
I Met a Professional Starcraft Player at the Canadian Border – Encounter with NoRegreT, the Canadian Zerg Player
Featuring a Portrait of Jake Umpleby Aka NoRegreT
I Met a Professional Starcraft Player at the Canadian Border – Encounter with NoRegreT, the Canadian Zerg Player
I’m not really going to get into too much details here, but long story short, I was refused entry to the United States of ‘Murica a few days ago. It was an incredibly frustrating and upsetting event, and at the time I was totally losing my cool and was having a mental breakdown. When it was time for the American officers to drive me back to the Canadian border, I was seated in the back with a shy, quiet kid wearing a big backpack that carried his dope ass laptop. Jake, who goes by ‘NoRegreT’ in the world of Starcraft 2, a competitive strategy game that I once divulged my time into, had been refused entry due to the fact that being a ‘professional gamer’ wasn’t a recognized job to a USA border control officer. ‘Tis the tragedy of life.
As I was slowly returning back to reality after the shocking experience at secondary inspection, I sat down next to Jake to chat with him. He seemed as if his spirits were crushed for the refused entry, but he claimed that it was because he had been abruptly woken up from his slumber at the US border. At 19 years old, it was his 5th year as a professional gamer, and his second year on making real financial benefits. Jake was on his way to New York City to enter a Starcraft 2 tournament which the grand prize was $2000. Decent, I thought. However, Jake told me that the reality of most tournaments were around $200-$500, and that is only if you win the entire tournament. Video game tournaments vary in prize money, and Starcraft 2 is supposedly in the middle bracket, with higher tier games having up to 18 million dollars (as of 2015). At one point he said that he tried training in a game that had much more viewership and money, but his heart wasn’t in it. Curious, I Googled ‘NoRegreT Starcraft’ to find more about him. Surely enough, he had a Team Liquid Wikipage where he was described as an aggressive Zerg player, and a few Reddit posts with a ton of people disapproving of him. ‘There’s a lot of haters’ he said, ‘but that’s part of it.’ He seemed perfectly content with it.
Jake was nice enough to offer me his spare bus ticket ride back to Toronto, but the bus driver said we both needed to buy new tickets. The entire ride back to Aubrey Town of Canadia, was a dream. When I woke up, the progamer was long gone. Hope he lands on this one day. May his passion for life remain undaunted, and his haters destroyed in the field of combat (in the virtual world of Starcraft, of course)!
Photo by Choi David // www.choidavid.com // @choidavid420