Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
Quick answers
Is esports a real sport?
It depends on your definition, but esports meets many of the criteria: organized competition, professional athletes on salaries, governing rules, world championships and enormous audiences. Elite players train for hours daily, and the physical demands of reaction speed, precision and endurance under pressure are genuine, even if they differ from traditional athletics. Institutional recognition has grown, esports was a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games, and the International Olympic Committee has backed Olympic esports competition. Critics point out that the games are privately owned and change constantly, unlike static traditional sports. Whether or not one calls it a sport, esports functions as a professional competitive discipline with a global industry around it, and the debate matters less than that reality.
How do esports players make money?
Professional players earn from several streams. Team salaries provide a base, and tournament prize money can be enormous in games with large pools, Dota 2's The International has paid over $40M across a single event. Beyond competition, many players earn substantial income from live streaming on Twitch and YouTube, from sponsorships and personal brand deals, and from content creation, which for some exceeds their competitive earnings. Top players in major titles can earn millions annually across these sources, though the majority of pros make far more modest sums, and careers are often short. The financial gap between the elite handful and the wider professional field is wide, and income beyond prize money is frequently the larger and more stable part.
What are the most popular esports games?
The leading titles by audience and prestige are League of Legends, whose World Championship draws the largest viewership in esports, and Counter-Strike, whose Majors anchor the tactical-shooter scene. Dota 2 commands attention for its record prize pools, and Valorant has grown rapidly into a major franchised circuit since 2020. In Asia and the global South, mobile titles including Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, PUBG Mobile, Free Fire and Honor of Kings command some of the biggest live audiences of all. Fighting games centered on EVO and real-time strategy like StarCraft II retain devoted followings. The mix shifts constantly as games rise and fade, but MOBAs and tactical shooters have been the most durable pillars of competitive PC esports.
Who is the highest-earning esports player?
By tracked tournament prize money, the top earners are overwhelmingly Dota 2 players, because that game's Internationals feature by far the largest prize pools in esports. Johan 'N0tail' Sundstein, the OG captain who won back-to-back Internationals in 2018 and 2019, long held the record with career earnings above $7M. Several of his OG teammates and other Dota professionals also rank near the top. It is important to note these figures track prize money only, not salaries, streaming income or sponsorships, so they understate total earnings and skew heavily toward Dota. A League of Legends star like Faker, whose prize money is far lower, likely earns more overall once salary and endorsements are counted.
Why is South Korea so important to esports?
South Korea effectively invented modern professional esports. The late-1990s combination of the game StarCraft, a national broadband rollout and PC bang internet-cafe culture created the world's first true esports ecosystem, complete with televised leagues, salaried players and genuine celebrities like BoxeR. The Korea e-Sports Association, founded in 2000, gave the scene formal governance years before anywhere else. That head start built a deep infrastructure and competitive culture that carried into later games, especially League of Legends, where Korea's LCK became the strongest league in the world and produced Faker and a long line of world champions. Korea's disciplined, systematic approach set the competitive standard the rest of the world spent years trying to match, and its influence remains foundational.
What was the biggest esports prize pool ever?
The largest prize pool for a single esports event is Dota 2's The International 2021, which reached $40,018,195. Dota's Internationals are crowdfunded: Valve funnels a share of in-game cosmetic purchases into the pool, which is how the game's championships have repeatedly set records unmatched by any other title. The 2021 winners, Team Spirit, took home roughly $18.2M, the biggest payout a single team has claimed from one event. For multi-title events, Saudi Arabia's Esports World Cup, launched in 2024, offers an even larger total prize pool exceeding $60M, but that is spread across many games rather than one competition. The International's single-tournament figure remains the benchmark for a lone event.
Esports flips the cost structure of most sports. There is no court and no equipment bag to buy, and League of Legends, Valorant and Counter-Strike 2 are all free to play. Instead, nearly every dollar goes toward input devices and the screen. There is a gap between a 60Hz laptop and a desktop running a 240Hz monitor that no amount of practice can close, and that gap only widens as rank climbs. The trouble is that most beginners get the priority order backward, buying a flashy keyboard or a gaming chair first and only noticing their monitor's refresh rate much later. Every figure below reflects entry-level United States pricing for 2025-2026, and getting the order right alone can cut a beginner's first outlay nearly in half.
The other thing to settle before buying anything is not gear but a goal. Climbing rank as a hobby and chasing a pro career are entirely different paths, and the odds on the second are extreme. Counting all ten LCS-adjacent North American organizations and their academy rosters together still leaves only a few dozen professional League of Legends seats in the region, contested by hundreds of thousands of players on the same ladder. On the upside, online play means anyone with a decent internet connection can practice against the same global population without traveling anywhere, which is not true of most physical sports. So the practical answer for most newcomers is: buy a mouse and mousepad first, use a library, campus lab or a friend's setup to test the waters, and delay a full PC purchase for several months.
Gear and budget
High-refresh gaming monitor
Starter price $130-$300 (United States, 2025)
If you plan to play at home, this is where the first dollars should go. A 24-27 inch 144Hz or 165Hz model runs roughly $130-$220 as of 2025-2026, while 240Hz models run $250-$400. The jump from 60Hz to 144Hz matters far more than the jump from 144Hz to 240Hz, so 144Hz is plenty for a beginner. For shooters, 24-inch panels remain the competitive standard over 27-inch because the shorter distance means less eye travel, while curved screens, 4K resolution and wide color gamut do nothing useful in competitive titles. A shockingly common mistake is buying a high-refresh monitor and leaving Windows' display setting at 60Hz for months without noticing.
Gaming mouse
Starter price $25-$130 (United States, 2025)
This is the single piece of gear most directly tied to performance, and it is portable enough to carry to a friend's setup or an internet café, which is why it should be the first purchase. Entry-level wired mice run $25-$45, while the roughly 60-gram wireless lightweight mice most pros actually use run $100-$150. Shape and fit matter more than brand. If your palm is smaller than about 7 inches long, an oversized mouse forces a fingertip grip and strains the wrist. Sensor quality on anything released since 2020 exceeds what a human can perceive, so ignore DPI-number marketing entirely; weight, shape and a cable that doesn't drag are what matter.
Large mousepad
Starter price $10-$45 (United States, 2025)
This is the item with the biggest performance-per-dollar payoff and the one beginners skip most often. Large cloth pads at 450x400mm or bigger run $10-$25, while glass or hard pads run $25-$60. Most pros use low-sensitivity, whole-arm aiming, which is physically impossible on a small pad. Aiming by flicking the wrist alone is both less accurate and a direct cause of wrist injury. Treat a cloth pad as a consumable: the surface texture changes and friction shifts after 6-12 months of regular use.
Keyboard
Starter price $40-$170 (United States, 2025)
This matters less for performance than the mouse, so there's no rush to spend here. Entry mechanical boards run $40-$90, and the increasingly popular magnetic (Hall-effect) keyboards run $90-$220. The only features that genuinely matter are N-key rollover, so simultaneous key presses never drop, and enough weight that the board doesn't slide. Using a tenkeyless or 60% layout lets you angle the board to free up more mousepad space, an advantage for low-sensitivity players. Note that rapid-trigger and snap-tap-style features on magnetic keyboards are regulated differently by different tournament rulesets, and Valve banned one-key-cancels-opposite-key bindings in Counter-Strike 2 in 2024, so check the current rules before buying if competing is the goal.
Headset or earbuds
Starter price $40-$170 (United States, 2025)
In shooters, reading footstep and gunshot direction decides fights before kill counts do. A $40-$90 stereo gaming headset is enough, and many pros actually turn off virtual 7.1 surround and run pure stereo, because virtual surround adds a sense of distance but often smears left-right accuracy. For MOBAs and strategy titles this matters much less, and whatever headphones you already own will do. Once you start playing team games, microphone quality outweighs audio quality: a teammate whose voice cuts out can't communicate a call no matter how good it is.
Gaming PC
Starter price $550-$1,300 (United States, 2025)
The most expensive item, and the one to buy last. League of Legends, Valorant and Counter-Strike 2 all have low hardware requirements, and a $550-$800 build will hold a stable 240 frames per second as of 2025-2026. Chasing Battlegrounds or the newest AAA titles pushes that to $900-$1,300. Prebuilt brand-name desktops cost 20-30% more for the same performance, and laptops cost about the same for worse performance while locking in a fixed keyboard and screen, a real disadvantage competitively. Testing your commitment on borrowed or public hardware for a few months before buying dramatically lowers the cost of a wrong guess.
Desk and chair
Starter price $150-$500 (United States, 2025)
This has zero effect on performance and almost total effect on injury risk, which is exactly why beginners get the priority backward. A mesh office chair with real lumbar support generally beats a flashy racing-style gaming chair and can be found for $150-$350. Pair it with correct height: raise the monitor with a stand or monitor arm ($25-$80) until its top edge sits at eye level, and set chair height so elbows rest at 90 degrees on the desk. For anyone sitting six hours a day, this combination determines the long-term health of the wrists and neck.
How to start
Pick one game and lock your setup
The first decision is not practice but selection. Five-versus-five MOBAs (League of Legends, Dota 2), tactical shooters (Valorant, Counter-Strike 2), battle royale, and fighting games barely overlap in required skill, so splitting time across two of them slows progress in both. Once you've picked, lock your setup: monitor refresh rate, mouse DPI and in-game sensitivity, resolution and aspect ratio, and key bindings, then leave them alone.
Tip Treat sensitivity as fixed for at least three months once chosen. Constantly adjusting it whenever your aim feels off is the single most common thing that stalls beginners, because muscle memory only builds on a stable value. On day one, also verify in Windows display settings that the refresh rate is actually reporting above 60Hz and that mouse acceleration is disabled in your graphics driver — an astonishing number of players buy a high-refresh monitor and run it at 60Hz for months without realizing it.
Drill fundamentals in isolation (months 1-3)
Ranked games alone won't sharpen a specific skill. In shooters, use an aim trainer or the in-game shooting range to drill crosshair placement, counter-strafing and spray control separately from matches; in MOBAs, use practice tools to count exactly how many minions you last-hit in a fixed ten-minute window. The goal at this stage is repeatable mechanics, not win rate. Thirty minutes of deliberate practice beats three hours of aimless ranked queue.
Tip Before drilling raw aim, fix crosshair placement. Beginners rest their crosshair on the ground and snap it upward when an enemy appears; strong players pre-aim at head height where an enemy is expected to appear and only adjust left-right, which alone makes reactions look faster than they are. The MOBA equivalent is the minimap: beginners glance at it once or twice a minute, strong players check it every ten seconds. Most deaths to ganks come from not looking at information, not from slow reflexes.
Prove yourself in solo queue (months 3-12)
In the North American esports ecosystem, ranked tier is the only publicly recognized résumé. Amateur teams, academies and scouts all start there. Diamond or above in League of Legends, Immortal or above in Valorant, and a strong Premier rating in Counter-Strike 2 are the rough thresholds where conversations begin. What matters at this stage is not games played but the quality of review, since only players who rewatch their losses climb tiers consistently.
Tip When reviewing, watch losses rather than wins, and within a loss, jump straight to the timestamp of your own death. Checking just three things — did you glance at the minimap in the ten seconds before dying, did you enter a fight without information, and did you have a retreat path — reveals most recurring patterns. Also remember that rank distributions differ meaningfully by server population and region, so comparing your tier directly against a streamer's on a different server isn't a fair comparison.
Join a team and scrim
Solo queue has a hard ceiling on what it can teach. Team-level concepts like drafting, set plays, objective timing and utility coordination only develop with five fixed players practicing together. Amateur teams typically form through game-specific Discord communities, college esports clubs, and team-finding boards, and once a roster is set, teams schedule practice matches against other teams, known as scrims, at a recurring time.
Tip When finding a team, availability matters before skill. Amateur scrim blocks are usually fixed on weekday evenings, and if you can't reliably clear that window, the team falls apart regardless of how good you are. On your first team, volunteer to be the in-game leader or shot-caller. Almost nobody wants the job, so the seat is usually open, and calling requires reading the whole map, which raises game understanding faster than any other role. It's also the resource scouts most often say amateur teams lack.
Play amateur tournaments and build a record
First tournaments are almost always online qualifiers, and many have no entry fee. Publisher-run amateur cups, collegiate tournaments, local LAN center events and community-run online leagues are the common entry points. What matters more than placement is the record left behind: tournaments produce broadcast footage or at minimum replay files, and that becomes the actual evidence submitted later to any team that considers you.
Tip It's more accurate to think of a first tournament's purpose as securing footage rather than winning it. Academies and second-tier scouts don't select players on rank numbers alone; they watch match footage to see how a player handles pressure and communicates with teammates, so save recordings even from a tournament you're eliminated from early. Also, online tournaments produce forfeit losses from lag and connection issues far more often than expected, so check your connection, client updates and voice-chat setup thoroughly 30 minutes before a match and have a backup connection ready.
Try academy tryouts, or choose a different entry path
The pro pathway is narrow and explicit. In League of Legends, franchised organizations' academy rosters are effectively the only formal route up, and most competitive titles require a minimum age, commonly 17 or 18, to sign professionally. Real scouting mostly happens in the mid-to-late teens. Valorant and Counter-Strike have a comparatively lower age barrier to entry and more open paths for an amateur team to climb into higher-tier competition.
Tip Realistically, chasing a League of Legends pro career past your early twenties is not a workable plan. But esports has far more jobs around the players than as players. Coaching, strategic analysis, data analysis, tournament operations and officiating, broadcast production, casting and observing, team management, and content creation all monetize deep game knowledge and often don't require a playing résumé at all. Someone who pairs high-tier ranked experience with video editing, data skills or a second language is often more valuable to a team than another player.
Running costs
Figures reflect a major market and vary by place and year.
Common injuries and prevention
Carpal tunnel syndrome and wrist tendinitis
This is esports' signature injury and has ended several professional careers outright. It comes from high-sensitivity wrist-only aiming with the wrist braced against the desk, combined with long sessions of typing with the wrist bent backward. Prevention comes down to three habits: lower in-game sensitivity and switch to whole-arm aiming on a large mousepad, which spreads load to the elbow and shoulder; lower desk height rather than resting the wrist on a wrist pad, since a raised wrist rest actually increases joint compression; and every 50 minutes, spend 30 seconds on nerve-gliding stretches, flexing the wrist up and down gently. Numbness or reduced sensation in the thumb and index finger is a signal to see a doctor, not to simply rest.
Forward head posture and neck pain
When a monitor sits below eye level, the head drifts forward, and every 1-2 inches the head moves forward roughly doubles the load on the cervical spine. Shooter players are especially prone to this because they lean toward the screen when focusing. The fix is desk setup, not posture exercises: raise the monitor with a stand or arm so its top edge is at or slightly above eye level, and keep 24-28 inches between eyes and screen. Using a laptop as-is is the worst combination; a laptop stand with an external keyboard, separating screen height from hand height, is close to mandatory. Adding ten daily chin tucks, pulling the chin straight back, reverses most early-stage symptoms.
Dry eye and eye strain
Blink rate drops to roughly a third of normal when staring at a screen, and combined with dry indoor air and late-night sessions, the cornea dries out. Repeated blurring of vision measurably slows reaction time. The well-known 20-20-20 rule, looking at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes, helps, but a habit that sticks better in practice is blinking deliberately and firmly three times every time you die or a round ends. Use preservative-free single-dose artificial tears, match monitor brightness to ambient room lighting rather than playing in a fully dark room with only the screen lit, and avoid wearing contact lenses through eight-plus-hour sessions, one of the most common and costly habits among competitive players.
Lower back pain and disc issues
Sitting six-plus hours a day makes lumbar strain structurally unavoidable in this sport. The pelvis sliding forward while focused, curling the lower back into a C-shape, is the specific pattern that produces disc symptoms even in players in their twenties. Prevention starts with chair selection: a mesh office chair with lumbar support that meets the curve of the lower back beats a reclined racing-style gaming chair, set so the hips sit fully back in the seat and the feet rest flat on the floor. Set an alarm to stand and walk for two minutes every 60 minutes; breaking up sitting time matters more than any single stretch. Core and glute strengthening twice a week noticeably lowers recurrence.
The realistic minimum to start in the United States is a mouse and mousepad at $35-$175 plus a reliable internet connection, and building out a full home setup with monitor, PC and peripherals runs roughly $900-$2,300. After that, monthly costs for internet and consumables run $50-$130, and adding coaching or an academy program adds another $200-$600. Compared to golf or tennis, the entry cost is similar and the ongoing cost is considerably lower. What must be avoided is getting the order backward — pairing a $150 keyboard with a 60Hz monitor.
The last question is always the goal. As a hobby, climbing rank has never been more accessible: matchmaking is free, servers are stable across most of the country, and countless free resources exist to learn from. As a career, the door is narrow, seats number in the dozens per region even for the biggest titles, and real scouting windows cluster in the mid-to-late teens. Anyone aiming for that door needs to start stacking rank and tournament footage by early-to-mid adolescence; anyone not on that timeline is generally better served aiming at coaching, analysis, broadcast or team-operations roles instead. Either way, one habit matters more than any other: reviewing losses rather than wins is what actually separates progress from a plateau, in ranked play and in a career alike.