With so many players in the Rocket League community, there are bound to be thousands of players striving to become a professional and climb their way to the top of the rankings. Perhaps even aspiring to attend the World Championships, not as a viewer, but as a contender. Thankfully, we have the help of Jos "ViolentPanda" van Meurs to discuss the lifestyle of a Rocket League professional, to give you that taste of what a day in the life is like and how you can get there too.

Hours Played - Do They Really Matter and How Do They Change?

Your 'number of hours played' in any game can be easily seen as an achievement, perhaps a showcase of how experienced you are in that particular game. This is certainly the same scenario for Rocket League. All well-known Rocket League professionals have hundreds, if not, thousands of hours in the game and this makes it easy to put them on a pedestal dependent on their number of hours.

However, it is important to remember that each player is an individual and learns at different paces. One player may advance in the game faster than another and vice versa. So due to these individual differences, the number of hours played should, perhaps, not be seen as an indication of one's skill.

ViolentPanda expands on this point by stating, "The amount of hours I play is something I don't really look at, because there have been times where I played so many hours but still not felt as good as when I was playing less hours." This emphasizes how it might just come down to how you feel on a particular day, but it is crucial to remember, as ViolentPanda puts nicely, "Rocket League is 50% just having your mindset straight and you need to take enough off time to keep it healthy."

How Often Professionals Play

Needless to say, however, the time you spend on Rocket League should not be overlooked by any means. In fact, when asked how long ViolentPanda plays as a team, he responded, "Practice hours differ every week, but when we are in the middle of a season, we scrim (practice) every evening for an hour, sometimes two hours, as a team. Besides that, we just play ranked on stream or by ourselves."

Playing the game for around an hour to two hours a day can be very healthy for your advancement. By playing the game for shorter amounts of time you:

• Are less likely to become fatigued, meaning you will not get tired and begin to decrease in rank.
• Are less likely to become annoyed and frustrated.
• Are less likely to become bored and lose interest.

For a professional such as ViolentPanda, then, you might expect the length of time they play to differ depending on certain variables. One huge variable is if there is a tournament approaching or not.

When asking ViolentPanda to give us a bit of insight, he replied, "We have more practice during big tournaments than in the off-season where we sometimes take breaks." This was followed by, "There have been times where we have had, like, 3 big tournaments in a row so we had to keep practicing, but when there is a gap between big tournaments then yes, we sometimes take some breaks."

(Source: team-dignitas.net/galleries)

Training For Tournaments

When approaching a tournament, practice is very important. As mentioned previously by ViolentPanda, the time spent when big tournaments arise increases, and constant practice is a must.

For upcoming players entering smaller tournaments or aspiring players that wish to enter them in the future, we asked ViolentPanda if when practicing as a solo player, he just plays matches or focuses on a particular point of his gameplay. To this, he responded, "I practice everything in general. I don't focus on just one thing because when you just play normal games, everything goes into play and not just one thing." This is a rather good point, as a normal match of Rocket League covers the majority of skills you will have acquired over time, including:

• Mechanical skill, such as shots like air dribbles, ceiling shots, flip resets and the like.
• Rotational ability, so that you can function effectively as a team.
• Being able to communicate with a team.
• Understanding your opponents.

It goes without saying, though, that by using a custom training pack of your choice can be advantageous. However, when the time comes to play as a team, as ViolentPanda says, "We just play and improve everything while just playing tournaments and scrims, no certain plays or aspects we try to improve on."

Rocket League Tournaments

When you imagine an esport, you imagine the big stages, roaring crowds and the incredible gameplay that is watched by hundreds of thousands of people on a global scale. One huge Rocket League tournament is the RLCS (Rocket League World Championships). ViolentPanda, playing for Team Dignitas, is no stranger to this tournament and when asked for his practice schedule during the RLCS League Play (Before LAN), he told us, "We take a break on the Mondays after the Sunday when we play. After the Monday, we scrim 1 hour, sometimes 2, every evening until the next match."

Again, this touches on the importance of breaks and short practice times. By taking a break on the day after competing, this allows time to relax and reflect on how you played as an individual and as a team. By playing for one to two hours every day after that, this keeps stress at a low and allows for a flexible practice schedule, which you may wish to put in place if wanting to enter a tournament of any scale.

During the RLCS Worlds at LAN, the 'behind the scenes' of it all is blurred for most. To help answer the question of how much time they are allowed to play in between games, ViolentPanda says, "It is all up to us because they give us all a PC so we have time to practice whenever we want." Again, though, although this is the case, over-playing or over-practicing is unnecessary and is bound to heap piles of pressure onto your back due to it being in a LAN environment.

Finally, on the topic of pressure and stress, we asked ViolentPanda if he ever becomes discouraged as a result of how the team played on any particular day of a tournament such as RLCS, and how he keeps a positive mindset to push forwards. To this, he responds, "Having a positive mentality while playing has nowadays become a normality to me because I have been through a lot by now. But in the past there have been times where there were moments where I felt frustrated and they were hard to get out of, but it is all about getting used to it and trying not to get frustrated as much in the start."