A day in the life of a pro gamer - Fatal1ty

Being a pro gamer sounds amazing – the money, the excitement, the adoring fans. Gaming all day long. But what's the lifestyle actually like? And what does their day-to-day life involve?

For one thing, if you have to practice all day, you're going to need the best possible hardware, like the ROG Strix GL702, which has been selected as the official gaming laptop for The International 6 (TI6). It offers extreme performance thanks to its Core Intel i7 quad-core processor, 8GB DDR4 memory and the latest dedicated graphics to help you against the competition.

Republic of Gamers spoke to eSports legend Johnathan Wendel, also known by his gamertag Fatal1ty, about what an average day looks like for a professional gamer. Wendel won around $450,000 during his career, after he went pro in 1999 by playing Quake, a first-person shooter.

Now, Wendel runs FATAL1TY, which makes branded accessories and hardware, and appears on shows like Endemol Shine Beyond's digital series Legends of Gaming. 

When you were a pro gamer, how did you train to improve your skills and how often?

Besides the standard training methods I put in place for myself, I would sometimes focus on what my top competition was best at, and figure ways to take that away from him. For example, one of my biggest rivalries was extremely dominant at one specific map. So I decided to dedicate a whole month to that one map. Now you might think I’m crazy for doing this, abandoning the other two competitive maps completely for one month, but in reality, I knew something had to be done to take this away from my opponent so he would have to make an adjustment. The other great thing about this was not only did I become a dominant force on this map, my opponent didn’t know I was secretly training like this for a full month.

So when it came to tournament time and we both fought through our brackets, we ended up in the finals together… I was super excited, because I already knew he would pick this map against me as it had been his go-to map choice for our matches previously where he’s had success! When the referees asked us what our map choice was, we both picked “Sacred.” People thought I was nuts at the tournament to play him straight up on a map which he’s basically unstoppable on. But I figured, if you want to be the best at this game, you have to beat the best on his best map. So this meant in our best of three match, we had to play “Sacred” all three matches if it goes that far!

That was perfect for me… I was so happy. I ended up winning the first match with a good margin and completely dominating the second match to take home my first Championship in the game Painkiller for $15,000 that weekend in Dallas, Texas! Now, after all of that – guess what this did for me besides the money and the championship? It set the stage for future matches to come… Do you think he will pick Sacred against me again? No. Since there are only two other choices for maps, it was easy to see what map to train for the grand finals in New York City.

Personally my best map was another map called “Meatless” which I was nearly unbeatable on, and his map choice Psycho. I trained the night previously knowing pretty much for certain he was going to pick “Psycho” and I deployed a tactic which would cause him frustration and also allow me to get a ton of quick kills. To say the least, it all worked out perfectly in the finals and I won four games straight, taking home the $150,000 in the NYC Grand Finals.

How did you balance your time between playing for fun and playing to practice and compete?

Fun?! It’s all about winning!

In all seriousness, I surrounded myself with great sparring partners who loved to joke around and laugh. When we wanted to have fun, we would play other games upstairs on a console machine or whatnot to take a break from the first person shooter grind. Our favorite was four-player Mario Kart on the GameCube. 

What's an average day for a pro gamer? Do they tend to play whatever game they want or do they have a set structure of training?

I’m not sure about other pro gamers, but mine was based around playing over eight hours a day in a competitive match. Wake up at noon, play till 4pm, go run two or three miles, have lunch, play two more hours, have dinner, relax, play two more hours then sleep… *Repeat*. 

What about team-based games like League of Legends and CS:GO? Do those players develop a playbook and practice together, or hone their skills separately?

You always need to hone your own skills, that’s what teammates like when you can deliver and when you need to be clutch. But you also need to realize: you need to be clutch team player as well and do the small things that make a huge difference in team matches.

In my two years of playing serious team-play matches, we always had a deep understanding of one another, but we would also talk out almost everything 'til we had some kind of identity to how we played the game. When you create an identity of how you play the game as a team, it becomes really easy to know what each player is doing all the time and allows for more opportunities to talk about more vital situations in the game.

Any top team will have a very in-depth view of how they play each map – that goes without saying. Playbooks, strategies, plan B, plan C, etc… You need to have a potential answer to every situation, if you don’t, you're going to lose.

Do you prefer PC or console gaming?

I prefer eSports over any one device, I feel the devices are changing all the time and it's naive to think that we won’t be playing differently in 20 years… Personally though, I play on PC the majority of the time as I think PCs are the most dominant/powerful platform for eSports right now. I do mingle in some console, tablet and smartphone gaming as well, which is showing its hand to be able to support eSports too.

Do you prefer to use a game controller or a keyboard and mouse?

I prefer mouse and keyboard definitely, and use the game controller only when playing games like Rocket League.

 

By Luke Graham

Read other content about Fatal1ty:

How eSports have changed: looking back with Fatal1ty

Here's how to be become a professional gamer (according to a pro)