FURIA's coach recently talked about how hard a packed schedule is: tournaments follow one after another, and the flights and time zone changes never stop. In his words, this is part of a professional team's life, and you have to learn to cope with it. The phrase itself is simple, but behind it lies one of the most underrated parts of LAN tournament preparation.
What a few hours' difference does to a player
Jet lag (desynchronosis) is a mismatch between the body's internal clock and local time. You want to sleep during the day, you can't sleep at night, attention and reaction speed drop, and appetite disappears. In CS2 this means broken timing, late reactions on peeks and sluggish team comms. In Dota 2 it means a weak draft and mistakes in the late game, when a series drags on for many hours.
For a player from Kazakhstan (UTC+5), a trip to a European tournament means a shift of 3–4 hours, while matches in North America mean a difference of about ten hours. These situations call for different solutions.
Approach one: adjust on site
The team arrives several days early and adapts the body to local time.
- Sleep is shifted in advance, by 1–2 hours per day, even before departure.
- Morning light outdoors helps "start" the clock, and in the evening it's better to dim bright screens and lights.
- Practice matches are scheduled for the time when the official games will take place.
- The benchmark for adaptation is roughly one day per time zone, and flying east is harder. This is a rule of thumb, not a law: people adapt differently.
The upside is obvious: by the first round, the body is working in the right phase. The downside is that it costs days, money and space in the schedule. For a team with a packed calendar, such a buffer isn't always possible.
Approach two: keep home time
If the trip is short and adjustment won't have time to finish, the team deliberately doesn't change its routine.
- Sleep and meals follow home hours, and the curtains in the room are thick.
- Practice is scheduled for the hours when the body is in its "daytime" phase.
- This works when the schedule is known in advance and the evening matches in local time coincide with the active part of the home day.
The weak spot of this approach is the tournament bracket. The time of the next match depends on the result of the previous one, and a game can suddenly land in the "home night." Then the benefit of the unchanged routine disappears.
Where the approaches converge and where they diverge
They have one thing in common: sleep is treated as a resource on a par with aim. Regardless of the chosen strategy, the same techniques work:
1. Caffeine only in the first half of the day.
2. Daytime naps no longer than 20–30 minutes, otherwise the night will be ruined.
3. Meals on a schedule, not "when you get hungry."
4. Hardware and settings checked the day before, so you don't spend the night on drivers.
They diverge in the choice of anchor point. The first approach orients itself to the tournament location and requires time. The second holds on to its own clock and requires a predictable schedule. Three things decide it: the number of time zones (1–3 are easier to handle than 8–10), the length of the trip and the known match hours.
It's better to test a scheme not at the main tournament but at a small away event. A simple diary helps: what time you fell asleep, how you woke up, what the first match was and how its second half went. After two or three trips it becomes clear which approach breaks down for a particular player, because chronotypes differ: some find late evenings easier, others early mornings.
