Re: Pubg Play
Berry Spitsberg
Esports is not designed for those worried about long-term life-planning calculations. Professional gaming is notoriously fickle; teams dry up overnight, prize money is chronically volatile, and entire organizational ecosystems can be sundered by a blase shift of interests around a corporate boardroom.
Still, I was surprised when Jord "Ibiza" van Geldere told me he had no aspirations for his future beyond PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. He possesses no delusion of grandeur. Ibiza did not put a career on hold to chase this dream. This is not a man that would've been studying for the bar or analyzing cancer cells if he wasn't dropping into Erangel on the weekdays. Instead, he developed a prestigious talent for digital marksmanship at the precise moment in human history when industry powers were prepared to reward that skill. The rest is history.
"I never enjoyed school that much. I'd always rather be playing games. People were like, 'Yeah I wanna do this or that,' but I never had an idea for my future. I just kinda lived day-by-day," says Ibiza. "Then PUBG came out and became an esport."
Ibiza tells me his parents were worried about him. His mother works as a teacher, his father in finance, and the family built a life on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Neither mom nor dad knew what to make of a child who decided to go all in on his PC gaming superiority over every other career path. (It brings to mind that scene in Say Anything, where John Cusack explains his passion for kickboxing to a deeply perturbed John Mahoney. If only he knew the UFC revolution was around the corner!) "They saw my friends doing good at school, and I was spending a lot of time gaming and my grades went downhill," laughs Ibiza. "They were concerned."
This was in the mid-2010s, as Twitch culture writ large was first penetrating into the general social sphere. In 2021, when Ninja is appearing on the Tonight Show and Pokimane is making cameos in Free Guy, it's a lot more feasible to turn headshots into a lucrative, healthy brand. But in 2015, Ibizia was in the wild west.
His first love wasn't PUBG. Instead, surprisingly, Ibiza tells me the initial shooter he obsessed over was a little-known product called The War Z, which was later renamed Infestation: Survivor Stories. The War Z, to put it mildly, does not have the best reputation. In fact, some critics regard it as one of the worst games ever made.
In that sense, it was easy to predict Ibiza's sensationational rise to dominance. So many of us came to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds like it was a profound, radical experiment. "You're telling me I can drop in anywhere? And that I start each game unarmed?" These tenets seem like second nature in an industry that cranks out new Battle Royales every other week, but in 2017 they were truly alien to the majority.
Except, of course, if you were already logging midnight shifts into DayZ or The War Z, and rummaging around in the muck to arm themselves as a nation of bloodthirsty survivors bear down from every conceivable angle. Ibiza never needed to learn the new language. He was a master of this brand new format from the moment PUBG briefly supplanted League of Legends at the top of the Twitch charts, while the rest of us were still catching up. With those bona fides, an esports career was a natural evolution.
"I streamed a little bit before PUBG came out. It was always for fun, on the side. But when that game blew up on the platform, my channel slowly started to grow, and I saw a PUBG team get picked up by TSM. I was like, 'Damn, I want to do that, too,'" continues Ibiza. "That's when I started seriously thinking about doing this professionally."
Gaming careers are chaotic. Nobody walks into a competitive scene and exits with a Team Liquid contract the same day. Ibiza was no different; he kept his nose to the grindstone, logging a season with the upstart Polish organization Team Kinguin, back when pro-level PUBG was still a twinkle in Brendan Greene's eye. Ibiza played with Kinguin until February of 2018, after he got in contact with former Team Liquid captain Keiron "Scoom" Prescott, who was in the process of reupholstering the roster from the ground up.
Ibiza says he noticed the difference from the second he started competing under the Team Liquid banner. There are plenty of paper-thin esports companies with a logo and a Discord channel with no true bureaucratic heft underneath. That all changes after signing with one of the powerbrokers, and getting spirited away to the training facilities, personal chefs, and health regimens available at the highest tiers of competition. ("I was like, damn," says Ibiza, as he remembers what it was like to first don the cobalt blue Team Liquid jersey.)
That is how quickly a life can change in esports. Ibiza transcended his gaming PC in the Netherlands and found himself competing for life-altering prize money in a matter of months. So much for not having a plan.
Ibiza notes that he wasn't nervous after suiting up for his first fully professional matches. Embracing the moment came naturally. "I wasn't affected by the pressure. I love the pressure," he continues. "A lot of people sign with an organization and immediately start performing worse. But back then, I could really feel like the pressure was helping me. I was really confident."
"I try to give side input. I'm pretty good at that. To give suggestions here and there. It's hard sometimes. The IGL already has a plan in their head. So you need to grab their attention, and very quickly, throw out another idea. 'We can also play from here because that gives us access to this and that,' and hopefully he considers it," says Ibiza. "There's so much happening, there's so much info coming through. You need to be aware of all 360 degrees. You need to be ready to rotate, or be pre-planning situations. A lot goes into this."
Since early 2020, there's been a new voice in the room. Team Liquid welcomed the 25-year old Dane Nikolaj "clib" Madsen to the battalion, right in the heat of the pandemic. It's always a challenge to develop chemistry and get up to speed in self-isolation, but Ibiza seems to believe the new-look roster is clicking on all cylinders. In fact, Ibiza sees something in clib that he recognizes in himself; that incredible, insatiable hunger of a dedicated athlete who's finally earned a shot in the majors. Clib plays with real fire in his eyes, and that's something that Ibiza wants to recapture.
"That's the downside of being in esports for a while. I've been noticing that I've not been as motivated because I've been in PUBG for so long. I've been streaming for two or three years. I never took time off. I think I've been grinding too much," says Ibiza. "So right now I need to step it up a bit. I'm trying to take more breaks. I booked my first vacation. I'm excited to do that, relax, and come back hard."
Ibiza already has plenty to show for all his grinding. Team Liquid took first place in the PUBG 2018 Polaris Series, they came in second in the Europe Continental Series at the end of 2020, and they've started 2021 off well with a championship victory at PSL Season 9.
"It was our confidence. We're always first going to our second day of competition, and then we end up throwing it," he says. "You start to play a little bit differently, and things don't go as easily. That's the problem."
Consider it the only irony that dogs Ibiza. Spend any time with the man, and you will quickly conclude that the one quality he doesn't lack is confidence. But perhaps that's also one of the lasting lessons he leaves us about success in esports. Bravado is great, but you know what's even better? Self-awareness. Self-awareness to understand when your strategic input is more trouble than it's worth; self-awareness to diagnose the passion in a fledgling teammate's play; self-awareness to know when you're playing tight after carrying a lead into the twilight of a tournament. Those are the lessons you learn when gaming was the only future you had in mind.
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Please not that all the sources confirm that these aren't "official" ways of spotting bots as there aren't any official ways to do so yet. These are mot tips and things to look out for to spot bots more easily when playing the game.
If you creep up on a player (for example when they have their back turned), they shouldn't have any idea you're there. Bots will notice you pretty much as they appear in your line of site, regardless of whether or not they should be able to.
I spawned into one game with a huge chunk of enemy players were running around in the same shirt with the same haircut. Now PUBG Mobile may not have the most down to the details character creation menu, but most people on the Internet have a little more room for variation than that.
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