I play games for fun, but I really enjoy the competitive element as well. I find a lot of reward in being competent at a game. This is an edited version of an on-going conversation with an ex-professional Dota 2 player. Most of this is relevant to other competitive games, but also to life in general. I asked him about the psychology of competitive gaming: how he handles losing, deals with disappointment, and how he maintains composure in high pressure situations.
For me, with Dota, I needed to succeed, and at that time in my life there was nothing that was going to stand in the way of it. I would try and maintain the friendships with [Redacted] and [Redacted], and thank God I did, but I would still cut them, and that’s a bit cutthroat, and I don’t think that anyone should actually do that. I regret those things. But the end goal is important, and you just need to understand what you’re willing to devote, because once you understand how much time and energy you’re going to devote to this, you’ll be satisfied with certain results or your rate of growth.
Analyze where you want to go, because if it’s really that important to you that you’re investing more than three hours a day into it and you want to make a thing out of it and reach the top 1%, then you can’t have someone on your team that’s going to tilt. But yeah, just understand what it might do to the relationship. I also think being competitive brings out the worst in us. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re able to do the introspection and grow and learn from it, because it’s important to recognize that those qualities exist in us.
So I would just say do some introspection about the things that matter to you and your goal with this game, and try to balance that. You know, dilute the things that matter to you, because multiple things can go wrong in life, so it’s good to have an assortment of things that bring you joy. So when I get tilted at games, I go to my family, and that helps. Just my example.
I think that when enough time has passed, like a year or two, and you look back on all of this, a lot of it comes down to a real balance in your health, mentally and physically, even somewhat spiritually. Not that I’m religious, but your soul has to be in a good place. Your mind and your body have to all be in a good place if you expect to be functioning at your full potential, if you expect to be able to convince yourself of certain competencies that you possess and to envelop confidence. You’re going to have to be very in line with yourself, very aware of yourself, and take care of yourself. Those are all really important things, and any psychologist will say that to an athlete.
I think being number one is overrated, especially at our age and phase in life. I think top 1% is a very nice and achievable metric. It displays a lot of experience and competence above the average. I think it’s very relevant to all things in life. But taking things in balance is more important than reaching the top for ordinary life. This is just referring to becoming great at something.
Find a strategy that’s going to work for you. In Dota my strategies were multifaceted in order to cope, but for instance I would be very controlling, micromanagement, etc. This made me feel more in control of the outcome and often helped.
But instantly queuing ranked games is really important, especially for confidence. So I’m going to try and explain this. Confidence is definitely a mindset. It’s knowing something. It’s knowing that you’re capable of actually achieving the goal that you’ve got in mind, and knowing it’s inevitable. A simple way of convincing yourself of this is understanding that thousands of humans achieved this metric before you. They’re no different to you. It’s solely about how much information we can consume and retain that matters, and the top one percent just have better learning techniques and strategies developed so their information is more reliable. But once you’ve convinced yourself that your goal is achievable and that you’re going to get it, it’s just a matter of time; then the confidence really comes along with the logic.
Clicking the search button when you’re on the ranked ladder is hard because sometimes your MMR goes down. But if you bring the approach of wanting a certain volume of games for your day and you’re just going to instantly queue after each game, it was so much easier. But letting the doubt settle in of wanting that number to go up, not down, is wrong. You have to somehow avoid that train of thought. I did it with my quota of games for the day and instant-queueing most of them. I would only take breaks if the loss was bad and I needed it. But I’d still reflect on every loss, even for 5 minutes.
If you’re despondent about your results, it’s fair to say that you were very emotionally invested, maybe time invested, but whatever went wrong, it mattered to you. Understanding how much value you’re putting on the game is important. I would say only at a professional level should a game be able to ruin your day. Otherwise, it’s just not worth letting it ruin your day. It shouldn’t matter that much. That’s just my opinion after having gone through that phase. But if it is at a professional level, then yeah, it warrants ruining your day because it’s your career.
This comes with confidence but also realism. I knew every loss was nothing but a lesson. So unless it was a tournament that I needed to win, losses didn’t deter me. I very consciously chose to reflect on every loss to identify what I thought was the crux or turning point that lost it for us. I did this for every single game. This review process made me feel a lot of relief after every loss because it helped me realize that the loses were preventable.
It was easy for me to learn from each loss because what I searched for in gaming was a sense of expertise, knowledge, and skill. So I was prepared to build it authentically by learning from each defeat. This was easier than it sounds because I’m somewhat compulsive, so dwelling on my loss in a form of analysis came naturally and helped propel me to want to reattempt the situation with an alternative approach.
For tourneys the losses hit hard. That’s just a character-building thing. Either you keep going and climbing that mountain, or you change roads. But the competitive aspect never changes, and you never stay on top forever. When you played ranked, there’s doubt if you’re going to raise the number or drop it. That shouldn’t be a thing. You should queue ranked for another reason: to improve. And then set a milestone. If you reach a certain MMR, you can start some perspective shift. That’s how it was with me. When I reached pro MMR I started to care about my rank, but I’d already taught myself not to be too obsessed with it. So although it’s a tightrope you have to walk and balance, the lessons reinforce better strategies.
Until you reach pro level you’re just a person trying to get better. What does it matter if we fail on the way? So find a way around wanting the number to go up too much. Ultimately, with consistency and small habits of improvement, the number will go up by itself inevitably. I used to tell myself “extinguish the fire” every time I wanted something too badly. It was like my mantra. It helped calm me down and focus on objectives, rectifying bad habits in every part of my game rather than always being concerned with the final outcome of the game.
You have to understand that you’re going to play with the win rate, right? So let’s say you’ve got a 55% win rate, which is usually decent. Then you know that it’s inevitable after a certain volume and duration that your goal is going to get achieved because you’ve got a positive win rate. So that’s all that matters. Then the losses don’t matter because you just know that they’re part of the 45%. It’s cool. Let’s learn from it. And that’s actually really important: learning from every single loss. Ninety-nine percent of losses are worthy of dissection. You have to analyze the root cause. You look at each little piece that goes wrong as breadcrumbs, and you follow it to the root of the issue. So in Dota, if something goes wrong at 10 minutes, it’s probably mistakes 30 to 60 seconds prior to the event, sometimes many minutes prior. But you have to watch the replay to analyze.
And as for decision-making, even in games, I can probably guess that 90% of the incorrect decisions I made in games can sometimes be attributed to my ego in some way or another, if I were to do enough introspection. I’m just saying it’s possible. And I believe a rather stoic take on the matter is important, you know, not to be overwhelmed with emotion in a loss, but to really draw whatever you can grow from the experience and accept the despair and quiet resignation, you know, just kind of… even if you can help your teammates that are probably also depressed, especially because you all are a bunch of friends.
The epiphany I had when opening my mind up to this sort of change came from my pro Dota coach. He taught me that every mistake you make adds to a snowball. Every last hit you miss is the seconds of not having your Blink on an Axe, etc. Every second you’re costing your game matters. And if you go back and look at your replays, you can quantify every step you missed and understand how far behind you are at each point in the game compared to the most efficient play possible. Making it to pro level is keeping that efficiency bar on par with you. Every time you drop below it, your performance is insufficient, a weak link in the chain.
Point being, building small habits (looking at my map, clicking on enemies’ items and mana, etc.) is the foundation of success. If you make those habits second nature, the success follows. And also not to underestimate a mistake. Even the smallest one is the first step to the snowball. Many people always say, ah, it’s just one death, my bad, bad positioning. In pro Dota it was unacceptable. You make a mistake and all eyes are on you.
And then I just wanted to mention two other actually important points. You mentioned a flow state. That really comes with obsession, and obsession in every sense of the word. You have to not be impaired by any other thought at all. No work, no thinking about what’s going on behind you, no spouse. Nothing else has to be in your head. It has to be the entire game. Zero break of focus from any source, and second-nature mechanics, meaning you do not have to think at all about the buttons you’re pressing. It is completely second nature because you’ve repeated it and rehearsed it so thoroughly, because you were so obsessed with it.
For instance, me playing Tinker 500 games. Obsessed with it. It’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to play it in every single matchup, and I wanted to learn from every single matchup. It had above a 65% win rate. It’s one of the best in Europe, you know. So it’s absolutely important to be obsessed if you expect to ever get so focused on something that the game and the strategy are all that you’re focusing on and the mechanics are completely second nature.
I would say the most important thing is watching the pros because they’ve got the highest quality of information. You can really build a baseline foundation on that information and take that into every game. Then you can build on it yourself, but definitely understand what the best people in the world know. That’s important. I have to say when I was playing Dota, which was probably 200 hours a month of gaming, maybe more, at least 200 hours a month of gaming, and 40 to 50 of that was watching the pros. It was absolutely key. There was no way around that. Anyway, I think ego death is kind of important in all of this and being kind of stoic about it and just pragmatic. Essentially, just running after the information. What can you learn from every game to improve yourself? That’s all that matters.
If a team member sucks or isn’t doing well, it’s tricky because, like I say, if it’s not at a professional level, you don’t really want to burn friendships or relationships. I don’t think it’s ever worth it then, personally. Just an example is that I used to play with [Redacted], you know? And then we kicked him because he wasn’t really good enough anymore. And I still regret that to this day. But looking at where my career went, I know it was necessary. But it’s definitely a regret. I also kicked [Redacted] from a team once. That was one of my biggest regrets. But I did fix it by bringing him back onto the team, but it still sucked, and it’s never ever worth it. It’s never worth doing that to a friend, in my opinion. Those are my biggest regrets.
