Surya G

Ever since Tyson “TenZ” Ngo became the first player to hit the VALORANT (now Radiant) rank in the game’s beta, he has been one of the best-known faces in VALIANT. A gamer for life, TenZ began playing Counter-Strike at just three years old. In 2017, at the age of 15, he competed in his first LAN, but it required permission from his mom. “When he was 15, one of his older teammates talked to me and convinced me to let Tyson go to Philadelphia [for Nerd Street’s Fragadelphia],” said Valerie Turcotte, TenZ’s mom. “He told me, ‘Your son has a future in gaming. He’s amazing; he’s going somewhere.’ Teams began approaching him before he graduated high school. So from that point, I knew this is what he was going to do.” One of those teams was Cloud9. One of the best-known organizations in esports, few orgs in the industry are as prestigious as the baby blue org founded by Jack Etienne. Just three days after graduating high school, TenZ hopped on a flight from his hometown in British Columbia, Canada, to Los Angeles. He competed briefly for C9’s CS: GO squad before becoming a streamer for the org as the team went through a time of tumultuous roster turnover. With the release of VALIANT in April 2020, less than a year after TenZ joined C9, an opportunity beckoned.