Going from playing in your bedroom to tournament success takes many hours of practice, immense skill and fast fingers, said van Dreunen. The average person completes about 100 actions per minute during a game, but professionals average between 350 and 500. Winning the games themselves — League of Legends, StarCraft II, Dota 2­, mostly multiplayer action adventure games — requires quick thinking and well-thought-out strategies.

It’s not unlike chess, albeit with a lot more speed. “It’s like if ice hockey and chess had a baby,” said van Dreunen. “It’s fast, it’s twitchy, but it’s also about the bigger picture — you see an opponent do something and you have to provide a response to that.”

Climbing the ladder

There’s one route to making money in this sport: win, win and win some more. In the Ukraine, Krupnyk didn’t have a computer at home so he joined a PC club in his home town. As he got better at his game — StarCraft Broodwar, the predecessor to StarCraft II —he began beating other club members. He’d then get invited to play people from different clubs and he’d beat them too. He then started competing online against players in South Korea, considered the birthplace of eSports, and won those games as well.