R.J. Socrates - Winning At eSports: How to Improve Reflexes, Creativity, Speechcraft and Others to Be a Better Player or Streamer

Winning At eSports

How to Improve Reflexes, Creativity, Speechcraft and Others to Be a Better Player or Streamer

By

R.J. Socrates

CONTENTS

Copyright 2020 R.J. Socrates. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

How to be a better eSports player or just a better player in gaming by overall standards? I have asked myself this question more than once in my head. Why can this or other guy shoot me from a distance when I play multiplayer, and all I can do is furiously ragequit without even typing gg? Sure I can blame my team or lag or even call him cheater because you can do all of this on the internet. But does it change anything? You wont be able to do that when playing a tournament because you will get an instant ban. If you are streaming a game on Twitch or YouTube and show a lack of skills and frustration to your viewers, you will look like a total amateur and will lose a lot of the audience.

Playing games at the pro level isnt easy. Human nature is pushing us to cross our limits and say finish a game in under X hours to break the world record or gain/unlock achievements that game creators intended to be impossible. People do crazy stuff. If you want to put valuable content on one of the popular platforms like YouTube, Twitch or others, you have to show something original and look good while doing this. The better you are, the bigger the audience you will get.

Similarly, for the professional tournaments, you have to train your four letters off and do that with your team to even dream of succeeding with todays competition. Millions of people around the world have access to computer games, either on PC, Mac, console, cellphone, etc. and can play for hours. The segment of eSports grow every year, and so does the prize pool. In todays world, you can basically live off playing computer games but if you told me that two or three decades ago, I would simply laugh. Imagine what will happen within the next few decades... There are already eSports teams deployed by big corporations or TV channels or even nations! At the moment of writing this book, there are sophisticated talks of putting eSports teams on the Olympics Games.

There are immense riches to be grabbed, but it is not for the timid. Just take a look at that big number of subscribers on the best YT channels going into millions or the number of people watching tournaments it is surpassing the fans of the usual big, ordinary sports events like the SuperBowl in the USA or the Champions League in Europe. Also, the average age for eSports gamers is relatively low, so as time passes, they will get older and older. This means that gaming overall will be growing for years and years and will keep on being an even bigger part of the worlds GDP, i.e. the economy.

To be part of this avalanche of gamers, this tsunami of players and streamers, you need to train yourself because the competition is growing every day. You have only two hands, one head with a pair of eyes and a mouth and your day is only 24 hours long. But dont worry, its pretty much the same for all of us.

To use what mother nature has given you more effectively, you need a bunch of exercises you can do offline and a good rhythm. Only in that way you will gain a competitive advantage over other guys and win thousands of dollars or attract thousands of viewers to your channel.

CHAPTER 1: REFLEXES

One great, very short exercise to calm your body before you do anything important, just anything in your life is to inhale twice and exhale long. It is thats simple. The best way is to double inhale through your nose and exhale via your mouth. That activates the sigh neurons which triggers the so-called calming reflex. The latter can be described as the parasympathetic arm of the nervous system.

Inhale twice through the nose and exhale long by mouth.

Repeat this a few times to reset your autonomic nervous system faster than any other mechanism known to humanity.

All we are doing here is influencing the subset of neurons which are inside your brain stem. Since the body communicates with the brain through the phrenic nerve from the diaphragm, the message simply says Calm down; you are now relaxed. Certain patterns of breathing will calm you just like you were entering a hypnotic state.

By repeating this exercise, you are falling into a state of meditation because it shuts off the frontal cortex and changes the brain waves. You will experience elevated states due to an increase in oxygen and will learn faster. The neurochemicals like acetylcholine are going to be at higher levels than they normally would be. It is all up to bringing oneself to that heightened state of alertness, of staying focus via controlling the relationship that the brain and body have. You can alternatively try the set of famous Wim Hof methods which I will not describe here, but which are easy to find.

Continuing with the reflex improving techniques. The general idea about enhancing your mind and muscles in that area is to do things faster and with bigger precision. Practice makes perfect they say, and it is awfully true. With every day passed in your life while playing CS: GO or any given game, your reflexes become better. This is a laborious work; however, but thanks to various exercises described in this whole book that you can do offline, and elevate your skills to a higher level. If you practice regularly different things from all chapters, I am sure that you will be a much better player or streamer with your reflexes, creativity, speechcraft, memory, overall physical condition and others largely enhanced.

Here are a few short and fun exercises you can do.

Pick up a small ball and bounce it from the wall. You can also use the ping-pong ball because its lighter so that you wont break anything at your house.

If you can find someone to train with, then please do. He or she will have to be sitting opposite or next to you and be very helpful at throwing something or trying to touch a thing that you will try to touch as well. You can ask your colleague, brother or sister or anyone you are living with.

Exercise 1

You and your friend are sitting at the table opposite to each other. There are things of similar shape on that table lying on a straight line, so each of you has an equal distance to each one of them. The first person is moving the hand very rapidly to touch any of those. The other person is trying to touch it faster. Change after several tries. From time to time, you can try to fool your friend by moving your hand only in the direction of one thing and change it very fast at the very last moment to touch the other thing.

Exercise 2

You and your friend are standing in front of each other with your arms at chest level. You have your hands (fingers) pointing up, and you keep them under your opponent ones while he or she has hands kept flat. The trick for you is to slap your opponent hands from above either both or only one. You have to move very fast as your friend can take them back.

You can practice in similar ways with many small objects like coins, for example, by putting them off the top of your hand and then trying to catch with hand open. Also, you can move a coin between your fingers or buy yourself one of those jelly balls you can squish and play with. This will reduce your stress levels as well.

I can also recommend these two free websites which have been designed to train various skills. You might already know them as they have been around for some time: http://www.aimbooster.com and https://humanbenchmark.com .

To help your eyesight, you can palm your eyes which will relax them. During the day, try looking at different distances from time to time (a famous rule 20-20-20 which stands for: every 20 minutes look at something 20 metres away for 20 seconds). For nighttime, you can use a skin cream on your face as those have lots of minerals. Just ask your woman for one; they know all about it. You wont get that many nutrients from normal food, so it is best to apply good skin cream directly.