By Hantu, an ex pro athlete, now coach

A theory of mentality and chemistry over skill is what I have decided to hold and explain today. A good mentality is way more expensive compared to an impressive skill. It is easier to polish physical combat skills than it is to build mentality.

As a coach/analyst, I have learned that other than paying attention to my team, I must also pay more attention to opposing teams as the analyst. I learned to pay attention to gameplay and patterns and the psychological aspect of their mentality and chemistry during the match. This includes reaction to loss and backup balance.

A couple of weeks ago, as I went to my first offline tournament as a coach, I happened to also go against two pro teams of Indonesian, RRQ and VOIN, off the bat I realized that RRQ was more of a threat having seen them relaxed and mostly laughing. I also realized my team was sweating and tense throughout the whole game. My team had to finish at the 9th because of one loss that they let in to their heads. One of my main attackers had his palms sweating buckets and made himself uncomfortable in any seating position. This caused a distraction that made him die early in almost every game after the first one. Other than that, the other teams had their own flaws. Teams that tend to argue internally end up on the bottom of the board. They’re too busy pointing at each other’s mistakes or chasing after opposing teams that they forgot to improve and read and basically everything else.

This also takes me back to the early days of my career as a former athlete, where I always had a hobby of analyzing even when I never thought I’d need to do this as my job later. As an esports fan, other than watching for fun I also like to pick up on their strategies and their ways.

According to most of my studies, the top teams in the world are often also the calmest. I’ll set up a few examples according to professional teams as I have given a contrite example with my own team, it’s time to also take a look at external parties.

In Valorant, you can see teams such as PRX, GenG and Sentinels (the top 3 finishers in Masters Madrid 2024) being more relaxed and rather comedic compared to the lower bracket teams who seems to take everything seriously. They act so because they know they’d win either way and it’s the fact that they know they’d win, made them win. All the ‘throws’ that the internet joked about, is their strategy. Not only it made them unpredictable but it also made them more at ease when playing which at the end proven to provide better results. Even if they ended up not being the best, first of all they won’t kill themselves over it, and second of all they still ended up being one of.

In PUBG, one of the best teams in Japan was named Varrel. Though they have disbanded, the four members had one of the best mentalities, especially their IGL. Known as silly and rageful, he was also known to be one of the best. As an IGL, he can’t be brought up in his emotions and he has successfully be knows as comedicly angsty without ruining his team. More than anything, he’s relaxed and he leads well. With every loss as a big name, he still played equally well or better after it. He doesn’t let one mistake create another one by distracting him. It’s like hitting a restart everytime the room starts, which is what should be a strategy of every athlete. Not completely forgetting the mistake, but instead of regretting it, using it as a self evaluation or a team evaluation.

Another thing to argue about is chemistry, it is as important. Consistency in roster plays a big role for this aspect of the theory. Some efforts can be made to accomplish this. For example, Reject’s team mostly live together (at least as the media shows) and spends a lot of time together as a team, as friends and as family. This might be one of the reasons why they managed to reign as the champions of Japan for almost 3 years now. As of mentality, you can’t laugh with your team if you do not know them. Chemistry is also important to predict and align strategies together.

With this a theory of mentality and chemistry in esports conclude that a team with a strong built mentality of individual and a strong built chemistry of a team is a lot harder to read and or defeat rather than a team made of strong individual skills with none of the stated. As a skill can take a year and a coach to train as for its static status but mentality and chemistry takes a lifetime to build with no guidance or material as abstract and dynamic the human mind and heart is.