Making it in ESPORTS...

I have never been interested in anything in my whole life. When I was a toddler I had a health complication which lead me to being the always ill child until I was about 12 years old.
My parents decided to try holistic shit which lead them into circles of spiritual women in menopause which in turn lead them to send me to one of those bullshit private schools. Somehow they decided it would be smart for me not to be allowed near TVs or computers or any kind of videogames until I was 13 or so.
Then it happened. I was allowed to have some computer time which lead me to install any kind of freeware demos of games I could find. I would grind through any of them in no time, like I was used to grind through any books I was given to read. I thought I was great. My ego was inflated as fuck, and since in the first 2 years of high school I wasn't that good looking (something that haunted me through childhood) I would come back home and play as much as I could.
In 2004 started playing a little broodwar (I got the full game with an Italian gaming magazine) and as soon as I figured out I could play outside of b.net and that there were a fuckton of people who already "knew" how to play the game I started sinking my head into it more and more. Back then, everyone was fucking terrible. I would 3hatch hydraling into 5 gas hydraguard and rape everyone because foreigners didn't have the apm to do sk terran and dropping 1 control group of zerglings would stop a 90 supply marine tank push. I knew in my head I was one of the top 3 Italian players and I'm confident I could have taken at least one game off of ClouD back when he was in ToT. Unfortunately, being the awkward kid real life made me, I was going to avoid socializing with anyone who would speak my language and ended up being one of those angsty online 14 year olds.
At some point a friend got a copy of Guild Wars: Nightfall for christmas. I'd estimate this to be around 2005. He lives 2 houses away from me and his pc couldn't run it so he came over and as we usually did we switched seats for a while playing the game. Then he decided he didn't care for it anymore. I did. I was fucking hooked, I used to play it like an MMO but I kept hearing that pve took no skill and that the best players were doing GvG, aka 8v8 guild battles. Note that GW was a game that took less than one day to get a pve character to max level with the best gear and where you could start a pvp character at max level with the best gear possible, but people needed to see titles to judge a player's skill and nobody took someone without titles. This seemed like an insurmountable wall for me. Then I realized I had made some friends on the way. One of them only played pve, we ended up becoming great friends and we even managed to meet in rl. The other was the typical super-competitive kid who would never shut up, and he got me into guilds that played really high up. From there, every night I would give my best not to disappoint my teammates. Lots of rage was had but I was never on the recieving end. I started adding random big names and chatting with them. This got me invited to big games where I would always give my best.
Unfortunately, my parents thought high school was more important than playing video games. In a way it was, since late GW was not an e-sports title (and in the west esports didn't even exist at the time), and I would sleep in class from staying up late at night and the trip to school took me 2 hours every time.
Then I changed school, I had been into wrestling for a while and was convinced that I didn't give a shit about university so I went to an easier high school in a much closer and much shittier town. I had a close group of friends, and everything was going smooth and easy. Unfortunately the GW scene had died at the time, so I played some WoW without dedicating more than 2 hours a day to it and got interested in real e-sports. Team Liquid was awesome. I actually started watching sc2gg english commentaries at first but then I realized I understood more about the game even if I hadn't touched it in a year or so than the commentator. And the players were fucking amazing. Bear in mind, as I said before everyone I knew was fucking terrible. And that includes Cloud, Mondi, Haypro, whoever you want. 2005 foreigner BW looked like the stone age compared to 2007 korean progamers. One man was unbeatable, he was so good that I decided I would never play BW again because I knew I wasn't going to come anywhere close to his level of skill. I couldn't possibly be more grateful to the man named Ma Jae Yoon.

Moving on, starleagues went by, BW turned into Iron Chef with the 2 most boring players sitting on a pedestal above everyone else and taking records that the older players were no longer competing for and SC2 came out. I tried it for a while, it was ok. I still peaked at 120 apm, not much I could do about it .
Since I found out about esports I tried looking at other games, but except for brink I'm not an fps guy. Dota and HoN I can't really follow for various reasons but eventually I picked up League of Legends.

LoL is a game that was created by the people streaming it. The original developers are people who worked on Dota allstars but that decided that Icefrog is a dick and that they should make a game that is actually fair to their players.
But nobody gave a shit about LoL before HotshotGG started streaming it. It took one extremely competitive guy who is very prone to raging to rack up 3.5k viewers each night for the game to bloom. Right now everyone is talking about it. The rivalry from the HoN community, who view themselves as the one legitimate dota successors helped fuel LoL's popularity. All the LoL top players who started streaming on own3d.tv made a no-name german streaming website the best in its category. If anyone managed to skim this so far I would like them to mention bananas in their comment.

TLO, Me and Tyler



Day[9] brings out the unsexy smiles in everyone.



Gretorp actually asked me for this picture. It's his (and my) facebook profile pic.










^Some pics from the crotch cam series.


TIME WARP!


..and we're magically at Dreamhack.


I missed July at MLG and I was crying inside at the thought that I wouldn't get a pic with him. I got him to turn around while he was watching bomber practice and take a pic. He even laughed at my tattoo.


He is everywhere...