Newzoo estimated the global esports audience at 532 million people in 2022, and many of the strategic problems in the competitions those viewers watch were first studied at a card table. Concealing intentions, choosing actions at planned frequencies, spending resources against the odds of success and controlling frustration after a loss are standard topics in poker training, and each one has a counterpart in competitive video games.
Bluffing in Early Game Theory
John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, published in 1944, included a mathematical model of poker. In their simplified version, the best strategy for the player who acts first was to bet with strong hands and with some of the weakest hands, and to check with the hands in between. The bets with the weakest hands were bluffs, and the model showed that bluffing paid even against an opponent who knew which hands the bettor used for it. Émile Borel had described a related model in 1938.
The idea that came out of this work is the mixed strategy. A player who always takes one action in a given spot can be exploited, so a sound strategy assigns each action a frequency. Fighting game players meet this at close range when they choose among attacking, blocking and throwing, because an opponent who learns a habit can punish it every time it appears.
Hidden Information in StarCraft
Unlike chess, StarCraft hides most of the map from each player. A player sees only the areas near their own units and buildings, and learning the opponent’s plan requires sending a unit to look, a practice called scouting. The information gathered this way is partial and can mislead, since a player can show one building while hiding the production that matters.
A poker player faces a similar task with an opponent’s range of possible hands. Each action removes some hands from that range, and a strong player updates the estimate as the hand goes on. A StarCraft player does the same with possible strategies, removing options as each piece of evidence arrives, and both make mistakes when they commit to a single reading too early.
Crossover Careers From StarCraft to Poker
Bertrand Grospellier, known as ElkY, placed second at the 2001 World Cyber Games and then moved to South Korea, where he finished 4th at the 2002 World Cyber Games and 4th in the 2002 OnGameNet Starleague. He won the 2003 Euro Cyber Games and reached the top 16 at the 2004 World Cyber Games before turning his attention to poker. He went on to win titles on the World Poker Tour, the World Series of Poker and the European Poker Tour, a set known as the Triple Crown, including a 2011 bracelet in a $10,000 seven card stud event, and his live tournament earnings passed $15 million.
Lex Veldhuis played StarCraft at a competitive level before he became a professional poker player, and Victor Goossens, a former StarCraft player who founded Team Liquid as a clan at the end of 2000, moved into poker, was the main influence on Grospellier’s switch and backed several Team Liquid StarCraft players at the tables. Andrey Yanuk learned card strategy through Magic: The Gathering and supported himself with Magic and poker games after leaving home at 18, before he turned professional in Hearthstone as Reynad.
Economy Rounds in Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike 2 gives each team money between rounds, and the team decides how much of it to spend. A team that loses receives a loss bonus that rises with consecutive defeats, from $1,400 after the first loss up to $3,400, and teams often save during a round with cheap equipment, called an eco round, so they can buy full equipment in the next one. A round won by eliminating the other side or running out the clock pays $3,250 to each player on the winning team, and a round won by detonating or defusing the bomb pays $3,500, so a team that wins after an eco round can be fully equipped for several rounds afterward. The decision weighs a small chance of winning now against a better chance later, and a poker player with a short stack makes a similar call between a marginal hand now and a stronger one later. In July 2025 a CS2 economy change from Valve gave the Counter-Terrorist side an extra $50 each round for every Terrorist eliminated in that round.
Card Probability in Digital Card Battlers
Card battlers such as Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering Arena add another overlap, because their players calculate draw odds the way a poker player counts outs. A Hearthstone deck has 30 cards, with no more than 2 copies of most cards. A player who goes first draws 3 cards in the opening hand, so the chance of seeing at least 1 of 2 copies of a key card is about 19%. A poker player holding 4 cards to a flush after the flop has 9 outs among the 47 unseen cards, and the chance of completing the flush by the river is about 35%.
Both numbers come from one counting method, and players in both fields use them to decide how much to risk on a draw. A Hearthstone player who knows the odds of finding a key card by a given turn plans the early turns around that figure, and a poker player sizes calls on a draw with a similar estimate.
Tilt in Poker and Esports
The word tilt came from pinball, where shaking a machine too hard set off a tilt mechanism and ended the ball. Poker players adopted it for frustration that leads to poor, often over-aggressive decisions, and esports players took the word from there. In 2024 a team of Spanish researchers published a tilt questionnaire in Frontiers in Psychology, built from interviews with 27 players and coaches from professional to amateur level and then tested on 488 gamers aged 18 to 50.
The researchers described tilt as frustration that builds with repeated errors, by the player or by teammates, and escalates into anger that lowers performance and attention. An expert panel cut 170 candidate statements down to 53, and the final version kept 18 items split between the causes of tilt and its consequences.
Higher tilt scores correlated with symptoms of internet gaming disorder and with lower life satisfaction. Poker players count tilt in money, since a player on tilt can lose in an hour what took weeks to win.
Prize Money and Career Paths
The early crossover ran mostly from video games to poker. Esports prize money has since grown. The 2025 Esports World Cup in Riyadh offered a prize pool of more than $70 million across 25 tournaments in 24 titles and brought together more than 2,000 players and 200 clubs. That total was $10 million higher than the inaugural 2024 event, which drew more than 500 million online viewers, and $27 million of it went to a championship for clubs that competed across several titles. A player with the habits that poker teaches now has less reason to leave esports at all, which makes the next ElkY more likely to stay where they started.
