Purpose: To explore the antecedents to, and underpinnings of, choke experienced by both amateur and professional esports players.

Methodology: We interviewed professional and semi-professional esports players about their subjective experiences with choke, and deployed an online survey to amateur players inquiring about their experiences as well.

Definitions: * ‘Choking’ (a term used to describe a scenario in which a player fails to maintain their performance in a situation where it is expected or highly important).

• Led my research team in developing research questions and the study design.

• Conducted a comprehensive literature review to provide the theoretical background for our study.

• Developed an online survey inquiring about amateur player’s experiences with choke, and deployed the survey to those who fit the recruitment criteria.

• Created an interview guide, recruited professional and semi-professional esports players, and conducted semi-structured interviews with players about their experiences with choke.

• Transcribed the interview audio recordings, and coded the data into themes in NVivo.

• Conducted a thematic analysis on the amateur player’s survey data, as well as the professional player’s interview data.

• Produced an academic paper for publication.

• Step 1: Deployed a survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey platform to amateur players who met the recruitment criteria, inquiring about their experiences with choke.

• Step 2: Recruited and interviewed professional and semi-professional esports players about their experiences with choke.

• Step 3: Coded the cleaned and transcribed data into themes using NVivo for both amateur and professional players.

• Step 4: Conducted a comparative analysis between the experiences of amateur and professional players.

There is much more to see in the paper, but the key takeaways are that:

• The antecedents and underpinnings of choke differ among amateur and professional esports players.

• Amateur and professional esports players share mental states (i.e., Nervous Activation and Overconfidence) and pressures (i.e., Stakes Pressure and Spectator Pressure) in relation to a choke event.

• Both amateur and professional esports players report unique mental states and pressures immediately prior to or following a choke event; amateurs cite Lack of Focus, Frustration, and Underconfidence (mental states) and Social Pressure and Distractions and Detractors, whereas professionals describe pressures related to Team Pressure, Stage Pressure, Reputation Pressure, Rival Pressure, and Sexism.

• Amateur players experience more Mechanical Choke performance failures, while professional players describe more instances of Strategic Choke.