Maybe I should be a cyberathelete.... How crazy is this. Recently parents everywhere discouraged the amount of time spent playing games. Now it could be argued by the kid they're working on their professional skills.
The reason why Koreans seem to dominate eSport games such as Starcraft 2 (SC2) is that they practice 12+ hours a day in a tiny apartment chockfull of other players.
The winnings are good: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Winnings , and the top players receive salaries but it's very cutthroat.
I don't follow League of Legends (LoL) (which the OP is talkin g about), however they really have paved the way for this as they fought extremely hard. LoL doesn't have as many open tournaments as SC2, however the main tournament (LCS) is run by Riot, the company who made League of Legends. Their typical viewers for livestreaming on sites like Twitch surpass atleast 100,000+ viewers. It's a crazy world out there.
Of course this is true of most of those who dream of a career in "traditional" sports as well.
you have a ridiculously higher chance of going pro in a video game than playing in the NFL, etc.
his point, while perhaps not really the best worded, is correct. there are way more Koreans who are better skilled than western players (called foreigners... even by westerners themselves).
also, as an american, I feel that it's kinda sad that american gamers are in no way able to compete on a large scale against europeans or asians in most big competitive games.
this doesn't include console fps games, since playing an fps game with sticks is like playing hockey with your penis.
Only a few people become good enough to get paid to play sports, and of those people even fewer can get paid enough to turn it into a viable career. Banking your life on getting lucky like that without any kind of fallback plan is not a particularly sound decision.
As an example, I knew many D1 tennis players who could charge upwards of 70$ an hour teaching private lessons (of which the club would take ~20$). I know one guy who is a pretty exceptional player but no where near good enough to make a living on the professional tour, and he brings in about 50,000$ every summer, then goes on tour with his band all winter.
I was merely a good high school player and even back then I was making 15/hr coaching and 25/hr for lessons. That's more than I make now sadly!