A Casting Career that was

As you may have known, I will be retiring from casting at the end of the ESL Challenger League Season 48 (December). This has been a hard decision for myself and I’ve been wrestling with it for the past 6 months.

The Reason

The main reason has been because I do not get hired for many paid LAN or Online events. I feel like I’m at the point where it doesn’t matter on how much I do. Someone else will be chosen or they’ll fly someone else in.

So pretty much, Dreamhack Melbourne was the main tipping point. You might be like “oh, it is just one event”. Dreamhack Melbourne is one of many events that I’m not really considered for.

Sometimes, you have to realise that maybe you’re not good enough for an event. Maybe the things that you know is not something that your employer desires. At this point, it is either adapt and to be the thing that they want or just don’t bother. I chose not to bother.

I’m not going to stick around for another 2–3 years in hopes of getting a gig either. It is not sustainable for myself in the long run especially when I can earn more as a Financial Adviser and do less compared to my work as a caster.

If I put 2–3 years as a Financial Adviser, I’ll definitely have my own client base where I can start my own business. As a caster, I don’t see it. All I see is that I do a lot of community casting and get the odd closed qualifier and that’s it.

After reading what Inmaniac said about it, it will most likely be the case and that I most likely didn’t cut it. Sucks but it is life. I obviously disagree with that case. As much as I dislike it, I have to learn to respect the decision.

The Happy Parts

I’ve had a great career. I’ve met new people, gained some pretty awesome friends and experienced amazing feats that I’ll never forget. I feel disappointed that I never reached my goal of casting a big event but you don’t always achieve your goals.

However, I did achieve something else which was appreciation and gratitude for supporting a community.

This isn’t goodbye, I’ll still be coming to events and will still be catching up with all of you. I just won’t be focusing on casting. I’ll most likely move to writing or doing other media stuff. So let’s go through what my casting journey has been like.

The Danes

One of the people that I appreciate was the first viewer of mine that i’ve met outside of Australia, Vibeke. Vibeke and her family are incredibly passionate supporters of Danish CS. They were in Leipzig to support the Hunden-led Mad Lions roster as well as Heroic.

She recognised me from casting Cadian’s Ace while he was on Heroic when I casted the closed qualifier for the event. She saw I was at Dreamhack Leipzig and wanted to say hi. Unfortunately for Heroic and Mad Lions, they finished 3rd and 4th while Renegades finished 2nd.

While scrolling down the twitter feed, Vibeke showed a wonderful art piece of Olof’s defuse on Overpass. It was incredible and I was in awe of it. Vibeke is a massive fan of Astralis. I’m happy that Astralis are bouncing back though. Vibeke and her family deserves as much.

Vibeke is a qualified teacher and often talked to me about how Danish Schools were starting to have courses in particular to esports and Counter-Strike. It was mainly focusing on building systems, structures and teamwork.

Another Dane that helped out immensely was Vorborg and the Copenhagen Flames. I owe a lot to the Flames for the initial exposure. The crazy aspect is that all those players that were in the Flames went onto bigger and better things.

Some of them are still even in the scene such as Basso, Farlig, Roej, Hooxi, Nodios etc. Also, Roej’s name oh god. Learning how to pronounce that one.

Vorborg is an incredible scout and is able to build teams that are always greater than the sum of its parts. I was hoping he would be the one to turn over EG on a new leaf and was confident in him doing so.

The most important one would be Mimi (Mimimimichaela). Even though she does not play CS anymore. She allowed me to cast further by allowing me to cast her matches via her channel.

I do remember casting a large amount of Copenhagen Flames and Assassins matches. It is sad that she no longer plays CS but I am incredibly happy that Mimi is incredibly successful in Valorant.

She put so much time into mastering CS and mastering Valorant. All of her MVPs are through sheer willpower, determination and work. Through this I met a lot of the female players who are now playing in ESL Impact or Valorant Gamechangers.

Mimi is also an incredibly fun person to be around as her friendship group at Twitchcon Amsterdam were hilarious. We fooled around so much with the photos. It was great.

Another important one is Allan, Allan is a creator manager but managed to help me out in regards to CS. He also helped me with my content and is an insanely good content and events manager.

He has been my go to on how to make future Dreamhacks better and he has definitely enhanced Dreamhack both in Australia and in Europe. The first Dreamhack I went to was essentially a couple of row of chairs and that’s it at Jonkoping.

However, that has now changed immensely where it has been in stadiums, rows of chairs have been backed by stands and a real emphasis has been put on crowd experience. The after-party events were absolutely amazing as well. Welcomehack, Endgame and all those events were an absolute blast.

The Brits

Other than my fellow co-caster, Wix who has been amazing as a co-caster and especially when I was going through an incredibly rough period. He made sure that I was ok. When I had disclosed that I had been struggling to eat, he even checked during the major qualifiers on how much I ate!

Wix is also a teacher and he has found his own success in the UK scene. I believe it was much better for him to go into his local scene and build from there. It is great for an Aussie to go to the UK CS, I don’t think it is great for a Brit to go into AUS CS. The opportunities are a bit less.

He has casted at a few EpicLANs and has made great inroads within that community. It is great to see.

The other organisation is Endpoint. Endpoint are nothing short of amazing. They are an incredible organisation that are open, honest and filled with limitless growth. Pete has done an incredible job where talent and players love him.

Endpoint don’t try to be the top professional organisation. They try to be a business where they can provide a wide array of services than just Esports.

They have their own paid casts, they have their own facilities and they might have their own Dominos Pizza on how much Pete orders it (ok, he ordered it once).

Endpoint were quite incredible in getting everybody over for a closed qualifer that I had between Endpoint and Mouz. I had hinted at the start of the BO3 that I felt that Endpoint could upset Mouz since they had a similar pool (which they did). My top clip to this day is Mouz failing the Catwalk Boost on B with Ropz falling to his death.

It was such a magical win for Endpoint and I’m glad that I casted it.

The Swedes

The first person that actually tuned into one of my casts as a player was HNS. One of the first games I casted was him having literally the worst game ever. He was playing with Pyth at the time, I forget the team name.

He was constantly losing aim duels, getting hit by timing hard and it was overall, a horrible day at the office. He eventually sealed the 16th round for his team with an MP9 ace. It was really good to see.

I had no idea at the time but another one of the swedes that I met via Dreamhack (Swebliss) had interviewed him at a LAN ages ago in an infamous interview. So he was already a bit of a meme.

I came to Dreamhack Winter where I saw Lilmix (HNS was in the team) at the BYOC. I was like “yay, i’m gonna catch up with HNS”. And guess what, HE DIDN’T GO! Atleast, I met with b0denmaster.

The other one is eraa and contiuning on from that previous story. I’ve never met eraaa despite watching his games at DHW twice. I’m doing a bit of a HNS here.

Eraa was on Prima when I first casted him and he has a fanclub. People loved him and Ztr (who was also on Prima). I’m not sure whether it was Advanced or a Closed Qualifer but the chat was going off with Alle Alle Eraaa. I think Prima lost in the end 2–1 but it was a really fun cast.

I sought out Prima for a bit and then saw that Eraaa went to GamerLegion. Basically, in GamerLegion. He pulled off so many insane clutches on Overpass that it was fun to watch.

Another one is Dennis, Dennis plays WoW quite a bit and we talked about it from time to time. He was on GamerLegion and well, when he played for GamerLegion. I happened to cast two of the games where they were clearly vsing cheaters.

I even had the cheaters accuse me of a witch hunt when I mentioned that it was suspect that their star awper (HOAR) was able to wallbang Rusty who made no noise on train (Headshot too btw). In the end, the cheaters got banned and the person who accused me of a witch hunt is still quiet to this day.

The next person very dear to me. I initially met Nina (DrWallin) via a mutual friend when she was doing all the skin gambling stuff. She was also surfing and decided to learn the actual game.

We ended up watching a CS Tourny in NA with a few of her viewers. This is where I found out who brax, steel and all that were. She was pretty annoyed that Pterodactyls4Ever was being heavily criticised despite brax playing much worse.

Nina ranked up to Global and she was focusing on being a primary awper. She was quite good on the A Site of Cache where she could essentially solo defend it with the AWP. She also played with a couple of her viewers with one of them being DNE who was incredibly sharp at the game as well.

Nina always wanted to go professional but I never understood on what was stopping her from doing so. She was at a fairly decent skill level and definitely had a higher ceiling. She understood the game at that point on a theoretical level.

She encouraged me to cast further and dedicate myself to it.

Another person who I met up with at Dreamhack was Zietra. Zietra was a caster/host at a few Swedish events mainly revolving around Esportal. We had chatted after the Prima game. We discussed about Fnatic in particular on how much Brollan had impacted the scene.

Zietra is a huge support of the Swedish T2 scene especially with Prima at that time. You’re beginning to see that the Swedes are indeed cooking up some starts with Metizsports and a few other teams rising up.

I’d also shout out Robin and Torbin who used to work for Dreamhack in hooking me up with a lot of closed qualifer games and getting me in touch with Mod. It was so much appreciated that you guys went above and beyond to help me out.

The Finns (Yes, Finland exists and is a country)

The first Finn that I’d like to thank is Rosieriver. She did a lot for me in regards to getting me in touch with her network. She also watched the Renegades matches with me at Dreamhack Leipzig and invited me to dinner with her crew.

She also encouraged me with my casting and always listens to my stream in the background. She is inspired by a lot of my casting and it led to her playing CS2 a lot more.

She has been an amazing person to me personally and as a content creator. Rosie always makes me feel incredible welcome at any event that we go to.

She also introduced me to the people who run Havu as well so I got to meet a lot of the people who ran the organisation. Havu are literally the most unluckiest and hard done by Finnish Organiastion.

Havu were meant to have an ESL Pro League spot but ESL changed Pro League just as Promotions/Relgations were going to happen. They handed an ESL Pro League spot to ENCE at the time who withdrew from MDL that year while Havu participated in it and came 2nd.

You can only imagine how the management of Havu felt after having an incredible team in MDL to only be booted out of Pro League by a team who had more money. (BIG also suffered this as well). However, the players within Havu have had amazing careers as coaches.

The Russians

The biggest team I’d like to thank is Gambit. When I was first looking for ESEA Advanced Games, Gambit Youngsters (the former Cloud 9 lineup) would always have their games very early.

This meant that a lot of my earlier games was of the Gambit Youngsters line up. Without them, it would have been incredibly difficult to cast as a lot of the games were at 11–12am my time.

It was a shame how their line up ended with the likes of Supra, Interz, Nafany, shir0 and Axile. However, these guys proved that you can make it into Tier 1 if you stick together and improved.

Another team would be Nemiga as they often scheduled their games to be much earlier as well. They also followed me on Twitter.

Lastly would be the model Ingame Leader, the Iron Lady, Vilga herself. Vilga was an incredible person to talk to about CS. She provided insight on the hardships both inside and outside the server.

She emphasised how much the female scene had improved even though Nigma had won 4–5 ESL Impacts at this point. She is an incredible determination and is just an example of what hard work can achieve.

When she played with Mimi, she was clearly the player that people turned to when things looked absolutely dire. I just remember a match where Vilga managed to get a 3k upon Entry on Short in a 3v5 to win the round on Dust 2. An absolute machine. Even thought she was not at Impact as player this time. She will be next time.

The Baltics

This section is mainly about Heccu and her absolute love for the game and any Baltic esports player succeeding. She has a great sense of humour that brings fun and warmth to any broadcast.

I am glad that she got her chance to shine at the major in Brazil. Heccu is an incredible interviewer and sideline reporter. She adds her own twist onto everything.

It is inspiring to see how much love and care she has for the Baltic scene. It is absolutely infectious. Everytime, I check in on how the ultimate Baltic Fan is going (yes, that is you, Heccu).

If you do not know, Heccu is a very good Diablo 4 player. She is the only member of talent who has killed Uber Lillith. Uber Lillith is incredibly difficult and I even haven’t killed her!

The Norweigns

The two orgs that I’d like to thank the most would be Nordavind (00nation) and Apeks. These two orgs are absolutely incredible on the work that they provide for the Norweign scene.

I’m glad to see some amazing content creators who I’ve met through mutual who represent these two organisations.

I’ve met various support staff from both Apeks and Nordavind at IEM Sydney, ESL Challenger and at Dreamhack. You guys provide such a top tier service to your team working each and everyday.

It is shame for how both organisations ended up as they did. I wish all the best for the Apeks guys that came out to Melbourne/Sydney. I hope you enjoyed your times in Australia.

The Australians

Well, there will be Kiwis in here too because well, you’re a part of Australia now. Jacinta who? Albanese is your Prime Minister now.

Firstly, I’d like to thank Flam, Digital, Borris and all of my co-casters. It was much appreciated in ANZ Main. I’d like to thank all my producers (Laura) and Ash as well.

Wander is a GOAT administrator and helped out tons at TGX on getting permutations on the playoffs. Ash (Aisling) is an incredible stage manager. I wish she’d have helped Australia’s Allstars against TSM Academy though…

I’d like to thank Tito, Hoackz, Monitor, Emjaecaer, Gomez (frags harder than JKS), Annette, Deb, Ben, Jyles, Taylah, Mordred, Owner of KZG, Cons, Kingfisher, Jamie, Beau, Semtex, Eddie, MC, Sav, Aiden (and Nancy — yes, you’re being memed) and so many other organisations, parents, producers and just supporting the game overall.

It makes me feel incredibly happy to see you at Melbourne/Sydney and your names to pop up in chat.

I also appreciate all the players who take up the interviews and that have taken the time to have a chat with me outside of events. You guys are all the greatest.

The Australian CS Scene is an incredibly supportive community and I hope this goes on forever. No wonder why our crowds are so good.

Anyways, that is enough from me. I may have forgot a lot of people in particular with casting but I appreciate each person that I’ve met throguh this.