In video gaming, Haag is No 1 with a bullet

Los Angeles

MATT Haag, a professional video game player, makes close to a million dollars a year sitting in a soft chair smashing buttons. It is a fantastically sweet gig, and he will do just about anything to keep it.

That is why, on a recent morning, he was in a bungalow in Venice Beach, California, making pancakes. Not just regular pancakes, but high-protein pancakes with ingredients like flax oil and chia seeds, whose balance of carbohydrates, fat and protein was created by a dietitian hired to teach him how to eat more healthily.

The pancakes were just the beginning of a monthlong training session that Red Bull, one of Haag's sponsors, organised for him and his team, OpTic Gaming. Over the next several days, he and his fellow players gave blood while riding stationary bicycles, had their brains mapped by a computer and attended an hour-long yoga class where they learned, among other things, how to stretch their throbbing wrists. The purpose of all this: to help them get better at blowing their opponents away in video games.

Three years ago, he was flipping burgers at McDonald's. Today, Mr Haag - 22, skinny and blindingly pale - makes his living playing Call of Duty, a popular series of war games where players run around trying to shoot one another.

Mr Haag has 1.5 million YouTube subscribers along with a lucrative contract to live stream his daily game sessions online. Known as Nadeshot (shorthand for "grenade shot"), he travels the world playing tournaments as spectators pack arenas to see him. At home near Chicago, he has a problem with fans showing up at his house.

And while most pro gamers have to settle for modest sponsorships with companies that make things like game controllers and headphones, Mr Haag last year also attracted Red Bull, the energy drink, which has traditionally built its marketing around skateboarders, motocross riders and other extreme sports athletes. He is one of six people on its roster of e-sports players, and it is showering them with the same attention and training it has lavished on athletes who compete in the real world.

For the trip to Los Angeles, Red Bull paid for Mr Haag and his teammates to live in Venice Beach. During the day, the company shuttled them to its headquarters in Santa Monica for workouts and other training. At night, they lingered in a high-tech studio and played video games into the wee hours.

Mr Haag is the face of the growing business of video games as a spectator sport. Thanks to live tournaments and online video streaming sites like Twitch, which Amazon bought for US$1 billion in August, video games have become something to watch, not just play.

But fans need someone to root for, and that is where Mr Haag comes in. He has the requisite marks of a champion, like tournament victories and a compelling back story. And he certainly looks like a gamer: on the recent morning in Venice, his pancake-making attire consisted of a T-shirt, knee-length shorts and a backward baseball cap.

Most important, though, is his compulsion to share his life - on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. He is, more or less, the producer, director and star of his own reality show.

Mr Haag's YouTube channel is in the top one per cent of the 220,000 channels tracked by the research firm OpenSlate. Beyond YouTube, he has become the No 1 player on MLG.TV, the site where people watch him play live.

What makes him so watchable? A recent survey performed by Jeetendr Sehdev, a marketer who focuses on celebrity branding, said that teenagers found YouTube stars easier to relate to and more candid than famous people from places like Hollywood.

Mr Haag's fans are right in line with this thinking. They seem to regard him as an exceptionally interesting friend.

For example, Kasey Young, 21, of Cleveland has learned through social media and streaming that Mr Haag drives a BMW, often eats at Chipotle and likes to say "wallbong", a nonsense term he made up with friends. Mr Young said that he now finds himself saying "wallbong" at work at random times.

"If he knew me in real life, I feel like we would be really good friends," Mr Young said.

Mr Haag's videos, raw and unproduced, add to this feeling of intimacy. In addition to game video, his YouTube channel has regular updates in which he appears revealing and honest - posting, for example, travel diaries in which he sits on a hotel bed and tells fans about his day. He also put up an old home video in which his awkward younger self makes an alien face for the camera and then pulls up his T-shirt to show off his bony chest.

Fans get to see interpersonal drama, like an episode last year when one of his OpTic comrades quit the team and accused Mr Haag of blaming him for a tough tournament loss. And although he has a mostly male audience and has made his reputation as a video game killer, he is not afraid to be vulnerable.

Fans know that Mr Haag's mother suffered from seizures for most of his life. When she died two years ago, he sat on a couch at home and recorded a YouTube video in which he thanked followers for their heartfelt messages on Twitter. He appeared distraught and shaken but also genuinely thankful.

Both his fans and his detractors agree that this connection with his public is what sets him apart and makes him "a people's champion", as Sundance DiGiovanni, chief executive of Major League Gaming, a gaming league, put it.

"If you're talking about YouTube and fan outreach, he's the No 1 player by far," said Mike Rufail, owner of Team EnVyUs, OpTic's chief rival. "But in terms of raw talent, he's a top 15 player - I wouldn't put him in that top three or four guys."

Mr Haag doesn't care what his opponents think. He makes several times his father's salary playing video games, and this year he bought a US$3,000 watch. The only thing he wants is to hold on to his job.

"I think about my future probably at least 10 times a day," he said. "I think about what if this all goes away one day? What if for some reason people just aren't in your live stream tomorrow? What if people aren't clicking on your YouTube videos tomorrow? What if your team doesn't work out and you're not performing that well and you have to quit competitively? What happens when you can't compete anymore and you want to retire because you're going insane?"

As Mr Haag was growing up in the Chicago area, his parents did not need to worry about where he was on the weekends: he was usually upstairs playing video games. Parties made him anxious. And instead of marijuana or alcohol, the sugary rush of an energy drink was his drug of choice and still is.

"He was more of a loner," said his father, Jeff Haag, 50, a carpenter. "He gamed a lot."

Up in his bedroom, clutching an Xbox controller and surrounded by posters of the Chicago Bulls and Muhammad Ali, Matt Haag had a place where he belonged. To friends and rivals he met through his Xbox, he was not a wallflower but a fierce competitor who could be a domineering teammate.

"Countless times I would put my head in the door and be like, 'Shut the hell up'," his father said. "He's like yelling at people when they weren't doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing."

His competitive career began seven years ago, when he was 15, with online tournaments organised through his Xbox, as well as small local contests held in banquet halls. Five years ago, his uncle took him to a tournament in Anaheim, California. The uncle, Greg Haag, remembered that the contest hall was hot and reeked of sweat and warm semiconductors, and that Matt Haag was disappointed with his fourth-place finish.

But the right people had already taken notice. Around the same time, Hector Rodriguez, a one-time insurance analyst who controlled a pickup team, OpTic Gaming, was trying to build it into a real business. He enticed Mr Haag to join OpTic by offering to pay for travel and lodging at tournaments.

Two years later, he went back to California for the Call of Duty championships - only this time with Mr Rodriguez instead of his uncle. The US$1 million purse made it one of the world's most prominent gaming events. He led OpTic to a first-place finish and the US$400,000 top prize. This brought him a wave of publicity and a US$100,000 cheque.

Today, Mr Rodriguez acts as Mr Haag's agent, mentor and chief scheduler. Unlike most agents, he doesn't take a cut; Mr Haag keeps all of his money from sponsors and contests. But Mr Rodriguez owns the OpTic brand and controls the merchandise sales along with OpTic's live stream and YouTube videos. In essence, this means he makes money from video ads and selling T-shirts. NYT