What reaction time do pro gamers have?

In the one lab study we found that tested full-time professionals (Pluss et al., 2020), the 25 pros averaged 296 ms on a simple reaction task, compared with 290 ms for recreational players and 313 ms for people who don't play esports. The differences weren't statistically significant. Absolute numbers depend on each study's equipment, so compare groups within a study, not across studies.

Do pro gamers have faster reactions than normal people?

On simple 'press when it appears' tasks, the evidence for a pro advantage is weak. On tasks with a choice or a cue, studies more consistently find gamers responding faster, often by tens of milliseconds or more. Most of these studies are small and cross-sectional, so they can't show whether gaming caused the difference.

Is fast reaction time why pro players are good?

Not on its own. In the studies above, pros and recreational players had similar reaction times, and what separates players at the top tends to be how they use what they see: reading cues, speed on choices, efficient inputs and decision-making.

Pro Gamer Reaction Time: Are Esports Players Actually Faster?

What studies of professional and expert gamers actually measured, where pros are faster and where they aren't, and why reaction time doesn't explain why they're good.

You'll see "pros react in 150 ms" repeated a lot. We couldn't find a peer-reviewed study that backs it up. What the studies we found do show is narrower, and more useful: pros aren't clearly faster at pressing a button when something appears, but they do tend to be faster when there's a choice to make.

What the studies actually measured

Study	Who was tested	Task	Main result
Pluss et al., 2020	25 full-time pros (15 MOBA, 10 FPS), 25 recreational players, 25 non-esports controls	Simple, two-choice and four-choice reaction; cued reaction	No difference in simple reaction time. Pros faster than controls on two-choice and cued tasks
Toth, Kowal & Campbell, 2019	98 Counter-Strike players grouped by rank, 29 male non-gamers	Colour-matching choice task (Stroop)	Gamers faster than non-gamers, but less accurate
Dye, Green & Bavelier, 2009	Action game players vs non-players, pooled from earlier studies	89 conditions from nine kinds of choice task	Gamers about 11% faster, with no loss of accuracy
Thompson et al., 2013	3,360 StarCraft 2 players across 7 skill levels, from game replays	In-game action latency and other replay measures	Latency shortens with rank, but at the top, actions per minute and hotkey use matter more

Simple reaction time: no clear pro advantage

The most direct test is Pluss and colleagues' study. Their professionals trained at least 38 hours a week and played for top-level teams. The MOBA pros played League or Heroes of the Storm, and the FPS pros played Overwatch or PUBG. On a simple task, where one circle lights up and you press, the three groups scored:

Professionals: 296 ms
Recreational players: 290 ms
Non-esports controls: 313 ms

None of those differences was statistically significant, and the recreational players were actually slightly faster than the pros. Four-choice reaction time didn't differ significantly between the groups either. These are averages from one lab setup, so the absolute numbers aren't comparable with a browser test. What matters is that full-time pros didn't stand out.

One newer result points the other way. A 2025 conference abstract by Meyers et al. found that elite Super Smash Bros. Ultimate players had faster best times on a simple reaction task than casual players and non-gamers, with an average of 225 ms for the elite group. It's a short abstract, though, and the groups weren't matched: all 20 elite players were men, while 18 of the 21 non-gamers were women. It's worth knowing about, but it isn't strong evidence.

Where gamers do pull ahead: choices and cues

The advantage shows up once the task involves a decision. In Pluss et al., pros responded faster than non-esports controls on a two-choice task (318 vs 347 ms). They were also better at using a brief cue before the target, and at ignoring a misleading one. They didn't beat the recreational players on either.

Toth and colleagues tested 98 Counter-Strike players at two gaming conventions. On a choice task where you press the key that matches a coloured box, every rank group was faster than the non-gamers (727 ms for the top ranks vs 865 ms). The non-gamers were more accurate, though, so part of that gap is gamers trading accuracy for speed.

Pooled over many studies, the effect is real but modest. Dye, Green and Bavelier plotted 89 conditions from nine kinds of choice task: action gamers' reaction times were about 0.89 times non-gamers', roughly 11% faster, with accuracy holding up. A larger meta-analysis by Bediou et al. (2018) found that habitual action gamers outperform non-gamers by about half a standard deviation across cognitive tests. The biggest differences were in attention and spatial skills, not raw speed.

This fits what we see in games. Choices cost time (Hick's law, covered here), and experienced players have learned to make them faster.

Did gaming make them faster?

The studies above compare people who already play with people who don't, so they can't separate cause from selection. People with quick reactions may simply be the ones who stick with fast games.

Training studies try to settle this. In the training studies Dye and colleagues summarized, 25 non-gamers played either an action game or a slower control game for 50 hours, and the action group sped up more. Bediou et al.'s meta-analysis of training studies found a smaller effect than the comparison studies (about a third of a standard deviation). But Hilgard et al. (2019) re-analyzed the same studies, corrected for publication bias, and found little evidence that training transfers. It's still disputed, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet.

What separates good players at the top

If reaction time doesn't separate pros from good amateurs, what does? The best data comes from game replays, not from pros in a lab.

Action latency matters until the very top. Thompson et al. studied 3,360 StarCraft 2 players and measured how quickly each player acted after moving their view somewhere new. Latency fell with rank and was one of the strongest predictors in the middle leagues. When comparing Diamond players with professionals, actions per minute and hotkey use were more important.
Reasoning tracks rank in League. Kokkinakis et al. (2017) tested 56 League players in a lab and found that rank correlated with scores on a fluid intelligence test (a correlation of .44). They didn't measure reaction time. In large player datasets, they also found MOBA performance peaked at ages 22–27, while performance in first-person shooters fell steadily with age.
Speed declines, and players adapt. In Thompson, Blair and Henrey's study of 3,305 StarCraft 2 players (2014), in-game response latency began slowing at about 24. Older players used the interface differently, with more hotkeys and more mini-map commands, which the authors read as possible compensation. We cover what this means for practice in Can You Train Reaction Time?

What we don't know

No study we found reports League pros' reaction times on their own. Pluss et al. pooled MOBA and FPS pros together, with only 15 MOBA players in total.
The samples are small and mostly male. Most studies test a few dozen people at a single point in time.
The tasks are lab tasks. A circle lighting up isn't a gap-closer coming out of fog of war. How fast pros react to real game threats hasn't been measured in a published study, as far as we can tell.

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Bottom line

Pro gamers don't appear to have dramatically faster nerves. On simple reaction tests, the best study of full-time pros found them about level with recreational players. Where gamers do pull ahead is in recognizing a cue and choosing a response quickly, and that matches how fights are actually won: reading the threat and predicting it, not just pressing a key the fastest.