Gamers are a curious bunch. You obviously love to sit down to play games yourself. But sometimes watching a professional, or a group of professionals, show off their elite skills on a streaming site can be fun too. Watching is almost as fun as playing. It’s all of the excitement with no work.
Esports tournaments and high roller events are very similar spectacles when you really break them down into their core pieces. Professionals play, and curious bystanders stand on the sidelines to enjoy the show, usually to see who will walk away with the massive prize pool. There are other similarities between them, too.
Professional gamers are amazingly skilled
If you gathered some friends and signed up as a team in a professional League of Legends tournament right now, you’d lose. You would lose at a high roller event, too, most likely. The other teams or single players you’d be up against would be more skilled than you. They’d have a better grasp of team play and would definitely know the best winning strategies better than you do, even if you’ve been playing the games for decades.
The team that outplayed you will have been training in very specialized and specific ways to get so skilled. On the gambling side, a high roller person from New Zealand might have made proper use of live casinos to perfect their card-based talent in the most authentic way. They wouldn’t only have played on weekends with their friends to understand strategies and get good. Live play in real time prepares them better for high-roller events. On the video gaming side of things, pro gamers would also be playing live, against other real live skilled players as much as possible. When you practice with real opponents and in real settings, your instincts get better faster.
The skills needed are similar, but are non-transferrable
Put a pro high-roller poker player on a VALORANT team, and they’ll be in over their head. Sure, they’re really good at poker and might win at their game of choice, but esports games are a different ball game entirely. This is largely because esports games are usually multiplayer games. A pro is only as good as the rest of their team, and if a collection of gamers doesn’t play well together, they won’t get far.
It’s also because, while poker and VALORANT, which console players will be happy to know, are coming to consoles, both need a strategy to win; the strategies themselves are completely different. Poker is all about reading opponents and making tactical decisions alone. VALORANT is similar in the tactical decision part but also needs a mastery of mechanical skill and a coherent team dynamic.
High roller events and Counter-Strike 2 tournaments both draw crowds
High-roller events and esports grand tournaments are really fun to watch. This is something the different flavours of gaming events share in common. They also both need a little extra know-how to watch. When a high roller event or Counter-Strike match is taking place, they’re not as widely advertised as a hit television show.
Unlike widely popular, multi-season television shows like The Boys, the crowds drawn to gaming championships are more niche. It’s like this: your cool and hip grandma can probably get into a show like The Boys, but without prior experience actually playing a tactical game like Counter-Strike 2, she will have a very hard time understanding what’s going on if she watches a match. She just won’t know what’s going on.
So, poker tournaments and Counter-Strike 2 tournaments are similar because fans of both will have played the games themselves at some point and will have context. Esports fans will know when Denis “electroNic” Sharipov just pulled off a crazy shot, and pro poker spectators will understand the strategies Daniel Negreanu might use to win his high roller event.
There’s a pot of gold at the end of the show
This similarity between esports and high roller showdowns probably won’t be very surprising. In both, glory and money are both prizes to be won. With esports, the prize pools are usually a lot bigger, but teams of players have to share the money between themselves if they win. Right now, the biggest total esports prize pool to date is over $60m, but that prize is reportedly going to be shared over many games, qualifiers and MVP awards throughout the single massive event.
Pro gamers on both sides are famous.
You already know that many esports legends are incredibly famous, but you might not be aware that pro gamblers are also known far and wide. On both sides of the gaming divide, many talented gamblers have made massive names for themselves. Some have retired but still earn a good living with YouTube channels, sponsorship deals, books, courses and more. This fame, or infamy, of players, is another similarity between esports tournaments and high-roller events.
Obviously, the two kinds of events aren’t exactly the same. But look closer and they share a lot more than what might immediately be apparent. It’s possible that there’s some overlap in the fans of both sides, as people who simply enjoy watching pros do their thing can happily watch either kind of show for many of the same reasons.
