When it comes to streaming games and esports, the most important element to your overall presentation is the quality of your source material. Playing well and being charismatic are important, to be sure, but how entertaining or engaging your stream is won’t matter if your video quality is bad, your sound is muddy, and you are uploading at a speed that causes your stream to hiccup and time out.

Historically thought of as highly competitive games, racing games have little representation in the esports landscape. Players mark this as a commentary on the skill-to-luck ratio in playing racing games, and most manufacturers still see racing games as suitable for living room play, and not as much for major competitions.

Use this Cheat Sheet to help you as you enter the world of esports. Here you can learn some of the key esports lingo, find out about some professional teams worth watching, and see how to get started playing a mobile esports title, Clash Royale. ©Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.comEsports LingoOne of the most confusing elements of entering the esports world is getting used to the language.

Twitch is the name most often mentioned in esports spaces, surpassing even Twitter. Co-founded in 2006 by Justin Kan and his partners Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt as Justin.tv—which livestreamed Justin's life 24/7—and relaunched as Twitch in 2011, Twitch.tv was born from the idea of streaming media live.

Fighting games have a fascinating ecosystem. A massive number of titles have been created, and modifications and advancements have been introduced in various games during the 30-plus years that fighting games have been a part of the gaming world. The following criteria are essential to competition and are true of almost every fighting game: Two characters appear on the screen, each controlled by a single player.

Unlike some other esports genres that have relatively few titles, the fighting-game genre includes literally hundreds of titles. Not all of them see regular competition in the esports world, though in the most technical sense, any fighting game could be an esport. This section takes a look at the big names so that you know what to expect if you want to dive into the most popular esports fighting-game titles.

In contrast to football esports, several games have the full license of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and NBPA to produce video games. Amid the sea of titles that include EA’s NBA Live and an arcade-style two-versus-two-game called NBA Playgrounds, no basketball game has found the following and competitive dedication of the NBA 2K series by 2K.

John Madden Football debuted in 1988 as an Apple IIe game (see the following figure). The game didn’t gain wide recognition until 1990, when John Madden Football was released for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo consoles. In 1990, the Madden game for Genesis was considered the first “killer app” for that generation of the console wars, ranking as one of the highest-rated and highest-selling titles for the life of that console.