X30 Professional Gaming Team

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Ediz Basol
Alias: goodfornothing
Specialty: Counter-Strike 1.6
Age: 23
Location: Los Angeles, CA
How long have you been playing games competitively: 5 or 6 years

Bio:

The first game that I really ever got into was Counter-Strike. I remember my older brother showing me the beta version right when it came out and I never really stopped playing from then on. It took me a long time to get to the level I'm at right now, starting at OGL and working my way through every bottom league in CAL. I eventually caught my break when I won a Southern California LAN tournament and was picked up by Turmoil. From there I was able to get with that team to CAL-Invite and CEVO-Professional and after a short period on a few other teams (WEW, iDemise, excello, AGN) am now with x3o and have been with this basic lineup for quite some time.

As far as outside of gaming I am a senior at the University of California, Berkeley and am about to graduate. When I'm not gaming, I study, play poker, and bar crawl a little too often. Over the summer you can find me at the beautiful California beaches during most days :) I'm also in a band www.myspace.com/theofersures. We play some concerts and are in the works of putting out an album.

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Matt Iantosca
Alias: PaTyoJoN
Specialty: Counter-Strike 1.6
Age: 23
Location: Los Angeles, CA
How long have you been playing games competitively: 5 years

Bio:

I first started gaming when some of my friends from high-school introduced me to counter-strike. It was something we would do after we would play some basketball, get tired, and then relax inside and still get to play together. For the first year or two I was just playing for fun; I never imagined getting paid to play a videogame. My friends and I kept getting better and eventually entered a league, to test how good we really where. We got beat pretty badly at first, until we learned there was more to the game than just running around and trying to kill everyone. To be the best, we actually had to work together, which wasn’t the easiest thing to get used to, but gave everyone a new motivation to keep playing. I eventually got better and better, and eventually was better than all of my friends. I moved on to play with some new guys, which is when I started attending tournaments. The first place that I went to was web2zone in NYC, and this is where I gained some recognition and really jump-started my career. After graduating from high school I moved to the west coast for college and continued playing. I met some new people and attended more and more tournaments, eventually attending the CPL which at the time was the “big tournament”. I ended up playing very well there and we placed 5th in the world, which is when I realized that I could compete with anyone. I continued to play for a few more years on various teams until I made my way onto Turmoil when I was contemplating not playing anymore. I enjoyed playing with the new team and it sparked my competitive edge and got me into the game again. So today, I continue to play with impulsive and goodfornothing from Turmoil, mehLer who I’ve known for a long time, and ben who is new to the team.

I played a lot sports growing up; basketball, baseball and lacrosse. Once I got later into high school and got tired of being at practice till 8 at night in the freezing cold, I started playing more counter-strike, practicing till 10 pm at night in the warm!

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Derrick Truong
Alias: impulsivE
Specialty: Counter-Strike 1.6
Age: 20
Location: san jose, ca
How long have you been playing games competitively: summer of 2002

Bio:

I grew up playing many first person shooters such as Doom, Duke Nukem, Golden Eye, and Silent Dark. I loved console shooter games and I avoided playing counterstrike for the longest time; but when my friends introduced me to the game during the summer of 2002, I got hooked. At first I just played for fun in pubs and then I got into a local LAM team that competed in CAL-Open. Then I got my first break on basiKz in CAL-IM with my current teammate now Ben Hui. From there I caught another break when Galen Hurley got himself and I into CyberGlobe. From CyberGlobe I made a name for myself but it wasn’t until I landed on Turmoil that people started noticing me. My first big breakout match was against Team 3D at Winter CPL 06.

Some other things about myself is I took Tae Kwon Do for 8 years growing up and playing on varsity volleyball team at my high school for 4 years. I am really competitive and I am the loudest on my team. I’m known for my raw fragging ability and being able to get the entry frags.

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Benjamin Hui
Alias: benz0
Specialty: Counter-Strike 1.6
Age: 22
Location: West Covina, CA
How long have you been playing games competitively: 5 years

Bio:

I’ve always enjoyed participating in competition, whether it be sports or gaming. I played baseball for my high school team and in football leagues growing up as a kid. I discovered Counter-strike in high school when my friend introduced me to it. I just played in public servers, but I was instantly hooked. My first clan was a pub clan with twenty members, but as I played more I became more interested in competitive CS.

Besides gaming, I go to school full-time. I enjoy working out as much as I can and hang out whenever I can, usually enjoying a few drinks.

www.gotfrag.com

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Dan Mehler
Alias: mehLer
Specialty: Counter-Strike 1.6
Age: 21
Location: New Jersey
How long have you been playing games competitively: 8 years

Bio:

I started playing Counter-Strike the same way 99% of the community started, through a friend. Once he showed me the basics, I was hooked. My competitive gaming career started with just a team of friends, but after time I saw my in game skills evolving too quickly for my friends to keep up. I found my way onto better skilled teams over the years and eventually join Green Berets, which I called home for about 3 years. After GB, my next big team was Turmoil, which is the same core of guys that make up the current x3o CS 1.6 team.

I consider myself to be a very relaxed person, I tend to just go with the flow and take things as they come. I've always been very active in sports my whole life, I started playing competitive soccer when I was 5 and continued all through high school. When I'm not gaming you can usually find me hanging out with my friends until all hours of the night.

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Justin Summy
Alias: sunman
Specialty: Counter-Strike 1.6
Age: 22
Location: Grantville, PA
How long have you been playing games competitively: 7 Years

Bio:

My name is Justin Summy, I am currently 22 years old from Grantville, Pennsylvania. My hobbies, besides counter-strike, are talking to my friends and driving my car (06 Dodge Charger R/T Daytona). Although I played soccer and baseball for many years during school, I still loved gaming more. I started casually gaming in my early years on consoles such as Super Nintendo and Nintendo64. From there I got my first PC which I enjoyed playing games on even more. The game that got me hooked on First Person Shooters was Delta Force from Novalogic. I played that for about a year online and joined my first clan (or squad as it was called in that game). I play many other types of games on the side for fun, but FPS games were always something that attracted me the most. I discovered Counter-strike from a PC Gamer magazine in which the demo CD contained the mod. Lucky for me I had the game Half-Life, the game in which you needed to play counter-strike since it ran off of it's engine. I was hooked from the first day I played it. I began exploring the community counter-strike had in pubs for the next year. I worked my way up the ranks of different clans to become more known and become a better player. After finally making my first big break at my second CPL event in which I helped my team (zEx) take down eoL the euro powerhouse with "The Shot Heard Round The World" (as some call it). It's been roughly 6 years since my first LAN event though and I can't count how many I've been to since then. I have traveled to China three times, France four times, Sweden, Spain, and all across the United States and Canada to play counter-strike. I have won big events such as: WSVG, ESWC, CGI, and CGS Season 1, all of which had a 1st place pot ranging from $40,000 - $75,000. Along with LAN play I practice and compete in online tournaments every day in hopes of improving my individual game and working with my team. Gaming is my passion, my hobby, my current job, and hopefully my career. I hope one day when a kid is asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" They will say, "I want to be a professional gamer." That way I can say I was one of the first.

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Tarik Elkhatib
Alias: rockyte
Specialty: Counter-Strike 1.6
Age: 20
Location: Burke, VA
How long have you been playing games competitively: Since Nintendo

Bio:

For starters my name is Tarik Elkhatib if you're wondering my name is Egyptian but I am only half and the other half Swiss. I was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1986 i am currently 20 years old and live in Burke, V.A. I have lived in Virginia since 2001 but up until then i traveled and move just about every 2-3 years because of my mom's job with the state department. I was born in egypt and lived there till i was about 7 years old. After that we lived in Algeria for about 2 years then got evacuated after a civil war broke out, we were then temporarily stationed in the US for about 4 months. Then we moved back to Egypt for another 2 years until my mom's tour ended there. Our next post was Moscow, Russia what a change that was cold weather and a lot of snow, being so young and seeing snow for the first time. While we lived in Moscow I learned how to ice skate and started playing ice hockey for fun with friends. After Moscow we then moved to South Korea and lived there for about 3 years. Ive played soccer and basketball ever since i can remember in youth leagues every season and in every place ive lived. I played football for my high school in Virginia. After graduating High School in 2005 I began to attend Northern Virginia Community College taking a couple classes here and there but not really being serious about it. I do however plan on returning full time in Spring 07 so i can finally get all my credits and transfer.

Lucky for me and my sisters our parents thought it would be a good idea to have a computer in the house since it started to become popular. From then on i slowly taught myself how to use a computer and play games on it and install stuff through DOS. My first FPS (First Person Shooter) games were doom and quake 1 I had to play on an old Packard Bell computer we had in 1996 i think it had like 175mhz and 16mb of ram. Pretty top of the line for its time and pricey. At the time the only games i really played were RTS (Real Time Strategy) games like warcraft, and starcraft. Those games were pretty big in Korea and were always played at the local PC BANGS ( Korean LAN Centers) that i went to with my friends. It slowly began to become a regular thing and me and my friends loved going to play starcraft on computes that were way better than ours. I didn't really start competitive gaming until I started to play counter-strike sometime 2002. Yet again i had a really bad computer and 56k internet so it wasn't fun to play with all the latency problems. So i finally got a better graphics card and started to pub on 56k with a good friend of mine. We used to pub on the same server everyday because we would ping 190ish to it and for 56k that was great. After that i took a break from playing counter-strike because i wanted to wait until i got Cox high-speed internet. So finally one day after I got back from a snowboarding trip with some friends my dad told me he got cable internet and that's when it all started. I started to play a lot more and more as days went on and strived to get better and better.

The competitive side of me playing counter-strike didn't kick in till i had found out about a local LAN center in Virginia called BlackOut. I started to go there a bunch and play alot of counter-strike on LAN we played a lot of maps like dust1, iceworld, and awp_map all the time. Then one day they announced that they were going to have a counter-strike 5v5 tournament, so we gathered 5 of our friends and made a team. We had absolutely no idea how to play counter-strike competitively and we went into our first match just running around and buying anything like a pub. Needless to say we got beat pretty bad I don't even think we got 1 round. Later on we found out that the team that one was a pug of local pro players that included Ksharp and cBz. After we saw how good they were me and my friends went on a mission to get better so we found out about online leagues and started to really play competitively that was in maybe 2003. After that i just slowly worked my way up the ladder and began to get better and better. I didn't really get into higher level counter-strike until i was finally given the chance by a local team whom i was friends with at the time called .pV| ( Pernicious Vengeance). The leader of the team d1m0rphism went to high school with me and I guess saw that i wasn't to bad at the game and they needed another player. So i left my cal-im team at the time and joined them to play in Cevo-p Season 1 and Cal-p at the time because they had just gotten moved down from Cal-invite. After that i just kept hopping around from team to team and going to a lot of local LAN tournaments. I actually didn't attend my first major lan tournament until Sept 2006 which was the WCG USA finals in las vegas, that was with my local lan team viGor at the time, we competed in and had just won Cal-p. Some of my previos teams and leagues. Playing without Pants (cal-o), D!nked (local va, cal-im, cevo-im), VA.valor (local va), Tranq0 (cal-m)x3o (Cal-i, Cevo-p, Cpl, Mostly VA lanteam), Visual Gaming (Cal-I), pV Pernicious Vengeance (CAL-P. Cevo-P, UGS-I, VA Lan Team), viGor (CAL-P champs, CEVO-SP, VA Lan Team)

Some LAN Accomplishments:

1st X3O CS 1.6 Tournament 01/07
1st DC-LAN Winter 01/07
1st at web2zone PNY March Madness 07
1st at c3 06
1st ECL summer 06
2nd - PNY March Madness 07 overall
2nd - WCG Northeast Qualifier 2006
2nd - WCG east coast qualifier 05
9th - WCG USA Finals in Las Vegas
3rd - c3 summer2005 tournament
3rd - cyberhub 2/24/07
3rd - c3 feb 11th 2006
3rd - x3o 06
3rd - Holodek $6K CS 1.6 Tournament 06
5th - w2z winter 06
9th -16th - CPL Winter Championships 12/06
5th - Lethal Gamers Boot Camp 12/06

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Mason Dickens
Alias: mason
Specialty: Counter-Strike Source
Age: 21
Location: Houston, TX
How long have you been playing games competitively: 8 years

Bio:

My name is Mason Dickens; I’m 21 years old and was born and raised in Houston, TX. I started out gaming back in 2000 when I used to play a game called Rogue Spear with my older brother. Rogue Spear was a popular FPS game, but never took off competitively. There was only websites that hosted ladders for us, which is very different then a league. I continued to play RS for about 3 years until my brother finally convinced me that I would never get anywhere in it and I should switch to Counter-Strike because there was actually tournament’s with money involved. I gave it a try and was instantly hooked, so there was no going back from there. I have been playing CS competitively for many years now and have been lucky enough to travel around to US to many LAN Tournaments. Almost a year ago a new league called The CGS came out but they don’t support 1.6 in the league. However they do have the game Counter-Strike Source. I instantly made the change in efforts to try to make this new league to get to where all of us gamers have been trying to get to for our whole gaming career. I joined up with x3o last January and I haven’t been more happy with a team in my career. I am still trying to make it into the CGS so we will see what happens. In my free time away from gaming I love to hang out with family and friends. I also enjoy spending time on the golf course.

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Keven Cuevas Lariviere
Alias: AZK
Specialty: Counter-Strike Source
Age: 17
Location: Montreal , Quebec , Canada
How long have you been playing games competitively: 6 Years

Bio:

My name is Keven Cuevas Lariviere and I am from Montreal , Quebec. For those who are wondering I am half Spanish and half French-Canadian. I was born in Montreal and have been playing video games since I was about 5. Although I played soccer for a few years during school, I still preferred gaming. Besides gaming my hobbies are going out with friends and watching hockey. In my early years I had a Super Nintendo; and I remember playing with my friends for hours. But when I was 8 I received my own computer and from then on I loved gaming even more. The first games I played casually were Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft. The next game I bought was Unreal Tournament (99). After that I instantly became addicted to FPS (First Person Shooter) games. The next game on my list was Call Of Duty 1. I played in pubs for about 2 weeks before joining my first clan. I'm too embarrassed to say the name of it but I met some really great individuals on that team who taught me a lot about gaming. This developed my competitive nature for gaming. In about 2 to 3 months my team was dominating the TWL CoD1 Ladders. I soon found out about CAL which was another competitive online gaming league. I joined a few clans in CoD1 and eventually made it to CAL-Invite, the highest level of play in the league.

After that, my friends and I from CoD switched to Counter-Strike Source and that’s where it all started. We attended our first local LAN after only playing the game for about 3 weeks and managed to get 4th. After such an achievement we thought highly of ourselves considering 2 of the teams above us we're CAL-Invite at the time. The team that got 3rd at that LAN was eGe. They were the best local team at the time and after that event they offered me a spot on their team. I’m not sure where I would be today if I didn’t accept their offer. I learned so much from those guys which who were all known players and much better than I. We quickly moved our way up in CAL and CEVO while attending as many LANs as possible and placing top 2 in the majority of them. Here I am today with Team x3o; my goal is clear to me, I want to attend as many LANs as I can and win all of them. Gaming is much more than a simple hobby for me It’s my passion and I practice everyday to become a better player.

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: Philippe-Olivier Crepin
Alias: PEX
Specialty: Counter-Strike Source
Age: 18
Location: Montreal , Quebec , Canada
How long have you been playing games competitively: 4 years

Bio:

Hi, my name is Philippe-Olivier Crepin, but my friends call me P-O. I am currently 18 years old and I’m from Montreal, Quebec. I just graduated from High-School and I will be attending College next year. My gaming career started when I was five, playing games with on the Super Nintendo with my little sister. A couple years after my lovely great grandmother bought me a Nintendo-64 when the console just came out, which changed everything. I was about 8 years old at that time and I remember playing a lot of consoles with my friends. I had a tree house in my backyard with electricity making it the coolest spot to hang out. We had pretty much every console. When my family bought our 1st computer I really enjoyed playing Diablo2 and WarCraft3. One day my friend invited me to his house to try the new game he had just bought, Counter-Strike 1.6. It was just amazing! It was the kind of first person shooter game I was looking for. We played all day and the next day I went out and bought it myself. I could play a full day in public servers just having fun playing online with friends. Being able to play online on the computer is what drove me to continue to play games. The competitiveness of the game just pushed me to get better then everyone else. I still wasn’t playing those games competitively and I didn’t know much about gaming tournaments and competitions.

My competitive career started when Counter-Strike Source came out, which quickly became my new favorite game. Shortly after I found out about a local LAN tournament that I could compete in and actually win real money. I started taking gaming seriously and practicing every day. After winning my 1st LAN tournament I just couldn't stop playing the game. The sheer adrenaline and intensity of LAN was what made it so desirable.

Watching professional matches and demos really helped to teach me the in-and-outs of the game. I found myself at the top level pretty fast, with the first Team eGe. At this point eGe was an all French team full of experienced players. We had so much fun together. Keven, "AZK," was on the team aswell, and I’ve been playing with Keven for almost 3 years. We have been on the same teams for a while such as eGe, Frantic, Guardians and now proudly playing with Team x3o. Outside of gaming I played soccer and football when I was in school, but now i just play sports for fun. Some of my hobbies that I really enjoy are snowboarding and skiing. I spend most of my free time with my friends, my family and my girlfriend. I practice and put so much dedication in hopes of improving my individual play and chemistery with my team. The gaming scene is getting bigger every year, you can consider now gaming as a job, even a career. Hopefully it will just keep getting bigger, because gaming is my passion.

Gamer Stats:

Full Name: William David Ritson
Alias: icel0re
Specialty: Quake 4
Age: 24
Location: Bowling Green, KY
How long have you been playing games competitively: 7 Years

Bio:

I got involved in gaming back in the late 90's, around 1996-7 I think it was. My mother had just purchased a computer for us to use at home (P166 - 16mb ram) and I was absolutely thrilled at the thought of playing games on something other than my super Nintendo, or Sega Genesis. After a short spell with Duke Nukem 3D, I met someone in my small town of <4000 people who was going to add more ram to my mothers computer, he noted that his son, who was in his early 30's played this game called "Quake" and I should give him a call and see if he could get it onto my computer for me, the man who got me all started was Perry "[ac]k1lbitch" Macy. I saw it running on his computer for the first time shortly there after and was completely spell bound by the monsters, the guns, the 3d movement, everything! He was running a low end p133, so the idea of my 166 was pretty amazing to him.

Needless to say after that, I met another local clanmate of him named Neil "[ac]FungusButt" Bosley. Neil was the uncle of a girl I was in grade school with, so me and him instantly had something in common. We would play modem to modem games where I would dial his house (he wanted the 0 ping, haha!) and we would play the single player together, beating it, or even against one another, this was my first true taste of 1v1 deathmatch. After a few weeks, he set me up with a copy of "Gamespy", a server browsing tool, and showed me how to play online, at this point, the addiction process had begun. I mainly played on my local friends clan server, which was for people with high pings only. The competition was friendly, the people light hearted, this is what really made me want to see if I could become something more at this game. After getting into an argument with 1 of the server admins, I was asked not to play there for a while, and during that time, their server went down for service.

At this point, I had no real place to play. I had places to play, there were thousands of other servers, but I didn't know where to start, seeing as my home was gone. This is when I ventured out on my own for the first times, playing 1v1's, and team deathmatch games with some of the better modem players in North America at that time. I struggled as most new players do for some time, but the results eventually came. I was making my way up the ranks of the clan scene, starting low, and by 1998 I was in what many would call a "good team". This team was known as [ra], or Red Abyss. This is where I met another Kentucky player by the name of "Kevin "Clubber" Crask. He lived around an hour away, and would sit on servers with me, and other members of the team and they would attack me in certain situations, often 2 versus 1, or even 3 versus 1 to simulate real game situations. These were the first people who really put time, SERIOUS time into helping me mature as a player. Quake at that point was dying off, as Quake 2 was fresh on the minds of a lot of players, and I was again looking for a team, and perhaps even another style of Quake to play. This is where I met the infamous "Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel". We were both highly skilled modem players at this time, with no where really to go, and the team deathmatch scene was in terrible shape, so we talked and decided to join a "Clan Arena" team known as "TmG", or The Maniacs Guild for short. Clan Arena was fast paced, full of all the best deathmatch players, plus you got to start with all the guns and armor, "Score!" I thought. John and I headed up what was to be the most deadly modem division of arena players in clan arena history, as in over a year playing together, we lost only twice to other modem teams.

Quake 2 had really picked up steam on the west coast, especially with the "PGL" or professional gaming league heading up the battle. New players were emerging, and the action was intense. Quake 2's significantly slower speed didn't really appeal to me, or many of the guys inside our social circle of gaming friends, so we figured we wait it out for Quake 3, hoping it held more promise, and our interest for that matter. In 1999, while on vacation, q3 test hit. As soon as I got home, I downloaded it on my new computer and started fragging away, all with an amazing 85 frames per second. I was a child again! I devoted endless hours on weekends to this game, vowing to get back to the top of the scene again and proving that I was someone not to be reckoned with. 1999 ended with the official release of the game, and gave way to the year 2000, and a ton of lans in which I would come to meet a lot of the guys I am still competing with, and against today. Needless to say, after 2000, the rest was history, I acquired a SDSL connection at my house and began playing with low ping at home for the first time. This is where my real practice began. Years would pass as I again moved up the ranked, finally joining a primarily Russian team named "CCCP". CCCP at the time featured high class spotlight players like exorcist, ni3, kuku, dkphenom, and others at that time. They took a gamble on me, and it was one they would never regret. This is where my first professional level experience came into play. We played in every invite level tourney for years to come, and had many 2nd place finish's, and several of our players ended up achieving international fame. In 2001, we even merged with European Quake Team "EYEballers" out of Sweden, our reputation grew even more.

Quake 3 later died off, lans stopped due to the emergence of this evil game called "Counter-Strike", Which brings me to Quake 4 where I have really come into my own, establishing myself as a consistent top player in the united states finally, and one that is respected by players everywhere. My continued competitiveness I think stems from the fact that I played 3 sports in highschool all 4 years, and I have played 2 sports in college, those being Division 1 Mens rowing, and Division 1 Mens Rugby. If I'm not trying to rail you online, ill try and tackle you in person, so to speak. Im a competition nut, I love the idea of competing with someone, or against others for the common goal of saying you won, which this is what drives me to become the best player I can be today. In my free time, I am any other college junior. Weekends are filled with practice online of course, but mainly going out to parties, the occasional club, going home to see my parents, having with my car (00 mustang GT) or doing anything outside, weather depending. I'm a very all around, well balanced person I think, and its something that gives me great enjoyment through out the year.

Meet the Team x3o

Counter-Strike 1.6

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Counter-Strike Source

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