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“The way that we’re all brought up is like… finish school, get a comfortable 9-5 job and look forward to retirement – but I wanted to look further than that; I’ve always wanted to do something I’m truly passionate about.”
Keiron (‘Scoom’) Prescott, Gibraltarian professional gamer and popular streamer has been hitting the headlines in 2018 for his huge achievements in the international E-Sports scene – most recently representing the Rock at ‘PGI Berlin’ at the Mercedes Benz Arena alongside his team ‘Team Liquid’.
PGI was the first E-Sports international championships for ‘Player Unknowns Battle Grounds’ (PUBG), a first-person shooter game which Keiron has been playing since its early ‘alpha’ stage on invitation from the developer himself, with a live audience of 15,000 people, an online viewership of 64 million and a prize pot of US $2M.
Team Liquid came second in both third and first person mode – winning a whopping $360,000 between the four team members. On leaving the stadium the magnitude of their success sank in:
“There were thousands of people outside waiting for us, we spent over an hour taking photos with them and signing autographs… it was insane.”
But Keiron’s passion for gaming started, like all great things, with humble beginnings; as a 13 year old kid who got his first PC at the same time that Call of Duty 1 was released.
“That’s when I really got hooked onto gaming […] after that I wouldn’t say I was failing my studies, but I wasn’t focussing much on it. Don’t get me wrong, I passed my GCSE’s and AS level, but I couldn’t see a direction that I really wanted to take.”
At the age of 18, while working in the Government Employment Scheme, Keiron watched as a fellow World of Warcraft gamer called ‘Athene’ began to make good money in online poker. Keiron became Athene’s best student:
“I became what they call a ‘rake back’ hero. When you play online, the casino takes a percentage of the total pot, this is called a ‘rake’. On Poker Stars you could get a percentage of your rake back […] I’d play 24 separate games at once, play thousands of hands a week and made a little cash on the actual games but I’d make more from getting the ‘rake’ back. I’d spend 14-16 hours a day grinding, which looking back, was a bit too heavy.”
“By that point I was making more money from playing poker than my job, so I left to fully commit to playing poker. When I told my parents, they weren’t too happy but they weren’t worried – they’ve always trusted my judgement and I am always honest.”
Keiron gave up poker later on after a breakup left a sour taste in his mouth, and decided to work in a Government job with very good prospects, however Keiron didn’t feel it was right for him and once again he left his job, with nothing but his savings, to risk it all on a new journey – professional gaming.
“I got into streaming Role Play Games when ‘Twich’ came out, people found my character entertaining and I got Twich partnered in 2015 with thousands of viewers. From then on I became a streamer too.”
To date he has amassed 37,000 followers on Twich and currently travels the world to play in pro-league gaming tournaments.
You can follow his journey on…
Twich: www.twitch.tv/scoom
Twitter: @Scoom
Instagram: recscoom
Scoom’s Best Tips for a ‘Noob’ on PUBG:
Watch other good players: see what they are doing, how they are doing it and find out why it works. 
