Improving Your Read on the Game: Pause & Predict!

A piece of feedback I give to nearly every caster is to improve your read on the game. When I say this, I’m not only talking about your understanding of the game from a memorization or academic perspective: knowing the ability names, map familiarity, or even how game mechanics interactions work. I’m talking about the deep understanding of the way that high performing teams and players gain their edge over others. These ways are expressed in play styles or metas: the strategy in which a team or individual plays the game.

As a broadcaster for esports, your familiarity with metas, teams, and individuals are imperative for you to add value to the broadcast. Only then can you interpret the nuances so the audience can better appreciate the gameplay. Otherwise you’re left with surface level discussion where you are merely saying what eyeballs can already see.

In this series called Pause & Predict we dive into analysis of gameplay to deepen our understanding of different esports titles. At certain points we do the actual exercise where we pause the gameplay and predict what will happen next based on our read of the game. If we’re right, it confirms our understanding! If we’re wrong, then we’ve learned something new. This has repeatedly led to faster pattern recognition and internalization of learnings than watching a VOD with less intention.

Check out the playlist below – we also stream every Tuesday at 10:30pm ET on twitch.tv/broadcastgg!