The mindset of a competitor can be a contradiction. Among competitors winning is everything. But sometimes you don’t have the right team and you need to rebuild. You need to have patience for the future, but you also need the impatience to try to win now. You must both believe you are the best there is and respect the dangers that other teams can represent. You need the strength to stubbornly stick to your strengths while adapting to the changing eras. You must realize you are the underdog, but still have the confidence to know that you should win. You need to find strength in weakness, composure in passion, victory by letting go of the idea of victory. This is the paradoxical mindset of the competitor.

“We never thought we were gonna win 4 years from now, we thought – we really thought – ‘this is our year. We’re gonna get this done. We’re gonna push, push, push, get better now.’ and in the process of having that kind of impatience… you develop. Right? If you’re patiently going about it, you’ll never get there. So it’s kind of a, for players it’s kind of a patient impatience.” – Kobe Bryant

Players need to have the ability to reasonably assess the situation of their team and the context of how they measure up against the wider world. So when you have a team that has some rookies, you have to realize that it takes time and experience to build something great. But that doesn’t mean you can slow down, that doesn’t mean that when you go into the tournament that you can be satisfied with just making the playoffs. An example of this was Fnatic at the Boston Major. At the time, this was a team that had to rebuild as they had a rookie in-game leader in Maikil “Golden” Selim and a rising talent in Jonas “Lekr0” Olofsson. They made it to the quarterfinals of the Boston Major and given where they were in the context of the world, this was a good achievement. But that didn’t stop them from playing as if they had a real chance to take it all and they forced SK to play a grueling three games series that lasted five hours. While they lost there, that belief that they could win in that moment will one day push them forward when they mature as a squad and their strength as a team matches their ambition.

The Brazilian squad that made up LG/SK (now MIBR) have a contradictory mindset when it comes to how they view themselves and the others as a team. In every interview they will always talk up the competition. They legitimately respect what other teams can bring to the table. When asked the question on who could get far in the tournament, they will pick out favorites but point out anyone can win on a given day. But when you ask them who will win, who is the best, they will always say it is themselves. That they can beat anyone, anytime, anyplace. This is a delicate balance and we’ve seen all-time great players get into the trap of self-confidence which can slip into stubbornness.

Vincent “Happy” Cervoni is one of the all-time great players and leaders of CS:GO history. He broke the game from 2014-2015 with his forcebuy meta and was the leader to have led the French to two Major Championships at DreamHack Winter 2014 and Cluj-Napoca 2015. In the modern era though he has become an archaism. He hasn’t adjusted his leadership or his playstyle to the modern meta. As a leader he could never accommodate what the players of his teams wanted to do so when the victories stopped coming, the system broke down. As a player he has become predictable in his lurk style so even though his ability to read the game and his skills as a player haven’t diminished, his effectiveness has.

Happy is a peculiar case because that stubbornness is a hallmark of some of the greatest players of all time, but you still need to be adaptable. Sometimes you can’t force the game to bend to your will, sometimes you have to concede some ground to the game. Finding a mix between these two approaches is the ideal and this is what the current Liquid Dota 2 roster has done. At the beginning of 2017, the team had found problems with how they wanted to play stylistically. They were playing too close to the meta rather than the strengths of their own players. They eventually found a mix between the two and started to dictate the meta. This allowed them to eventually win The International and have an incredibly successful year from TI7 to TI8.

Beating a championship contender in any esports is no easy feat. It requires skill, work, luck, and mentality. As an underdog you have to believe you can still win even if you know that you are outmatched. An example of a player who didn’t have that mentality was Jonathan “Jinro” Walsh. Early on in SC2 he had made it to two GSL semifinals. In both series he had a chance to win, but in both series he was decisively defeated. The reason was because he respected his opponents too much, he realistically believed he had already overachieved so he didn’t have the winning mentality to keep pushing for more. In Dota 2, Jacky “EternaLEnvy” Mao epitomizes this sort of mentality. The worse the situation, the more unlikely the chances in the game, the more likely he is to win. For whatever reason being the underdog in the game and fulfilling the story of the anime protagonist fills him with a comeback strength unmatched in Dota 2 history.

EternaLEnvy wasn’t the only player to have found strength from a weak position. In an interview, Fernando “fer” Alvarenga revealed that he couldn’t hear from one of his ears for multiple tournaments. To make up for this fact he created a hyper aggressive style to compensate for his weakness and because of that style he became one of the best players in the world in 2017. One of the ultimate examples was Jung “Mvp” Jong Hyun. He was a player who had faced every obstacle imaginable in 2012. He had pinched nerves so that he felt pain and couldn’t feel the clicks of his mouse and keyboard. He played in his worst matchups against the best players of the time and against the most imbalanced meta of all-time. Despite that he persevered and became the definition of victory in spite of adversity in SC2.

Victory and the desire for it is what drives all competitive players. It is what forces them to put in 8-10 hours a day for months or years at a time. That drive that need to win is what fuels them daily, but ironically it can also be what destroys them. As Daigo Umehara once said, “It may seem contradictory, but, in my experience, letting go of winning encourages victory.” Focusing on winning puts extra stress on the player as they put too much of themselves into the act of winning rather than the act of playing. They focus on the goal rather than the path to get there. Among all of the paradoxes of the competitor, this is the most contradictory. The drive and ambition to win is what fuels players to get to the top, but it that very same drive to win can be what stops them at the very last step. They get into their own heads, the feel the pressure, they choke, they tilt, they fall. It is the final step of the true champion to be able to pull composure from that passion and that is what the 2015 Fnatic era of CS:GO did when they became the greatest lineup in CS:GO history.

Patient impatience, confident and humbleness, stubborn yet adaptable, arrogant underdog, strength in weakness, victory by letting go of the idea of victory, composure through passion. These are some of the paradoxical mindsets that have defined some of the greatest players in esports history.

Related Articles: