The Hot Hand in Esports
摘要
This research article investigates the hot hand phenomenon in esports. The research focuses on two definitions of the hot hand: streakiness and clustering of success. It attempts to find the hot hand in two distinct settings: the KovaaK’s aim trainer and professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive matches to assess the potential effect of incentives and pressure on the occurrence of the hot hand. Streakiness is expressed through conditional probabilities, and the clustering of success is assessed by entropy. Monte Carlo permutation tests are used for inference while controlling the family-wise error rate and setting a false discovery rate, both at 5%. The analysis reveals no evidence of the hot hand in KovaaK’s aim trainer, while the results in Counter-Strike provide mixed evidence for the hot hand, as some tests indicate the presence of the hot hand while others do not. Additionally, the weighting of past performances appears to have little to no effect on predicting future performances. The findings indicate that the hot hand is present in esports. They also imply that high-pressure and high-incentive environments may be necessary for the hot hand to occur or to have a strong enough effect to be detected by the employed methodology. Avenues for future research are suggested.