“At 21, I was making six figures playing League of Legends competitively. Then I walked away”

I’ve been gaming pretty much my whole life. When I was three, my older brother handed me a PlayStation controller that wasn’t plugged in so I could pretend I was playing with him. Growing up in Lima, Peru, we would go to computer cafés near our house and play old-school games like Age of Empires and Counter-Strike. My mom is an accountant and my dad is a retired civil engineer, and they always expected me and my brother to do well in school, get solid jobs and work our way up the ladder. By the time I turned seven, my parents decided to move to Brampton to give us the best education we could get. I always did okay in school, but I wasn’t particularly into academics. I preferred to spend my time playing World of Warcraft.

In 2010, when I was 13, two friends told me about a new game they were playing called League of Legends, a strategy game where the objective is to destroy the opposing team’s base. I was really into Call of Duty at the time, but I decided to give it a try. From the first match, I was hooked. I felt there was a different level of depth to the game and liked being constantly challenged. I would come home from school, eat something quickly, then watch livestreams of the best League of Legends players. It was like being able to watch LeBron James practise basketball every day.

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I started out ranked at the lowest level, bronze, but worked my way up to gold after a few months of grinding. I became obsessed, staying up until 1 or 2 a.m. gaming until my dad would get mad and yell at me to go to bed. In the summer, when I didn’t have any homework, I played for eight to 10 hours a day. In 2013, I hit the diamond ranking, which meant I was one of the top 300 players in North America. After that, one of my friends wanted to sign up for a League of Legends tournament, so we put together a team. It was hosted by a little game shop in Mississauga called Untouchables. We ended up winning—our prize was a few T-shirts and $50. Once I experienced the adrenalin rush of playing in front of people in a tournament setting, I was hooked. I thought, I want more.

By the time I was in Grade 12, I was playing at the challengers level, meaning I was one of the top 200 players in North America. Still, I was graduating, and gaming was only a hobby. I didn’t have a strong sense of direction academically, so I decided to study business at the University of Toronto. My brother had studied international business, so the degree felt like the default option. In 2016, soon after I started at U of T, the school announced it was dipping into e-sports and forming a League of Legends team that would compete against other schools across eastern Canada. It felt like serendipity. I tried out and made the cut.

There were a lot of excellent League of Legends players at U of T. By my second year, we had five challenger-level players on the team. We managed to win the eastern conference competition for Canada, which earned us a place in a North American tournament being held in Los Angeles. We won second place in LA, which qualified us for the collegiate world championships in Wuhan, China. All of our flights, hotels and food were covered by Riot Games, the company that owns League of Legends.

League of Legends is massively popular in China, and the tournament was held in a university stadium with 5,000 people watching. It was surreal. Prior to that, I had only ever played in front of an online audience of a few thousand or in person in front of 100 to 150 people. The crowd reacted to our Chinese opponents’ successful plays with a roar. Meanwhile, our team’s successes were met with silence. We ended up losing in the grand finale to the best Chinese team, but the whole experience was exhilarating. We were invited to another event, in Taiwan, that was being held for the top four teams from the previous tournament. In Taipei, we beat the team that we’d lost to in Wuhan, which was awesome. At that point, we could honestly say we were the best collegiate team in the world.

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That’s when I started receiving attention from the pros. In 2018, League of Legends became a franchised league—similar to the NHL or NBA—so there was a season with games every week and playoffs. Two of my U of T teammates and I got professional offers to play for the North American League, which was called the League Championship Series (and is now called the League of the Americas).

I felt a lot of mixed emotions: I was beyond excited about doing what I loved professionally, but I was also nervous about what my parents would think. Dropping out of school to become a pro gamer at age 20 was going to be a tough sell, but in the back of my mind I knew I was going to go through with it no matter what they thought. I had the contract for a couple of months before I told them I had received the offer. They didn’t approve, but at the start of 2018, I dropped out of school and moved to LA to become a professional e-sports player.

In LA, a lot of the league’s players stay in competitive gaming houses, where you basically live with your teammates and practise out of the same place. Leaving home for the first time didn’t faze me too much since I was moving in with two of my teammates from U of T as well as our coach. Those familiar faces helped me feel close to Toronto.

The schedule of a pro gamer is pretty intense. Every day, our manager would pick us up and bring us to the mansion in Santa Monica where Flyquest, the main team that I was playing alternate for, lived and practised for eight to 10 hours a day. Work-life balance isn’t really a pillar of e-sports. I would typically wake up at 9 a.m., be at work by 10:30 a.m., eat whatever food they’d ordered for us, meet with the team for an hour to figure out what we were practising, then practise as a team from noon to 6 p.m. Then I’d eat again, take 30 minutes to unwind, practise on my own until midnight, go home, go to sleep and do it all over again the next day—for six days a week. On my one official day off, I’d take a short break from the screen to try all the amazing food LA had to offer, then go back home to practise.

That first year, I earned the equivalent of what you’d make working full time at McDonald’s. But, because your housing and food is paid for, most of the money goes straight into your pocket. After a year playing alternate for Flyquest, I moved up to playing for the main team and started earning six figures US a year. I was on cloud nine, finally in the same league as all these players I’d looked up to for years. At the same time, though, it was incredibly overwhelming having to catch up to their level in a short amount of time.

I moved into a different house, so I was no longer living with my U of T friends. It began to feel more like work. There was a lot of pressure—I wanted to perform to the best of my ability to prove that I deserved to be there, plus tier-one matches had much higher viewership, so poor performances would leave you open to scrutiny from the public on the streams themselves as well as on Reddit and X. But I still enjoyed what I was doing, and the money was good. Plus, my parents had become more supportive of my choices—they even came to visit me in LA.

During my third year playing professional e-sports, Covid hit. I began to feel homesick and missed my friends and family, which took a toll on my gameplay. Halfway through that year, I got dropped from my team, which was a big wake-up call. I was able to find another team in LA pretty quickly, but I realized that everything could be taken away from me at any point. I decided to work harder to stay in the game. By my fourth year, I was starting to get burnt out and having an identity crisis. After five years of professional gaming, I wondered who I was beyond an e-sports player. I knew I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life, but I didn’t have many other options, so I signed on for another year.

That last year playing e-sports was miserable. I was anxious all the time and started having panic attacks. I was burnt out, spending 12 hours a day doing something I no longer enjoyed. At the end of the season, I decided the best thing for me was to quit. In 2022, I “retired” and moved back in with my parents in Brampton. I spent the next six months  thinking about what else interested me: culinary school, software engineering boot camp. I weighed the pros and cons and decided that finishing my business degree at U of T was the most stable move.

Technically, I was in the third year of my studies, but I had taken all my first- and second-year courses six years prior, so I didn’t remember much. I had to re-learn how to do calculus and write papers. It was challenging—I spent a lot of time in office hours with professors, getting them to explain things to me. I never regretted my decision, though. There are times when I miss the satisfaction of working day in, day out with a team and seeing tangible improvements toward a shared goal, but for the most part I’m glad to live a much more relaxed lifestyle.

This spring, I graduated with a marketing degree and a major in economics. I still have a lot of drive in me, and I’d like to become some sort of executive or get involved in policy and make a difference in the world, but first I need to find an entry-level job. Even though I’ve put hours into a career, developed my teamwork, and learned how to give and receive feedback, being a pro League of Legends player doesn’t really give you a set of transferable skills that a Fortune 500 company would understand.

I still keep up with competitive League of Legends games. I have a lot of friends who are pro players, so I tune in to support them. But I hardly ever play video games anymore. These days, when I play a game, my brain clicks back into e-sports mode, and I get incredibly competitive. The instinct helps me improve quickly, but it also brings a heavy dose of anxiety and stress. I hope that one day I’ll be able to sever that connection, pick up a controller and play purely for the fun of it.