game, then instead look to put together a regular group of gamers interested in the same game you are interested in. Again, there is no right or wrong, and different approaches suit different people, but considering the point of surrounding yourself with like-minded people in order to gain their will for gaming, a team and/or collaborative/competitive environment will only improve you, and will set you and your team up to be able to enter tournaments.

The Roundtable Discussion, or circle, is a key tool in uniting people and shifting them from the “me” mode to the “we” mode. It is a means for developing well oiled human relations. Using the Roundtable Discussion, teams and literally any groups of people, can overcome the above-mentioned problems, which can lower teams' and players' performance, and even break teams apart.

For optimal team or group dynamics, the Roundtable Discussion should be practiced regularly offline or online (e.g. through platforms such as Zoom or Google Hangouts). We at Addiktz are leading the field in Roundtable Discussions for eSports gamers and teams. Addiktz organizes bootcamps for eSports gamers and teams, and by incorporating the Roundtable Discussion method into the bootcamp we saw improvements in many in-game team metrics like in-game communication, group and personal confidence and more.

Teams that spend quality time together reap many more benefits. This is why South Korea is so far ahead of many countries, which has a focus on team houses. For teams that can't get together in team houses, then the bootcamp is a 2-day intensive solution that Addiktz has practised. In this lesson, you will learn the principles of the bootcamp and get the tools to inquire about holding your own bootcamp.

All the problems and common pitfalls that many aspiring young gamers fall into are presented in this book as a means for young aspiring pro gamers to be able to better prepare and equip themselves for encountering these problems, so that when such obstacles arise, you can get through them faster and with more awareness than had you not been prepared.

Instead of deterring you from becoming a pro eSports gamer, by acknowledging the ways you might fall, and preparing yourself for them in advance, you increase your chance of being able to overcome them and use them to make yourself stronger as a gamer, as a team, as a person dealing with the gaming industry and community... and most importantly, as a person.