A split push is when some of your team members decide to create pressure on one side of the map away from where the enemies are, this will result in one of two things happening. Either one of more of the opponents respond to your push, or you get the objective from this push. While this is happening, the other members on the team will push into the enemies, gathering information and creating a distraction, confusing the enemies as to where you will eventually end up. An example of a split push would be in the map "Split" on VALORANT. Say you and your team are wanting to push onto "B Site", two of your team members would push through "B Main", and the remaining three members would push from "B Link" up through to "B Tower". This strategy means the players who are defending "B Site", have to watch both "B Tower" and "B Main". It allows the two teammates pushing through "B Main" to get easier access to the "B Site" as the defenders will be distracted by the "B Tower" push. This split strategy takes enemies from one part of a map to another to allow easy access for the attacking team to a different points on the map.

A rush strategy is just as it sounds, you rush into the enemy to catch them off-guard. To perform a rush, the attacking team will use speed and surprise to overwhelm their opponents, usually before the enemy is expecting to defend quickly into a game. The rush strategy is often a death trap in the hopes your teammates will quickly trade you out for one of the opponents. A rush can go one of two ways, the first way being if performed correctly, you catch your enemies off-guard, losing minimal casualties in the process and achieving what you are wanting to achieve with the push, or it could go a completely different way, your enemy could be expecting the push, putting more defences in the way to either delay your push, or to stop it completely. An example of a rush would be in League of Legends (multiplayer online battle arena). Say you are losing more towers than your opponent and you decide the best way forward would be to rush the enemies when they expect you to fall back. You would gather all five of your teammates, and strategize a rush push into their defences.

Understanding the basics of the game is the first step to understanding game mechanics. Learning the core mechanics that are common in most games, such as health, cooldowns, damage, armour, critical hits, etc. will allow you to further develop game mechanics. Game mechanics are the rules and procedures that guide players through a game, they provide structure for how the game reacts to a players' reactions. Game mechanics can be broken down thoroughly into different actions, processes and visuals. You can analyse game mechanics through VOD reviews and all types of verbal or non-verbal feedback from peers. Analysing game mechanics can be a difficult process, figuring out what needs to be changed or adapted to improve your game mechanics is complex due to there being so many mechanics to learn. In my individual and team performance, I will be analysing game mechanics for VALORANT, evaluating movement, aiming, utility usage and game positioning.

There are three methods of analysis capture; action sequences, full game and end game. For my individual and team performance, I will be analysing full game capture. I will be studying and interpereting game data from a competitive scene to gain insight and see where improvements need to be made. I will also include statistics on individual players and statistics on the overall team. From analysing games, I will be able to capture team data using "VALORANT Tracker", an analysis software game specific to VALORANT. Full game analysis capture is a good way to see where improvements need to be made throughout an entire game, allowing analysts to look deeper at how teams play with one another, how individuals play throughout a game in the team they are in, how individuals play on the character they are playing and how strategies are working for the team throughout the game. Action sequences are good if you have a well-established team and need to focus on  improving how some aspects of the game are played out, for example, how a round of VALORANT went in favour of the enemy team and what your team can do to improve on the aspects that lost them the round. You are able to pinpoint exactly what went wrong within a moment and create an improvement plan for this specific area. End game analysis is the analysis of what happened towards the end of a game, what methods allowed you to get to this endpoint of the game. I will not be analysing this as I feel I will be able to receive more in-depth knowledge from analysing a full-game, rather than just one specific point of a game. Nevertheless, the end point of the game is arguably the most important phase within a competitive game, it determines whether you win or lose the game, however, with full game analysis, I will be able to gather more information about the team and how individuals played throughout said game.

Statistical analysis plays a crucial role in understanding and predicting the outcomes of esports games. Analysing player statistics, team performance, and historical events allows you to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of teams and players. Alongside this, you are able to study opponents to allow optimization of in-game decision making. Player performance goes beyond kill-death rations and incorporates statistics such as APM (Actions Per Minute), KDA (Kill/Death/Assist Ratio), and CSPM (Creep Score Per Minute) in games like League of Legends and Dota 2. Successful esports teams use this data to optimize their strategies, allowing identification of strengths and weaknesses. I will be using statistical analysis to predict the outcome of the game, prepare myself for how each player will perform and what strategies to analyse depending on what works and does not work within a game.

Knowing prior achievements of teams allows another team to prepare themselves for the upcoming game. Understanding player/team records, accuracy and win/lose ratio will help teams to develop strategies to counter said team. For example, FNATIC won the VALORANT Championship LOCK/IN 2023 event, this caused teams to change strategies based on how FNATIC played throughout the series, developing counter strategies and assisted them in building on strategies to exploit the weaknesses of the team. Knowing how each individual player from a team plays, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, allows your team to format plans based around that specific player, for example, if you are against a strong lurker in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, you would make sure there is always one or two team members around to catch this lurker off guard, creating an advantage for their team. I will be using prior attainment knowledge of both teams in my performance analysis, analysing specific players and team strategies/achievements to create plans on how counter strategies could have been put in place.

Developing analytical skills to present feedback on skills and strategies will enhance the skill set within a professional game. Having the knowledge to understand statistics, make judgements based on these statistics and predict the outcome of games based on previous analytics will allow you to identify what qualities need to be improved within a team or player. Presenting feedback with analytics will help with the understanding of exactly what needs to be improved within a strategy, team or player. Knowing exactly what a player or team needs to improve on will allow a coach or mentor to recommend training courses, warm-up routines or other external tools to help with the improvement of the aspects discovered when analysing performance. For example, in my performance analysis, I will develop the analytical skills to present feedback for each player, recommending what they can do to improve. I will do this by looking at KDA ratio, utility usage, results from strategies, round win rate and more.