esports

The Toll of Travel on eSports Athletes

Taking StarCraft 2 on the professional circuit imposes a whole lot of extra challenges.
By Rob Zacny
11 min readPublished on
Battle Grounds Detroit Trophy

Battle Grounds Detroit Trophy

© Cameron Baird

There is great tension in the life and career of a professional StarCraft player. On one hand, their job is to compete in tournaments and, for a lot of players outside of Korea, tournament participation and prize money is an important source of income. Trouble is, a busy tournament schedule is a disaster for players' practice and preparation. It's a paradox: to have a career in StarCraft 2, players need to get results in tournaments, but the only way to get better is to stay home and practice.
Here in the closing months of the main StarCraft 2 season, with WCS winding down and with the Grand Finals in Washington capping off the Battle Grounds season, StarCraft's busiest pros are starting to feel the full toll of a competitive season.

Lost Time, New Fans

"[Practice on the road] is basically impossible," said Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski.
Artosis is one of the busiest casters in StarCraft, covering the GSL in Korea and traveling to numerous events around the world. He's also a road warrior himself, having had a successful career in Brood War in addition to a second-career in Hearthstone. He knows what the road takes out of players.
Artosis at Dreamhack

Artosis at Dreamhack

© Helena Kristianssonn

"Laptops suck for practicing, and hotel internet sucks. The desks and chairs aren't right. Also, you are jetlagged and tired from breathing terrible air and eating terrible food on a cramped plane," he said.
The big problem with travel is that it casts a much longer shadow over a player's practice regime than just the time he or she spends at an event. A two or three-day tournament wipes out an entire week of study and practice.
"Downtime is super important to actually stay on top. You play the least StarCraft when you are going to tournaments," he said.
Artosis explained that for a weekend tournament, a player will usually spend Thursday traveling and have to battle with jetlag after landing. Then there's the matter of simply trying to find nutritious food. For a traveller, the easiest food to find is frequent the most unhealthy, and that can be poor fuel after a long trip and before an even longer tournament. Once that's done, there's the matter of trying to get some practice games done. This is not as easy as you might think. Some tournament organizers won't have the spare equipment set up for players to take some practice games. Even if they do, players might find they can't get into the level of games they need.
"You can stay warmed up on the PC," he said, "but you are on some ladder account in Europe that has Bronze rank to start. It's a waste of time."
Once the tournament is over, there's another round of travel, and usually some more jetlag and exhaustion on the other end of it. A player may not be able to resume a full practice schedule until a few days have passed. Compared to a Korean player in a team house, who spend that week getting 10 hours of practice every day, the traveling tournament player is at a huge competitive disadvantage. And sometimes, that kind of disruption can leave a player badly behind the state-of-the-art.
"The entire metagame can shift in the course of 2 days. It definitely doesn't always shift so quickly, but the game is constantly evolving," Artosis explained. "Any pro that travels is losing valuable practice time, and thus understanding of the current state of things."
Park "DongRaeGu" Soo Ho echoes Artosis' analysis.
"Typically, when I go to a tournament overseas, it costs me about a week of jet lag to deal with it, and [I get] zero practices in-between," he said. "I think going to a tournament hinders me more than [I make gains]. However, I love going out to events overseas and standing in front of such passionate foreign fans. Personally, I find [traveling] once a month is a good balance."
Focused Hydra at Battle Grounds Global

Focused Hydra at Battle Grounds Global

© Marv Watson

Shin "Hydra" Dong Won, after his difficult performance at Battle Grounds Global, felt that travel had played a role in his poor play.
"Inevitably, going to tournaments that are far away make it difficult for me to look over my conditions and stay in tip-top shape. I think I’ve shown that at [Battle Grounds Global], which is very unfortunate," he admitted. "I am going to have to figure out how to maintain my form and skills at these events."
However, like a lot of Korean players, Hydra finds foreign events and fans a particular draw. As a member of the CJ Entus team, which has traditionally focused on competition within Korea, he greets foreign travel with fresh eyes and enthusiasm.
"I am very new to going overseas to participate in tournaments. So far, I love everything, despite my lack of performance. I find foreign cheering culture very different from the Koreans. Super loud, super emotional, and -- oh, did I mention? -- super rowdy!" he said with a laugh. "I absolutely love it. It's a completely different feeling from what I'm used to getting. This doesn't mean that Koreans don't cheer. It’s just a different atmosphere."
Serious MMA

Serious MMA

© ESL

Shaping the Battlefield

Of course, the players who are hardest-hit by travel are the ones who are used to keeping an intensive practice schedule at home. For players who have had to adjust to life on the road, the prospect of bouncing from a DreamHack to a Battle Grounds to a WCS group isn't so daunting.
When it comes to travel, Mun "MMA" Seong Won is positively nonchalant. For him, readiness is a state of mind.
"Going overseas or not going overseas doesn't make a difference to me," he said. "My form tends to speak for itself on a day-to-day basis. I do not really do anything extra to balance travelling and practicing. How I do it is to try to make every situation look and feel as if it is just another day at the team house."
Sean "Day[9]" Plott, another former Brood War pro and the scholar-in-residence for the English-speaking StarCraft community, said that a big part of his preparation for professional competition was to practice under bad conditions just so he could get used to the discomfort and disorientation of tournaments.
"I had been going to SC tournaments for four or five years and just noticed what things distracted me a lot, like playing in a cold auditorium, or playing in a hot auditorium," he explained. "Or playing when the edges of the table are too high. Or too low. These types of things. I'd think about what things I could control, and what things I couldn't, and I began to practice around the things I couldn't control."
Sean "Day [9]" Plott at Battle Grounds Atlanta

Sean "Day [9]" Plott at Battle Grounds Atlanta

© Cameron Baird/Red Bull Content Pool

In some ways, it was a method-acting approach to the game. Instead of just treating it as an intellectual pursuit, Day[9] would try to get in the same mental and physical spaces he'd encounter on gameday.
"I would say to myself, I'm going to do a whole bunch of tiring activities in the day and make myself play four hours, and then I'll look at what goes wrong in those replays. And then the following day, I'll begin to say, 'Okay, I'll work on my macro, because my macro goes when I'm tired.'"
Most players, however, go to pains to ensure that they're playing under condition that are as near-to-optimal and familiar as they can make them.
"I don't really have rituals, but I am very dependent on my settings," Hydra said. "Before playing any tournaments, I double, triple, quadruple check the settings to make sure it is what I am most comfortable in."
Some players are notorious for being finicky about playing conditions. Chris "HuK" Loranger knows he's one such player, but admits that non-ideal playing condition hit him particularly hard.
Chris "HuK" Loranger at Battle Grounds Atlanta

Chris "HuK" Loranger at Battle Grounds Atlanta

© Cameron Baird/Red Bull Content Pool

"I will go to a tournament and sit down and play a few warm-up games, and I will base my strategies on how bad the lag is, or the framerate, or whatever. Because if you try to do something fancy, like play late game with a lot of harass, storms, drops -- All these more mechanically intense things? And then you have graphical lag or internet lag and you just lost that first Warp Prism with two high templars in it? You're insanely behind," he said.
Still, part of being a pro is gauging those playing conditions and making do. The community hates a whiner, and HuK's found it's often wiser to soldier on rather than raise a fuss about dodgy playing conditions.
"It's a sensitive issue, because if I tweet that, I'm burning bridges, damaging relationships with Blizzard, and the community is like, 'Why are you whining? You're just whining because you're going to lose,'" he said. "There's nothing positive that comes out of it when you do that kind of thing, and I've done that kind of thing, so I know."

Foreign Climbs (On the Ladder)

For players outside of Korea, the relationship between practice and travel can be a little more complicated. Many of the best non-Korean players arrive in high-level StarCraft as relative autodidacts: players who've had to develop their skills away from the structure and training disciplines of a team house. For players like this, it can be difficult knowing what kind of practice is actually effective.
Dan "ViBE" Scherlong admits that the game got harder for him after he kind of stumbled into the United States WCS championship.
"In WCS 2012, I didn't practice at all. Like, for a month. I literally played Diablo," he admitted sheepishly. "I went into the mode where I was like, whatever happens with the tournament, happens. But I want to have fun with friends. So I practiced maybe 20 games in total over the whole month. And I went to WCS 2012, and I hadn't practiced at all and I ended up winning the whole event. And I was like, 'Sweet! I can not practice and win!' But if you take it too far, you stop winning."
Scherlong hasn't completely found that balance between improving his skill at the game and staying in the right mental space to succeed during a tournament. But after a working vacation to Australia early this year, and a return to the Korean server, he's starting to feel his old skills returning.
"I didn't get the results I wanted from MLG Anaheim, so I was kind of inspired to do what I did back in 2012, which was just ladder 100 percent on the Korean server," he said.
Kane at Battle Grounds Detroit

Kane at Battle Grounds Detroit

© Marv Watson

The Korean server is the Promised Land for aspiring pros, but it's not easy to get good practice on that server when the lag can be so debilitating. For Sam "Kane" Morrissette, he had to travel away from the MyInsanity team house in Switzerland to realize his own practice ambitions.
"About four months ago, I decided to go to Asia and stayed for 3 months. I was practicing with the yoe Flash Wolves in Taiwan, which was really great. The last two months I felt like I was improving, but the last month is really what did it for me." he said.
The stress of traveling and living abroad was worth it for Kane, who saw firsthand just how far ahead the Korean server can be.
"Changing my setting was huge as the Korean server is completely different from the NA and European server. On the NA server I was always ranked one. EU, I was top ten. Korean server, you lose a lot," he said with a smile. "When I first got there, I was rank 90. When I left, I was like rank 40. It's completely different training with Koreans."
Kane Playing at Battle Grounds Detroit

Kane Playing at Battle Grounds Detroit

© Marv Watson

And that might be the single most important challenge travel imposes on StarCraft's best players. For North Americans and Europeans, life on the road doesn't hit them quite as hard, because they have less to lose from travel. In fact, traveling to Korea to train for a season can equate to a year’s worth of experience on the other servers. Even week-to-week, Korean ladder experience is a competitive advantage.
"The metagame is very far ahead in Korea, especially in Zerg vs. Zerg, I've found," Kane said. "Roach burrow is very popular over there. Once you learn their meta, and you come back here, it's really nice to play against foreigners."
That's what no amount of travel tips and role-play can change: a player's practice environment. Jetlag, fatigue, bad diet, and awkward tournaments setups are all things players can learn to overcome. But for the products of the Korean team system, travel is particularly devastating because it takes them away from the source of their strength. But for players like Kane, a little travel can go a long way.
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