The kit filter: We've tracked down the gear pro-gamers use to git gud

A bad workman always blames their tools, so reads the old adage. The same is true in gaming; how many times have you slapped your mouse down in frustration because you're sure it's just cost you the win in Counter Strike or Valorant? Well, let's take the tools out of the equation and look at what the leading esports players are using themselves.

Of course, using the same gear as Faker isn't going to suddenly make you too a four-times League of Legends World Champion, but at the very least if you're matching the gaming setups that the professionals use you can't use that as an excuse. You're just going to have to use them to git gud.

I've picked out three of the main categories of esports, FPS (Valorant, CS2, Fornite), MOBA (League of Legends, DOTA 2), and sports (Rocket League, FC25), and picked the most popular gaming mouse, gaming keyboard, and gaming headset from what the highest proportion of professional gamers use. It is worth noting that sponsorship and platform plays a big part of this, where Logitech sponsors a lot of the MOBA pros and the PS5 is the de facto platform for something like FC25, so the DualSense is the automatic choice for the pros. So, keep that in mind...

This is also all the kit for professional gaming, and not necessarily the best for everyone. We curate the best gaming mice, gaming keyboards, and gaming headsets throughout the year, testing all the top brands as they release new peripherals. So if these options don't float your gaming boat, go take a look at our current recommendations.

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Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

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