Thursday, April 28th 2022
Team Liquid and Alienware Revolutionize Industry Standards for Esports Athlete Training with Launch of The Pro Lab
Team Liquid and longtime partner Alienware are launching The Pro Lab, a groundbreaking global training program. This initiative aims to quantify and analyze core cognitive skills that define a successful esports athlete, transforming the professional training experience and establishing new industry-wide practices. Until now, professional esports training has been informed by disparate game-specific data and rudimentary KPIs. Team Liquid and Alienware saw this as an opportunity to develop an approach rooted in quantifiable game-agnostic data, focusing on cognitive skills synonymous with peak competitive performance such as anticipatory skills, divided attention, emotional regulation, automaticity and more. The Pro Lab is a first-of-its-kind training space backed by esports science, fundamentally changing not only the way these athletes train but how they grow and evolve along with the industry.
Team Liquid and Alienware intend to eventually release findings in an effort to democratize the data and insights, encouraging industry-wide adoption of new best practices. The partners also plan to make the Pro Lab available to select students and academic institutions for additional research to continue enhancing training protocols. "Team Liquid has always been committed to putting its players first," says Steve Arhancet, Co-CEO and Co-Owner of Team Liquid. "The Pro Lab, in partnership with Alienware, is the next stage in that evolution. Our main focus will be working smarter to provide our players with the resources to learn about themselves, their habits, their strengths, and areas of improvement so we can continue to grow and compete at the highest levels."
"Over the course of the last decade, the core of this partnership has always been a shared desire to empower and elevate not only Team Liquid athletes, but the industry overall. The Pro Lab is an extension of just that," says Chris Saylor, Alienware Marketing Director. "To support Team Liquid and go on this groundbreaking journey with them is what Alienware is all about and we look forward to what's to come."
The Pro Lab is powered by top-of-the-line Alienware and Dell Technologies equipment. Some of the award-winning and best-in-class technology includes:
"Similar to the development of our training facilities, we believe The Pro Lab will make waves in the esports industry and beyond," says Victor Goossens, Founder and Co-CEO of Team Liquid. "There are core skills that 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 industry-wide benchmarks when it comes to player training."
With the holistic use of Alienware and Dell Technologies hardware, BrainsFirst software and support from aXiomatic Gaming's wealth of sports performance expertise, this comprehensive program will uncover foundational insights that will drive the next generation of esports training.
The Pro Lab will be integrated into the larger Utrecht, Netherlands and Santa Monica, California Alienware Training Facilities, which are also currently undergoing extensive renovations.
Alienware supports Team Liquid's 110+ athletes and 120+ support staff across five continents through providing cutting-edge gaming PCs, monitors, headsets, peripherals and an array of Dell Technologies solutions, delivering the technical power needed to perform at the highest level. Together, Alienware and Team Liquid have launched two Alienware Training Facilities, setting the standard for multiple organizations to follow, won countless championships, become leading industry advocates, working continuously to foster a culture of inclusion and accessibility.
Source:
Team Liquid
Team Liquid and Alienware intend to eventually release findings in an effort to democratize the data and insights, encouraging industry-wide adoption of new best practices. The partners also plan to make the Pro Lab available to select students and academic institutions for additional research to continue enhancing training protocols. "Team Liquid has always been committed to putting its players first," says Steve Arhancet, Co-CEO and Co-Owner of Team Liquid. "The Pro Lab, in partnership with Alienware, is the next stage in that evolution. Our main focus will be working smarter to provide our players with the resources to learn about themselves, their habits, their strengths, and areas of improvement so we can continue to grow and compete at the highest levels."
The Pro Lab is powered by top-of-the-line Alienware and Dell Technologies equipment. Some of the award-winning and best-in-class technology includes:
- The Alienware Aurora R13 and Alienware 34 Curved QD-OLED Gaming Monitors.
- A specially configured Dell Precision 7920 workstation, processing high-volume, real-time reports in AI applications and powering 6 Alienware 25 Gaming Monitors at once.
- A Dell PowerEdge R740xd2 server to maximize uptime for data-intensive workloads.
- Team Liquid's performance scientists and analysts will use these high-performance systems to run NeurOlympics software from BrainsFirst, setting a primary baseline for each athlete.
"Similar to the development of our training facilities, we believe The Pro Lab will make waves in the esports industry and beyond," says Victor Goossens, Founder and Co-CEO of Team Liquid. "There are core skills that 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 industry-wide benchmarks when it comes to player training."
With the holistic use of Alienware and Dell Technologies hardware, BrainsFirst software and support from aXiomatic Gaming's wealth of sports performance expertise, this comprehensive program will uncover foundational insights that will drive the next generation of esports training.
The Pro Lab will be integrated into the larger Utrecht, Netherlands and Santa Monica, California Alienware Training Facilities, which are also currently undergoing extensive renovations.
Alienware supports Team Liquid's 110+ athletes and 120+ support staff across five continents through providing cutting-edge gaming PCs, monitors, headsets, peripherals and an array of Dell Technologies solutions, delivering the technical power needed to perform at the highest level. Together, Alienware and Team Liquid have launched two Alienware Training Facilities, setting the standard for multiple organizations to follow, won countless championships, become leading industry advocates, working continuously to foster a culture of inclusion and accessibility.
35 Comments on Team Liquid and Alienware Revolutionize Industry Standards for Esports Athlete Training with Launch of The Pro Lab
There's some good general research on this topic coming out of UC-Irvine in the US and Kologne University in Germany.This is an interesting question. I was trying to help my organization spec' out a PC for esports (which will also get primary use and value as a media lab for auto-cad, video encoding, etc. during the school-day), and our tech director went straight to a 144Hz monitor and a graphics card that would greatly exceed that framerate for most games. 144Hz comes out to 7ms/frame. Meanwhile, we were looking at internet ping times of 30+ms, student-athlete reaction times of 170ms+, wired mouse polling rates that hit about 1ms... the FPS and monitor's framerate rate didn't seem like the thing to worry about. Asking around with the gamers they definitely noticed and complained about dropping to 30Hz (our existing PC's do this a lot, unfortunately), but 60Hz at medium resolution seemed fine and no-one really noticed the difference between 120Hz and 144Hz. For streaming, we target 1080p at 60Hz, and it definitely takes a beefier PC to host the game client and simultaneously run all the graphical components and stream/record, but we only need one of those. At some point it's diminishing returns. I play too, at a much lower skill level, and got a curved 2k-res 34" v-synced at 144Hz cheapest possible off-brand because I can, but with my middle aged reflexes and poor eyesight I doubt lower res and 60Hz would even be noticeable for me. I love the curvature and size though: it feels more immersive and I can run plenty big font regardless of resolution.