Testing the Implications of Tournament Theory in eSports

This paper tests some implications of tournament theory in eSports (videogame) competitions. Using the personal statistics of professional players in Dota 2 at the last 9 major tournaments, as well as data on the audience of each of the tournament, 2 regression models were built, which estimates the influence of factors on the effort of eSports players during the match, as well as the number of spectators who watched the match with the participation of the observed team. The results of the model estimation reveal, that not all the implications of tournament theory work in the framework of eSports. In particular, one of the main implications is not fulfilled, namely the positive dependence of the player's effort on the prize spread between the stages of the tournament. This paper also attempts to take into account the indicators of diversity within the team in both models.