Lessons - What It Really Takes to Win | Carlos Rodriguez - 17x European Champion

In this lessons episode, explore how elite eSports performance develops through strategic game selection, discipline training, and constant adaptation. Discover why picking the right title shapes long-term opportunity, understand how mental endurance and personal development elevate competitive skill, and uncover how failure, risk-taking, and self-trust drive sustained success in a fast evolving industry. What does that mean for eSports? How do you become the best? Because if you're talking about all the different games that you could play, do you just focus on the one that's growing the fastest? It has the biggest community and play that again and again. It's a very good question, right? So I will say I got lucky on my first move in World of Warcraft because World of Warcraft just happened to be one of the largest games back then, but then in the fourth year competing in that game, 2009 actually, I decided to quit World of Warcraft and I decided to quit for different reasons than the game being smaller. I didn't even think about that. I quit because I felt like I wasn't the owner of my lack. I wasn't like the game had certain things that would make it so the class I played in the game would just become less and less up to me to win with, you know? So I was like, yeah, I don't want to be like I'm like, yeah, I don't my control completely. So I decided to quit, and I quit on my peak. I think I played, I won in Europe and then I played the World Championship and I think in the like third or fourth, I can't remember exactly. And the first with my class, there's like different classes in the video game. I was playing Warrior and I was the best warrior in the world, right? And so yeah, then I said to quit because of that reason and then I then asked myself, okay, I want a career of this. So I think I have a gift to play video games. I think that my hand coordination is pretty good. I think that I can think on this spot really well as well and also I have no fear. I mean, I am inherently a very confident person which is very useful in game to assert dominance whenever you're playing, you know, and facing someone. So what game should I play next? What games fits my skill set and what game is played by a lot of people because the more people that play the game and watch the game, the more price pool I will have access to, right? And that's when I consciously decided to go for League of Legends, which is even a soft today. One of the largest games on the planet, if not the largest, I'm pretty sure is the largest PC game on the planet. And that's when I built the next portion of my career for five years straight. Played that game, became one of the best in the world that it played a lot of tournaments, build a brand, created content, live streamed and made myself, you know, a known, you know, professional player with a lot of fans. And yeah, that was a conscious effort. And I'm very glad that I did that. Even though like League of Legends marketing was not my favorite game, I just thought that I could be very good at it and I thought that I could have a career that I could live with, you know. Um, when you're when you are trying to become the best at a game, what does your actual routine look like? What's your day to day? So that the, you know, in, in, in traditional sports, you can't, you shouldn't practice more than your body physically allows you to because then it becomes counter, counterproductive, right? When your muscles are too tired, then you get into bad habits and, you know, yeah, you get into bad habits when you're too tired. But with video games, I always say, if your mind can take it, you should be training. And you're not going to get exhausted on your arms. You're not going to, unless you really have a fucked up way to pick up the mouse or the controller, you're not going to develop carpal tunnel, you know, like, yeah, like it's not going to physically tax you. If you just do the ABC of what to do when you play games, like stretch every now and then turn up from your chair and like, you know, stretch and whatever, right? But, uh, but mentally it's very taxing because every game you play, you have to think about a thousand things, a thousand things while you're controlling your character, while you're thinking about what your team is doing, what moves should the team do next? What is my opponent thinking of doing? It's just very taxing, you know, and you have to take it seriously so that you can develop good habits. So I think that an average successful career has a player training eight to ten hours a day. And there's players that can take more. There's players that can take less. There's more creative players that benefit more from playing only six, seven hours, whereas there's more players that benefit a lot from repetition that, you know, having 11, 12 hours a day help them more. So it's ranges, you know, but for the most part, I think that the rule of thumb is if you can take it, you should be practicing. And the way in which you practice, there's two ways in which you practice in esports. One is alongside your team. So if it's a team game, you practice alongside your team, and you practice against other teams, or your sister team, and then you practice team play, you practice call outs, you practice together, you know, you learn how to play together the game, you practice picks and bounds, you practice the way in which you guys play the game together, and you practice what your team is known for, what is your playstyle, right, which takes hundreds, if not thousands of hours, okay. And then you practice by yourself in the sense of your practice, your mechanics. Imagine this as if you're in your NBA player, and you're just shooting by yourself, right, just shooting at the basket for hours. And the way in which you do that is is every game has their is something called solo queue, and you just queue up, and then you automatically get placed with other players in the world in your team and other players in the opposite team, random people that are of your level, more or less. And that's how you practice, you learn your mechanics, you develop your own, and yeah, and those two combined make up for the totality of your practice. Some players like to go to hit the gym, a lot of them actually like to also read books and just develop their minds, and I have come to realize that it does help depending on the player. Yeah, no, I was going to ask like if there's any, any like physical or mental exercises that you do that translate into, but for you in particular was mostly just practicing the actual game that you're playing. I mean, it was a practicing game. I was hitting the gym as well, and I was reading books. I like to read books a lot, and I like meditating as well. I picked up reading books and meditation when I was 17, and finally enough, it was when everything just boomed, you know, like, yeah, and I have never lost the habit anymore. I don't meditate every day, but I use it as a tool, you know, and and same goes for reading books. When I feel like I'm a bit stuck or I'm a bit overly stressed about something, a micro and job is, it can get incredibly stressful, even more so than as a player. But I've learned the little tactics to get rid of that stress and to find solutions to complex problems that require a lot of creativity and ambition and balls, honestly, like sometimes I just have to, sometimes I just have to take a leap of faith and, you know, using my gut feel as the faith, you know, and I feel like reading books and meditating and spending time with myself helped me greatly. Yeah, no, I just find it so fascinating because you know, when you look at when you look at traditional sports and you find the people that are the best, well, you know, they put in the hours and they put in the work, but then they find the best, they usually will find the best coach and that will sort of guide them and because traditional sports, there's been people that have done it before, right? There's there's training methods that have done it before. If you're, if you're the number one eSports player, no one's ever really done it before. There's no coach that has done this as a professional for 10 years, you know, before you were even born that knows how to, knows how to train, knows how to navigate and how to deal with contracts. So like technically you're, you're more or less on your own. Did you find somebody or was it, was it you sort of paving the way because then when I look at you and your story, it seems like you paved the way for how to coach, how to train, how to negotiate, how to how to build a brand, how to sort of operate at a high level when you're actually as a player, it was just you basically and probably a handful of other people that were coming up at the same time as you. Yeah, this is actually a good point. Like it is true that I never had, I didn't, I never had a mentor as a player. I just never had a mentor's player. That's simple because I was, I mean, I was not literally the first player, but I was the first player, you know, in one sense of it was what I was one of the first players, you know, and I could just look at my environment and say, okay, that works. Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, that guy got fucked. Okay, you know, I was just taking my learnings the hard way, you know, and yeah, you're right. I mean, I had to build my own path and in a way, that's why I think, and I'm very grateful for this, the industry, like my reputation and credibility within the industry is really high. It makes me happy that people look back and see me as, yeah, a legacy player that now is touching a completely different side of the business, you know, and ultimately, man, I feel like it's just, it's fun when you have to build a path that's never existed before because you like, you learn to take fuck up some failures as just another day in the office, you know, like right now, like the culture of G2, it's incredible. Like, I feel like people just know inherently that the only thing that will be held accountable to is to try out things. That's the one metric that everybody's held accountable to. Just try out things that haven't been done before or try out things that you think you can do better. And that's the only KPI pretty much, you know, if you fail at it, that's okay. But if you get nothing new done, if you're taking no, no, no risks, then it's when, you know, when I start looking at you, maybe not a good culture fit. And I think that comes from my times as a player, like so many decisions were straight up wrong, even in social media, just having a big mouth. It sometimes was great, something was shitty, you know, and I built a brand, my brand is completely transparent. This raw guy that is just bantering with everyone, having a good time and sometimes misses the mark. That's pretty much me, you know, and I love it. You know, I really love it because you can't, you can't, you can't, what's the word I'm looking for? You can't serve the wave unless you're at the exact a proper place in the wave. If you're too high, if you're too low, you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it. And sometimes you will miss the mark, you will miss the wave, and sometimes you will miss the mark. It's going to get you a lot of hatred, and you have to be okay with that, you know? So I feel like going through all those failures, including shitty contracts signed, including bad decisions around changing players, including whatever it is. The fact that I can't look at a Bible and just say, okay, I was right, okay, this is wrong. And just look at just the results of my actions is very reassuring. And like almost liberation, you know, it's like a freedom, you know? You can trust yourself. I think that's the most powerful thing you can ever do. You trust yourself. You know that if you had to do it all again, you had to figure it all out again. You just trust that you do it because you figured it out once. And now you start to understand that if you can figure out and navigate all the good, the bad, and the shit that happened to you, and you do it successfully once, you can do it multiple times. And you probably, you know, your career in your life is going to look different in another 20 years from now, whatever that is. And then you'll figure that piece out. And I think that's probably the most powerful thing you can do. And you can only you can only ever come to that conclusion if you failed a lot. Because then if you haven't failed, you don't know how to deal with the failure. You don't know how to trust how you'd react when when stuff doesn't go the way you want it to go. So I think it's all just the small things in the day to day, right? Like small things, small things, whatever small may be, you know, it's like when something is out of the comfort zone, it's like the reason you just don't want to do it is because, okay, what if I do it and then I don't do it properly? Or what if I try to do it? And it's just not the expectation I had. It just doesn't matter. You know, just just just go. You know, just do it. Yeah, what's the worst scenario? You know, you lose the evening, like what is the worst scenario? You lose 100 euros. Like what's the worst scenario? You know, just try it. You know, if you really have fill in it, well, why not? You know, if anything, you get a 100-year-old lesson. I always said, you know? Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.