How to Keep Your Cool While Gaming – A Guide for Competitive Gamers

Competitive gaming is as serious as any other sport, it sometimes gets on your nerves. Players get too invested to the point that they may rage. We all gamers go through this. We are competitive by nature, and we sometimes lose it over a loss or a play that goes wrong, which is okay. Even pro players go through that too, but the difference is how they deal with their feelings during the game, how they keep cool even during the hardest of moments, the most tilting ones. So as this is an issue that faces us all competitive gamers, here is a list of facts and tips that should help you manage to stay cool and control your anger, so that you can make the most out of every competitive game you play without holding yourself back:

Avoiding Triggering Factors

Tilt may sometimes be caused by factors you can not avoid, but some other times, you can easily avoid them. An enemy player teasing you or a teammate flaming you in the chat might get under your skin. So if that happens, you should immediately mute them or just ignore the chat. Reading their negative messages will only result in you losing focus, so it is better to always avoid the chat when it gets toxic, or even the voice chat if a friend of yours is tilted and it starts to affect you. This goes for any tilting situation you find yourself in that you can avoid.

Containing Rage

Tilting and raging don’t only affect you and your gameplay, they also affect your teammates and the game in general. The tip here is not to suppress your emotions, that would be unhealthy, but it is to realize how worse things will get because of you if you let them take control. You should always take a moment to slow down so that you don’t make an impulsive decision that may lose you the game.
Containing rage does not only apply to you, you can also contain others’ rage, your teammates’. If a teammate is tilted and they flame you or another teammate, your chill attitude can cool them down and have them get back to focusing on the game.

Own Your Mistakes

If you make a mistake, do not just go immediately looking for someone to blame. Own your mistake and learn from it, doing so will help you get over it easier and get back to focusing on your game without getting tilted.

A Tip by YamatoCannon

YamatoCannon, the head coach of the seven-time LEC winning team, Fnatic, had some great insight on tilt in his YouTube video “What Is Tilt and How to Stop It”, and one of the most important things he talked about was being present in the moment.
Being present in the moment is basically assigning all your senses to the task at hand, which in our case is the game. Slowing down and focusing only on the game keeps you from letting your emotions get the best of you, as doing so will help you get to see the things you need to do, the calls you need to make, the objectives you need you need to prioritize, how important your presence in the game is, and how you can have a huge impact on the game even if you are behind.

In Conclusion

Always remember that you can not control the triggering factors around you, whether they are toxic enemy players, or even your teammates. What you can control is yourself. So always keep control of your emotions, avoid triggering factors, make sure you stay focused on the game, and whether you win or lost, always say GG at the end of every game.