Game Boy

At 21, I was making six figures playing video games competitively. Then I walked away

- BY JUAN GUIBERT

I'VE BEEN gaming pretty much my whole life. When I was three, my older brother gave me an unplugged PlayStation controller so I could pretend to play with him. Growing up in Lima, Peru, we'd go to computer cafés and play games like Age of Empires and Counter-Strike. By the time I was seven, my parents decided to move to Brampton to give me and my brother better opportunities.

In 2010, when I was 13, two friends told me about League of Legends, a strategy game where the objective is to destroy the opposing team’s base. I decided to give it a try, and from the first match, I was hooked. I liked being constantly challenged. After school, I'd watch livestreams of the best players. To me, it was like watching LeBron James practise basketball.

I started out at the lowest level but worked my way up to gold after a few months. In the summer, I'd game for up to 10 hours a day, often until 1 or 2 a.m. In 2013, I hit the Diamond 1 ranking, which meant I was one of the top 300 players in North America. My friends and I put together a team and entered a League of Legends tournament at a game shop in Mississauga, and we ended up winning. I loved the adrenalin rush of playing in front of an audience.

By the time I was in Grade 12, I was playing at the Challenger level, meaning I’d cracked the top 200 players. Still, gaming was just a hobby, and I decided to study business at the University of Toronto. But the school had a League of Legends team, so during my first year, in 2015, I tried out and made the cut.