Twenty-two-year-old Derek "Raydere" Trang and his four teammates train hard. Five nights a week, for four or five hours a stretch, they power through team-building exercises, strategic planning and good, hard play.
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The hard work has paid off. At the weekend, the Chiefs, who hail from various parts of Australia, beat their long-time rivals Legacy, three-to-one.
Their sport isn't basketball or hockey but League of Legends, a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) and the most popular computer game in the world. There are 67 million monthly active participants in the game around the globe – almost three times as many people as live in Australia.
The Chiefs' win at this week's LoL tournament for the Oceanic region, held at Luna Park in Sydney's north, won them $16,000 in prize money. In a couple of weeks' time they're off to Istanbul for the International Wildcard Qualifier – their shot at a place in the world grand final in Berlin later this year. Last year the winning world final LoL team raked in more than $US1 million ($1.3m) in prize money.
To the uninitiated the idea of young people getting paid big bucks to sit and play video games may seem absurd. But these guys are serious, and advertisers and other sports industry stakeholders are quickly waking up to the growing trend of "eSports". The sport even has commentators, referred to as "shoutcasters", like Jake Tiberi, who had a successful career in insurance before he made the jump to his eSports profession.
Trang, otherwise a Commerce/Law undergraduate at the University of NSW, began playing LoL because "it was fun", but was quickly drawn to the competitive challenge of professional eSports.
"In high school I played a lot of sport: athletics, rugby, tennis – three major sports, I'm a very competitive person," he says.
Keeping physically fit is just as integral to his eSports training as it is to traditional sports. A match can run as long as five or six hours, with sometimes thousands of fans watching, so stamina and a sharp mind are essential.
"Because it's sitting in front of a computer, people do tend to underestimate the physical toll," Derek says.
"But being active, in terms of doing exercise and being health conscious, really makes a significant improvement to your energy levels and focus."
Riot Games, the company behind LoL, pays players $100 each per game during the Oceanic Pro League season, but the main bag for eSports players is prize money. This year there is an estimated $US16.6 million up for grabs across 1231 eSports tournaments involving many games besides LoL.
The tournament with the most amount of prize money is the international Defence of the Ancients (DOTA) championship, another MOBA, with a prize pool of $US11.1 million. The vast majority of DOTA's prize money is crowd-funded by its ever-growing legion of eSports fans.
According to games research firm Newzoo, there are 205 million eSports viewers worldwide, growing 20 per cent each year.
A single eSports grand final can attract stadium crowds in the tens of thousands, but tens of millions across the globe will tune in via YouTube or Twitch to stream the events live to their homes via the internet, giving traditional blockbuster sports like the Super Bowl and the World Cup a serious run for their money in terms of viewership. Last year's LoL world championship final, for instance, attracted 27 million online viewers, according to Riot Games.
With numbers like these, Jack Watts, managing director of Bastion EBA, an Australian-based business which manages sponsorship opportunities for major organisations, says the appeal of eSports sponsorship reaches well beyond tech brands.
"About six months ago we identified eSports as a growing global trend that was going to take hold in Australia pretty quickly, and that also replicated in our London office which is seeing the same thing," Mr Watts says.
"As the sport grows, so will the industry around it, and it's about taking a conventional sporting approach and retro-fitting that for eSports."
Global revenue in 2014 from investors, sponsors, online advertisers, merchandise, licensing and tickets topped $US194 million in 2014 and is growing rapidly – at a clip of 29 per cent, year on year, according to Newzoo.
While Chiefs have signed up tech and gaming companies like Logitech and Nvidia as sponsors, household names like Coca-Cola, Nissan and Red Bull are also jumping on the eSports bandwagon.
The target audience is highly sought after by advertisers, and is difficult to reach through traditional channels. eSports enthusiasts are overwhelmingly male, young, educated, heavy users of digital media and have high disposable incomes.
Where traditional sports spur bidding wars for broadcasting rights through traditional channels – such as Channel Nine's renewed $925 million NRL deal – eSports' home is online. But there are still pay-per-view opportunities in live audience ticket sales and other participatory events.
"They're coming to those revenue streams slightly differently than regular sports, but they are still the same broadcast, sponsorship, prize money and other opportunities," Mr Watts says.
Hoyts cinemas, for example, secured the live broadcast rights to this week's LoL Oceanic Pro League final to show it in their cinemas across Australia, seeing thousands of fans dress up in "cosplay" for the occasion.
A video of Saturday's match is below:
