Soham

I grew up following Evil Geniuses, so getting to spend seven years here is a pretty cool thing to be able to say. With EG shutting down operations, I'm going to miss the people I got to spend those years with.

To my peers, players, coaches, support staff and everyone who worked here, past and present, thank you. I got to work with people who were very good at very different things. A lot of what I know now came from working alongside them.

Staff handled the travel and logistics that let teams arrive ready to compete. A coach might spend weeks getting something to click before anyone watching saw the difference. Players helped colleagues understand their games and communities, and made time for content and partner work alongside everything competing asked of them. A lot of what people did for each other never got much public credit. I appreciated getting to see that up close.

A special thank you to everyone who has been part of the rebuild since 2024. We were rarely in danger of running out of problems to solve. Working through them with this group was one of the best parts of being here.

Our partners made it possible to enter new titles, return to others and take a shot at some ambitious technology ideas. We got to build tools and analytics around how people make decisions in games, and explore what those ideas could do in sports and business. That was a part of working at EG I couldn't have pictured as a kid. Thank you for the trust you put in our teams and for working through those ideas with us.

To the people who built EG before I arrived, thank you for making it something a kid like me wanted to be part of. And to the fans, thank you for choosing to spend your time with us. Whether you came for a particular player or had been following EG for years, winning was more fun because of you. Your support while a team was still finding its way meant a lot, too.

To the interns across every part of the business, I loved watching you grow in your roles, and I learned plenty from you along the way. Please keep me posted on what you're doing next.

If there's something you care about doing, I hope you'll give yourself a serious chance at it. I would've missed out on these people and a lot of worthwhile work if I'd needed to know how it would all turn out before I started. I'd still take the chance.

Right now, I'd like to help people find good places to keep doing their work. If you're looking for players, coaches, staff or teams in VALORANT (VCT, Academy and Game Changers), Delta Force, Pokémon UNITE, EA FC or the FGC, please reach out. That includes players and teams who recently parted ways with EG and are still looking for a new home.

The same goes for people across the business, including finance, marketing, social media, graphic design, content, operations, technology and analytics. If you're hiring, I'd be happy to make introductions and talk through the work I've seen firsthand.

My DMs are open if you want to catch up or talk about what's next. I'd love to hear what you're working on, whether we've known each other for years or haven't had the chance to meet yet.

Thanks for letting me be part of EG. I'm glad I got to do this with you.

The cost of the last word.

You lost the round, but somehow the new guy is losing the review. They want to know why you called the rotate, but a few minutes into the conversation they're explaining that they weren't questioning your leadership. The demo is still paused while they figure out which part of their question they're supposed to apologize for.

At 11-11, everyone needs to follow the call, including the players who would have chosen something else. The coach needs to be able to close a review too. Did the player ignore the call, or question it in the time you set aside to discuss it? You don't owe every idea a trial or every disagreement another twenty minutes. Agree on those boundaries beforehand. It's hard to trust a process that changes depending on whose decision is being questioned.

Your teammates may already be working around you more than you realize. A developing player leaves out an observation because they don't want it remembered as an attitude problem when their spot is discussed. Your coach puts off a difficult conversation because there's a match tomorrow. You may genuinely be happy to take feedback once someone has reassured you that they respect your experience, but eventually people start deciding which rounds are worth all that preparation. From your side, it might even look like things are improving because the arguments have stopped. When the same issue shows up in an official, you're frustrated because you thought everyone had agreed on how to fix it.

Maybe you've already tried what they're suggesting with a previous roster, and it left the other site without enough utility to hold. They weren't there for those scrims. Explain that, and check whether the same problem still applies. Listening doesn't obligate you to use their idea. But would you have given it more consideration coming from someone you already rate highly? Are you teaching them something they were missing, or expecting them to accept that you're the person who knows?

For anyone in the off-season, start with the conversations that stopped feeling urgent after a win. Ask what people have learned to leave out of review, then use preseason to work through how calls get made and questioned. This helps practice your response too. Can you reject an idea without making the next one harder to bring up? Does disagreeing with you change how you treat that player the next day? Do this repeatedly, while you have time to get it wrong and repair it. After three losses with another match tomorrow, you'll need something more useful than remembering that you promised to be open-minded.

Some of the patience you're used to would follow whoever held your role. Stay vigilant about the background thoughts about the role you currently hold: accommodation around it isn't proof that you matter more than the person making it. Eventually someone else will get that treatment, and your work will still count. But once you need that kind of validation to feel secure in yourself, a teammate questioning one call can sound like they're questioning whether you belong there at all. Use the position to do the work. Don't use the people to prove your worth.

Over the coming weeks, I'll be closely evaluating how different iterations of our roster perform alongside feedback from our VCT team. At the same time, we'll continue working closely with team members on our reserve roster as we evaluate the best next steps for their future, whether that's within Evil Geniuses or elsewhere. Developing and creating opportunities for emerging talent is a core principle of our Academy program and an important part of how we operate as an organization, and we'll continue investing in the players and staff who earn those opportunities. Continuous improvement is our expectation, but winning is the standard.

Show Them Who You Really Are

The best part about showing up every day as a professional esports player: you were invited into the arena in the first place. That's true whether you're the new player trying to keep up, the one everyone already calls a superstar, or even the player who seems untouched by everything around them. You don't end up in those rooms by accident. At some point, someone saw something in you and made a call. This doesn't disappear just because things get harder or expectations get louder.

It's fair to push back on that a little. Esports isn't perfect. Sometimes rosters come together for messy reasons. Sometimes people get chances early, or unevenly, or before they're fully ready. And yes, sometimes you actually are behind the curve when you first get there. None of that is crazy to admit. Being early, however, isn't the same as not belonging. Being unsure doesn't mean you're a mistake. It usually just means you're in the middle of catching up to the level you were brought in for.

That tension shows up the same way for almost everyone, just with different flavors. Newer players feel like they're trying not to get exposed. More established players start feeling like they have something to protect. Then there are players who seem completely unbothered-- they just play, they don't overthink, and pressure doesn't really touch them. Some people are naturally low-friction mentally, or they trust their game enough that outside noise doesn't move them much. Don't compare yourself to that third category as the gold standard, because sometimes it just hasn't caught up to them yet either. Over time, if nothing gets in, nothing really changes either.. and no one stays on top forever.

In all cases, it shows up in the exact moments that matter-- on stage, in scrims, in reviews, in team discussions. You hold something back, or play something safer, or wait a beat too long to say what you were thinking. If you're reading this thinking, "easy to say, but if I mess up, I actually can get benched"-- you're not wrong. This space is competitive and spots aren't permanent. Shrinking yourself doesn't really protect that either though. It just makes it harder for people to see the version of you they picked up in the first place. Those day-to-day moments are where things start to move as a unit. It won't be in some dramatic, career-defining play, but in small decisions where the frictionless way out is usually the wrong one. Trust a read even if it might be wrong. Speak up in a review even if it comes out a bit rough. Stay engaged when it would be easier to disappear for a few rounds.

For younger players, that's usually how the game slows down and starts to feel more like yours. For veterans, it's how you avoid getting tight and stuck playing not to lose. For the players who have always felt unbothered, it's how you keep growing instead of staying the same while everyone around you (including your opponent) levels up. None of this guarantees anything. You can do all of it and still hit rough patches. That's part of the job (and really, it's part of the appeal of this profession.) This isn't about pretending everything works out cleanly. Just don't make it harder on yourself by letting that internal voice run every decision.

You were already in the room. If you keep choosing to show up inside it, especially when it's uncomfortable, eventually you stop trying to prove you belong to yourself. Whatever happens after that, at least it's decided on something real and not on a version of you that hesitated and played smaller than you actually are. Whether it works out or not, you won't be stuck replaying the same moments wondering if you ever gave your team the real version of you to evaluate.

No one benefits from that. Seriously, ask your mentors and peers-- that's the only version of the story your future self will actually be okay with.

O resultado vem do trabalho. A humildade vem dos dois. Hoje começa um novo capítulo.