viOLet's article in biggest German OnlineNewspaper

Right of entry: southkorean computergamer receives sportsman-visa

Professional gamers have to train a lot, gain a huge amount of money by winning tournaments and suffer from typical diseases of athletes like muscle ache. Still they are not recognized as offical sportsmen by public authorities. Now a slow process of easing the rights to enter the USA for official tournament players is starting.

To refuse the entry of an international and famous soccer player when he needs to play an important tournament is an unimaginable act that wouldn't be done by the US-authorities. But it is the common policy towards the so-called ''Esportlers'', even though they also have to play important tournaments. Now the american bureaucratist begin to ease the guidelines. Over the last while repeatedly sportsmen-visa were given to the athletes of computergames and give hope to a whole industry.

The South Korean Kim Dong Hwan, nicknamed ''viOLet'' in the Starcraft II business, recently received the P1-A-Visum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_visa).
Currently ranked #63 [http://wcs.battle.net/sc2/en/players/violet] in the Progamer-Ranking of Starcraft II players overall, he is part of the few people(max. 25.000 annually) of all kinds of sports that received this visa.
These people are then allowed to travel into the USA whenever they want to engage in their sports.

In the rubric of Esportlers there isn't even a handful of people owning the highly-coveted visa. Just since 2007 E-Sports is approved to be a real Sport by the US-authorities. This long and hard fight for E-Sports to be credited and accepted began with the lawyers of professional Counterstrike player Marcus 'Zet' Sundström. Nevertheless neither viOLet nor Zet was the first player to have received the P1-A-Visa. The Canadian gamer Danny Le, fighting under the flag of League of Legends, had been acknowledged as a professional sportsman for the first time in history. The South Korean Kim Dong Hwan for his part is now the first gamer of the real-time-strategy ''Starcraft'' who convinced the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to be a ''real athlete''.

But E-sports is not a novelty to the world: For more than 40 years electronic offline tournaments are held. From the 'Nerd-Events' in small Universities it developed into a multi-million-Dollar business -espescially in Asia. Allthough there are offical World Championsships and stadiums filled with fans, there are not a lot of authorites worldwide that accept Esports as a full-value sports.


Usually there should be high chances of gaining the Visa for all professional gamers, because the Immigration Services lists ''international fame'' '' a huge amoun of presentable successes'' and ''a high level of skill and recognation in the home country'' as the requierment to receive the Visa.
In the case of viOLet he satisifies all these conditions. He is known by the million watchers of Esport events and he almost earned 100.000 Dollars only by participating tournaments in 2011/2012.

All in all there is a positive development for Esports to be accepted as a full-value sports.
In case of the 23 year old South Korean, who received the visa recently, it might have saved his career as a gamer. He was not able to attend at many tournaments in the United States in 2013, which might have won him several thousand dollars.
Without this step into the future by the USA he would have to end his career!

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