[kappaloris]

A funny thought: this is a very obvious thing for people who follow the competitive scenes of (valid) multiplayer games. There are lots of cases where progamers get to a high level of skill after an amount of practice that absolutely would not be enough for other people. In the end it's not dark magic, they just tend to already have the right mindset (and experience from other games for example) to make the most of their practice.

An iconic example is the team (Na`Vi) that won the first big DotA2 tournament. The game was in closed beta and professional DotA1 teams got a key at different times. Navi got their key just 1 month before the tournament while other teams got theirs way before. Still, 1 month was enough to beat all other professional teams.

There's a lot of interesting things that one can learn from esports, even just from the sheer amount of data generated (dota2 has almost 10M unique monthly players).

[suby]

Quality of practice is also important, and probably a major factor in your example. My knowledge and skill will be vastly different if I spend 500 hours playing against the best players in the world, compared to spending 500 hours playing in Bronze league (does Dota2 have a bronze league?).