EPTI'm a 19 year old college student at the University of Illinois. I have been playing starcraft since I was 12 or 13 (2003 or so), so I'm pretty "old-school" for my age, but not so much in a relative sense. I can remember when mondi was owning kids at 14. Anyway, I played BW on and off for about 4 years, during which time that I was off I was probably playing D2, which I also played on and off for the same time frame. Around 2006 I started playing DotA and luckily managed to hang around very good players and became a very strong player myself. I was a member of a few different sponsored DotA teams over the years and I spent lots of time junior and senior years of high school playing that.
When I got to university I realized that playing the same video game all the time just wasn't for me. I didn't really play anything at all during the school year freshman year except that I bought myself an xbox and a TV at the start of the second semester and played halo 3 with my friends quite a bit.
This year I've gotten back into playing games a lot more starting with buying COD4-2 on release night and then in the winter I stayed at the place of a couple of friends who played heroes of newerth. I already had a key, but had only played one game, I picked it up very quickly though, given my background. We probably played 15-20 games that week and I have played another 40-50 since and it is very fun. I haven't had much free time because of midterms/homework/travel lately though.
I have also been following the starcraft scene much more closely this year than last, and I even ordered one of the jackets from a lil.susie thread, can't wait for that to arrive. Big thanks to lil.susie for all the effort. I even played a few games this last week when I found out one of my teammates on the ultimate frisbee team plays it. I beat a D+ in my first game in ~6 months (I played a bit this summer with another friend) so that was a nice confidence booster although it was in arguably my best MU, ZvP. I'm still not sure what race I want to play if I give BW a little more time before SC2, I'm pretty sure when SC2 comes out I'll random for a long time until I pick a race.
More about ultimate frisbee. I started playing freshman year, and I had no idea there was such a sick competitive scene, huge tournaments and colleges travel as much as 10-15 hours to get to some of them. I am on the B team here, but we are one of the best B-teams in the country and our A-team is currently ranked 6th (although that may be a bit too high). It's a really good motivator to get into better shape and I always like to have something I can always be learning at, and Ultimate gives me that.
This last summer I played poker for income. I, like many others, was brought into the game largely through LP in 2006, but I wasn't 18 so I didn't start then. I did moderately well and have made enough money for a college student to get by on. Poker is now more of a hobby in the same vain as BW or Heroes. I play to win, but I also play to enjoy myself, there is no grind for me, if I will have fun playing all afternoon I will, if not I'll play some rush for 15 minutes and stop.
I suppose I should address the topic of this blog at some point. During high school I decided I definitely wanted to study abroad. Last year my friends and I were tossing the idea around and we pretty much decided that Australia would be a badass place to go. I am the only one who actually had the drive/interest to make it happen (or maybe they had heavier course loads? stupid engineers). I suppose after that aside I should clarify that I am a business major currently in my 4th semester. Anyway I recently was accepted into the study abroad program and will be headed to UNSW for the semester starting in July (Spring semester?). I hope to play ultimate with the uni team while I'm there as well as nerd it up with other starcraft players. If you are from Sydney/ go to UNSW I would love to both hear what you have to say about the city and uni and perhaps to keep in contact with you so we can hangout while I'm there.
