The greatest gift of online gaming, beyond its massive entertainment value, is being able to enjoy it from the comfort of your own home. You have your own space and can choose your screen, mouse, and the perfect chair. Professional players count on this level of personalisation to gain advantages through having a perfect set-up, but at LAN events those advantages have to be surrendered.

Like in any sport, individuals and teams in esports perform better in certain conditions, and bettors must pay attention to those differences. In traditional sports betting, when looking for odds that win, bettors will typically have a preference for a home team because of the advantage of playing in their own surroundings.

But how does the difference between playing online and an LAN event affect esports players? Everyone will have their own preference in style of play and where they feel they can gain the biggest advantages for strategy and skill. They too, however, face advantages and disadvantages in certain conditions.

What Challenges Do LAN Competitions Bring to the Table

The best players of eSports like CS2 and Dota 2 will experience a difference between playing online in a remote competition, and at a LAN event. The latter is a gathering of players hosted in one space, with terminals linked on the same network. These are popular events, populated by skilled players and excited fans cheering for their favorite team.

A football analogy would be a team travelling for an away game. They have to go into an unfamiliar dressing room, stay in hotels instead of the comfort of their home, and deal with all the hassles of travelling. The disadvantages grow when a team travels to a foreign country to deal with cultural differences and longer time away.

At LAN esports events, players are taken out of their comfort zone because they don’t have their usual tools with them. Critical aspects like their own chairs, space and controllers can make a player feel out of place suddenly. But potential travel fatigue, jet lag, and changes in the routine can compound things for a player participating in a LAN tournament. Other factors mentioned directly by popular gamers are:

• Pressure of the crowd — it can work for or against the player, depending on his own personality and mental challenges. Being surrounded by other players can make a player more hesitant to take risks. The noise can also affect hearing (e.g. footsteps) within games.
• Differences in communication — in LAN tournaments, coaches need to have a different involvement, and the whole communication of the teams is affected. The emotional context changes everything.
• Another mentioned factor is that, in Dota 2, for example, the LAN tournament gives players tighter schedules. So, if they don’t perform well in that particular week, everything can be lost. In online competitions, the duration can easily be extended.

Some Positive Aspects of LAN Tournaments

Some players mention that they prefer the LAN format because they feel the competition is more real. Experienced players and teams tend to get the most out of this pressure and for beginners, it provides a great experience for competitive gaming and to meet with and learn from peers.

Another aspect that can’t be left out of the discussion is connectivity. Online competitions can suffer from lag when connections are of a lower quality than they need to be. This can badly affect reaction times, but in LAN tournaments everyone shares the same network so the latency and lag are nullified.

Esports Betting: LAN vs Online Championships

So there are different conditions when playing at a LAN event compared to playing online. One format is not necessarily better for one team/player, they are just different. Some teams, for example, performed fantastically during the pandemic, but struggled when in-person tournaments returned.

It’s very common to see teams changing strategies and setups for LAN events, but some teams do manage to just show up and play as if they were at home. So, if you want to consider this factor in your esports bets, it’s very important to study it on a case-by-case basis:

• Check the behavior of each player and team when playing online and in LAN tournaments. Some sites dedicated to eSports statistics have categories dedicated to this difference.
• Analyze other information such as the teams’ familiarity with the location, time spent travelling and other extra game details which will have a direct impact on their performance.
• Don’t forget about public opinion. As in football, it influences the odds, and of course fans and bettors have their opinions about which team or player is better in front of the crowd.