On September 15th, 2020, Team Liquid revealed its brand-new European HQ center in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in cooperation with long time partner Dell Alienware, matching the org’s North American HQ in Santa Monica,California Today, Team Liquid has actually revealed its most recent addition to both centers, and to the esports market:The Pro Lab
In collaboration with Dutch neuroscience research study group BrainsFirst, The Alienware Pro Lab intends to leader and establish sports science’s application to esports. By providing its competitive lineups as guinea pig for the BrainsFirst software application, Team Liquid is looking for to go into the untouched world of mapping top-performing players’ brains.
Ahead of the statement, Esports Insider explored the Alienware Training Facility in Utrecht to talk with the BrainFirst scientists and Team Liquid personnel behind the experiment.
Over a year-and- a-half after the center was revealed to the general public, the area has yet to be made use of to its complete capacity due to pandemic precaution, Jason Lucas Luijckx, Senior Partnership Manager at Team Liquid, informed Esports Insider while touring the center.
RELATED:Team Liquid launches The Next Wave searching integrate in NA
Not much has actually altered to the European center itself because Esports Insider last checked out in 2020, aside from Alienware hardware upgrades and a couple of brand-new prizes in the event. Downstairs nevertheless, The Pro Lab has actually been housed in the newly-completed modular Team Liquid Fan Zone, which will likewise act as a product look for upcoming garments drops, Team Liquid professional athlete and skill fulfill-and- welcomes and other occasions. The Team Liquid Fan Zone was meant in an Esports Insider interview with the center’s designers in 2015.
The Pro Lab established functions a number of Alienware Aurora R13 PCs paired with Alienware 34 Curved QD-OLED Gaming Monitors running BrainsFirst’s NeurOlympics software application, a set of workouts established to catch the main standard step of cognitive abilities.
BrainsFirst Co-Founder & & CTO Andries van der Leij informed Esports Insider that the business has actually dealt with expert football clubs and business organisations for many years to assist determine the cognitive capabilities of up-and- coming skill. Among its numerous customers is market maker IMC Trading, with whom Team Liquid partnered in February 2021.
IMC makes use of the NeurOlympics software application to test and determine its workers’ cognitive profiles, assisting to match the profiles with pertinent, fulfilling task functions based upon the software application’s insights. Just how Team Liquid chooses to use The Pro Lab’s findings is yet to be found, beyond Team Liquid and Alienware’s objective to ultimately launch its findings to the general public.
RELATED: Trading in Liquid– Why IMC wishes to hire players
The standard hour-long test includes 4 sectors assessing the individual’s attention, memory, control and anticipation cognitive classifications. The tests are easy, including keyboard inputs representing jobs determined by on-screen stimuli– as seen in the demo test The organisation prepares to routinely use reduced, twenty-minute variations of the tests to keep game-agnostic professional athlete profiles.
While the tests themselves would not be thought about complex, the metrology and analysis of the information needs cognitive professionals to draw out significance. The tests are far more than measurement of the portion of appropriate executions or input speed.
BrainsFirst scientists established a cognitive mapping system imagined in the kind of a radar chart to translate the outcomes into crucial information points, such as: Working Memory, Anticipatory Skills, Selective & & Sustained Attention,Emotional Regulation and Automaticity, to name a few.
The organisation wishes to allow its athletic supervisors and coaches to establish brand-new data-informed, insights-driven, personalised training programs based upon the program’s findings. The Pro Lab will ultimately carry out extra ‘holistic assessments’ to determine bottom lines in body, nutrition, hydration and healing, the main news release mentioned, to notify techniques to enhance gamer efficiency and motivate optimum health.
RELATED: Esports information and the requirement for professionals
“As athletic staff, we’re very much aware of how much brain power is involved in playing these games,” Brittany Lattanzio, Senior Athletics Manager at Team Liquid, stated. “The challenge has been in convincing athletes to work on specific mental skills, observed as an external party. The introduction of The Pro Lab gives Athletics staff visualisation and insights to help players improve.”
At the time of the go to, Team Liquid and BrainsFirst had actually evaluated the org’s StarCraft 2 gamers, and prepared to check all of its esports lineups throughout 17 titles, split in between The Pro Labs inNorth America and Europe
“It’s going to be a wonderful journey for both [BrainsFirst] and Team Liquid. We don’t know what insights we’re going to find yet,” Team Liquid’s Luijckx stated. “Maybe we’ll find out that we’ve been doing things all wrong from the beginning, maybe we’ll have to completely change how we’ve been training our athletes.”
Luijckx’s speculation is called for. Team Liquid has actually ended up being market leaders in mapping the minds of expert players, and when venturing into untouched area, there’s no informing what you’ll discover. BrainsFirst Data Scientist Rafick de Mol has actually currently seen a striking overlap in between profiles of the org’s StarCraft 2 professional athletes and IMC’s leading market makers.
RELATED: Team Liquid selects 3 brand-new executives
BrainFirst’s deal with football clubs has actually been utilized to discover cognitive fits in between on-field functions and professional athletes’ profiles– maybe the exact same can be made with lineup structure and function projects in esports titles in the coming years.
The chance provided to Team Liquid by means of the application of sports science to esports might likewise open brand-new classifications for collaborations in the market. Recently, esports organisations have actually purchased gamer health through expert physical training routines, nutrition strategies and personal chefs, either through internal hires or through third-parties.
Luijckx recommended that the findings may cause a market disturbance in how to finest assistance esports professional athletes attain their optimal capacity. A new age of sports science collaborations might be on the horizon, he stated.
In 2018, Team Liquid opened the very first Training Facility, signalling a shift from the ‘Gaming House’ meta, which was embraced from Korean esports culture and ended up being the market requirement. Focusing on the significance of a healthy work-life balance, The North American Alienware Training Facility set the brand-new requirement of a design work environment for much of the market.
RELATED: LDN UTD reveals Alienware as main screen partner
“Similar to the evolution of our training facilities, we believe Pro Lab will make waves in the esports industry and beyond,” Team Liquid Founder & & Co- CEO Victor Gossens stated in The Pro Lab news release. “These are key skills we look for in every successful competitor, and this program will help uncover new universal guidelines and KPIs that we hope will one day serve as an industry-wide benchmark in terms of player training.”
Members of Team Liquid’s moms and dad business, aXiomatic Gaming, have actually contributed in the advancement of the organisation’s professional athlete efficiency programs. “The team has just become so much more sophisticated while still emphasising the core tenets of treating our players with the absolute best care possible and valuing winning as our key metric for success,” stated Team Liquid Board Member Zach Leonsis in a 2021 interview with Sports Business Journal.
“We provide our NBA 2K league team, for example, with access to our medical staff, our training staff, our team psychologists,” he continued. “We treat them just like we would Alex Ovechkin or Bradley Beal. I think that the audience and the fans crave that.”
Thanks to Team Liquid and Alienware’s deep cooperation and financial investment to make the game-agnostic Pro Lab a truth, the esports market might well go into a brand-new stage of self-discovery and chance. The 110+ professional athletes presently housed under Team Liquid’s banner stand at the precipice of esports understanding base’s brand-new dawn.
The Pro Lab starts its research study standard with a remarkable subject group of professional athletes and supported by the winningest organisation worldwide in all of esports history. The Dutch stating ‘meten is weten’— significance ‘measuring is knowing’– is a particularly poignant viewpoint for the organisation’s method to holistic gamer efficiency.
