Been googling around a bit (currently I am sick so I have some time on my hands ... :-)) and I have a feeling that elite quake players are less successful than professionals/elite amateurs in other disciplines after their "career" as a player ...

Some famous players from the quake scene got a lot of success like Thresh, who is probably a millionaire with his x-fire venture and there is also CZM being a grad from some elite university and probably pursuing a phd right now ... I think these guys are some positive examples ... there is also fatal1ty who marketed his name and probably got a lot of money through this (although I am not so sure what he is up to right now)

but googling around a bit ... I found out many of the elite players didn't obtain academic degrees or founded a company .... they are working normal jobs at max that don't require a very high qualification, no university masters degree for example

I am just wondering, because if you look at grandmasters in chess, they are often also pursuing a university degree, or if you take olympic athletes, they are studying and competing in their athletic disciplines at the same time ...

these people who are really competitive from other disciplines also achieve a certain success in education and have a professional career thereafter ... but in quake this does not seem to be so much the case ... there are really some extreme examples of people not obtaining a degree for business at all etc. although they got into the elite ranks in quake and won tournaments there ...

Why is that? I mean achieving high skill in quake shows a certain capacity for work, shouldnt that show itself also in other disciplines? Or maybe this virtual geekdom is just too timedemanding and exhausting (need to be online a lot of the time to be able to practice with others, etc.), that you don't have enough energy left to take the hurdles in real life? Or are they too self-sufficient, thinking they achieved elite ranks in quake, they don't have to prove anything anymore?