How is the involved cognitive and manual labour virtual.
eSports are no more virtual competitions than chess.
in my mind, eSports is psychological/dexterical, and chess is psychological/memorization (openings). The challenge is getting to the point where the world at large considers these types of competition to be equally valid to physical/athletic ones.
There is a lot of memorization in eSports too. Remember where all the players hide in Counter Strike, remember build orders (openings) in StarCraft, remember skill and item orders in Dota clones.
yes actually you're right - maybe not as much as in chess due to the depth and variation involved in openings, but still a hell of a lot.
I always thought of chess as pattern recognition. But I guess that's kind of a subset of memorization.
a lot of the opening of chess is playing memorized counters to different plays that have been extensively studied - you could fill a library with books dedicated to chess openings, explaining why a particular move is good against another.