Those who might not know the esports industry well might think that professional gaming is the only way to go. In reality, there are a lot more working opportunities than you might think, from jobs in management, event planning, operations, social media management, and marketing just to name a few.
Today, we will be talking with Jack J, a professional Data Scientist who is applying AI to competitive gaming and esports.
This marks the start of a series about those jobs that may be unnoticed with the possibility of learning from those who already have worked in the world of esports.
Interview with Jack J, the founder of iTero Gaming
Q: Hi Jack J and welcome! Can you kindly introduce yourself and walk us through how you got into the esports world?
Sure, I’m Jack J and I’m a professional Data Scientist, formerly of HSBC and Deloitte, and now the founder and CEO of iTero Gaming, a start-up focusing on applying artificial intelligence (AI) to competitive gaming.
I’ve been casually involved in esports for years. Everything started off with me using the skill set that I was developing as part of my day job as a Data Scientist and applying it to gaming-related data. I worked on the analysis of teams and players’ performance, figuring out which dragon souls were the strongest and writing various articles about each meta and what were the most optimal champions.
Over time I became more and more involved and in 2021 I was invited to visit the Excel Esports gaming suite in Twickenham Stadium, London. There, I had the pleasure of meeting their analyst at the time (Logan ‘Owl’ Mansfield) who gave me a glimpse into the inner workings of an esports team.
From that day onwards, I knew I wanted to explore my idea more fully, so I handed in my notice at work and founded “iTero Gaming” with a rough plan of “using AI for gaming”.
Q: So what is iTero Gaming? And what was the idea behind the project? Tell us more about how you brought AI into esports.
The original concept for iTero Gaming was to build an AI capable of improving the very best professional teams in the world. The idea is that although players and coaches have a considerable understanding of the game, there are also some blind spots. While a person can only watch a limited number of games each day, AI can absorb millions of data points and learn incredibly complex rules. That isn’t to say that I believe that AI will ever be in a position to replace a coach, but it certainly can improve their understanding by identifying hard-to-spot patterns. Throughout the 2022 LEC Spring Split, I had the chance to work with various LEC coaches and analysts to better understand how the draft impacts a team’s chance of winning the game, with the intention of creating a product capable of giving teams the edge in Champion Select.
Ultimately, we ended up deciding to take those same technologies that we built specifically for esports and made them available to everyone through the iTero Drafting Coach.
Q: What are your and iTero Gaming’s goals for the next few years?
This year saw the launch of our first publicly available tool, the drafting coach, which works for any draft-based queue (it doesn’t support ARAM yet, sorry!). So far we’ve had fantastic feedback, as well as plenty of suggestions for improvements, so we’ll continue to focus on perfecting our tool and aim to become th best in the market. This includes adding AI-powered item and rune recommendations, as well as some extra functionality for creating your team’s perfect Clash composition.
As for next year, we will move on to developing the next phase of our project. This is going to be a more holistic League of Legends AI coach, capable of analyzing not just your decisions in draft but your behaviors throughout the game. There are also plans to explore how a tool like this could be used in other competitive games, like Valorant or CS:GO.
Finally, we have ambitions to return to our roots of esports, and we have plans to become more involved in that space by making full use of the advanced technologies we have available. More on that one another time…!
Q: For those who aren’t familiar with it, why do you think data analysis is important for esports and League specifically?
Unlocking data in the right way will create a fundamental shift in esports. There’s plenty of stories out there that show this in more traditional sports. Look at the “Moneyball” story in baseball, how mathematical models changed the rhythm of baseketball, or how Brentford football club changed their fate by using data to pick out the best players.
Essentially, data analysis is the natural progression of any sport and provides the next phase of innovation once getting ahead based on raw talent alone is no longer possible. For example, in League, the meta can become stale very quickly. Champions are repeated over and over again because teams have no systematic ways of testing various team compositions and counterpicks. In such a situation, data analysis comes into its own place with the goal of helping teams pinpoint the most effective team compositions and strategies. That being said, this process is time-consuming and due to the time constraints and how the game is constantly updated every two weeks or so, it can be tough to find what works best.
With AI, instead, we can more effectively predict the results of a game based on the draft, and have the ability to reinvent the meta time and time again by providing those secret pocket picks hidden away in the data at a much faster pace.
Q: You previously have worked on jung.gg, a project born to help players find the bes
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