Practicing for several hours a week and playing high-pressure level matches against the best in the world all the time isn’t the worst part of being a professional CS:GO player. The worst part, according to Heroic’s IGL cadiaN, is having to eat “bad food” for over 150 traveling days.
This is because the tournament organizers in CS:GO can’t secure a great catering service for players, forcing teams to spend a lot of money on food from outside the event and the hotel, according to cadiaN.
“[I] hope T.O’s will step up soon, traveling 150+ days a year with bad food is rough,” cadiaN said on Twitter. “[It’s] mostly poor quality. It’s also tough when the location moves from country to country, making it hard for the T.O’s to ensure good options. However, the money all team spends on ordering from the outside, due to bad food is insane.”
With the way the CS:GO calendar is designed for tier-one teams, players spend a huge bulk of their year on the road, jumping from one tournament to another, while also doing occasional boot camps from time to time, to try to arrive in the events in their best shape possible.
The food issue that cadiaN pointed out isn’t affecting only the players. Popular CS:GO caster Harry “JustHarry” Russell commented on the Heroic’s captain thread that he struggles during the events because there are almost no options for vegetarians.
“As a vegetarian, it’s pretty rough out here, so many times I’ve just had chips as the vegetarian option,” JustHarry said. “I love chip as much as the next guy, but after 10 days of [eating] only chips, I’m over it man, I’m done, tap me out, someone stop me.”
CadiaN might have more luck in his next CS:GO tournament, IEM Katowice, as he said ESL has made improvements on the catering throughout 2022. The last tournament he attended was BLAST Premier Spring Groups in Copenhagen, Denmark.
