The unlikely story of a 23-year-old Venezuelan who makes 6 figures playing video games in America | ||
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“Back in Venezuela, you worry every day about what you are going to do, what job you will get, how you are going to keep yourself going,” Ruiz recently told Business Insider. “I thought life in the United States would be easier, more advanced, less stressful.” These days, Ruiz gets paid to play "League of Legends," the world’s most popular competitive video game. He’s a star on Team Liquid, a professional team in the North American League of Legends Championship Series (LCS). He earns about $100,000 a year from salary, sponsorships, and revenue from the streaming website Twitch. Like all of his teammates, Ruiz practices 10 hours or more a day with few breaks. He spends his little off-time browsing Reddit, binge-watching Netflix, hanging out with his girlfriend, or video-chatting his family in Venezuela. On a recent Monday, Ruiz sat hunched on an air mattress in his team’s cramped duplex in Santa Monica. Dressed in athletic shorts, a T-shirt with Team Liquid’s stenciled horse logo, and rimless glasses, Ruiz looked more like a studious athlete than the slacker-gamer stereotype. As he fidgeted with his hands and rubbed his knees, the quiet gamer recounted his improbable journey to the US. It started with a game. Obsessed with games from the start
As a child, games fascinated him. The first one he ever owned was the classic Nintendo 64 game, "Super Mario 64." He was 5 years old. “Every day after school I would play it — I would sit there for hours,” Ruiz says. Ruiz associated gaming with the US because most of the games he played — including “Super Mario 64” — were in English. He taught himself to understand English so that he could know “what the hell was going on” in the games.
“I told my mom, ‘Every kid has one at school. It’s important for your grades,’” Ruiz says with a smile. The computer was a hand-me-down Pentium IV. He was amazed and hooked it up to the internet. The first thing he did was download a popular strategy game, “Age of Empires 2.” The 47-megabyte file took a week to download. “I didn’t realize how slow the computer was until we got another one years later. I just thought that was how all computers were,” Ruiz says. Finding a community of gamersBeing one of the first kids on the block with a computer was exciting, but the real thrill came when the soft-spoken teenager started visiting his mother’s internet café. There he found a community of gamers who shared his enthusiasm. The kids stayed for hours playing games he hadn’t heard of. The commute to the café was an hour long, but Ruiz began making it every day after school. For a kid very much in his shell, the café gave Ruiz a social outlet. The most popular games at the café were multiplayer online battle arena games, or MOBAs, like “Defense of the Ancients” and “Heroes of Newerth.” Unlike most games of that time, MOBAs were free and downloadable. When Ruiz was 17, the café gamers introduced him to "League of Legends," a new MOBA that became the next game of choice at the café. He hated the game at first. While League was similar to the other MOBAs, Ruiz thought it wasn't as freeform as other MOBAs, and required strategies he didn’t like using. Ruiz is an impatient person, he says, and if he doesn’t get a game at first, he quits. It wasn’t until a year later that Ruiz started playing "League of Legends" seriously. He began by exploiting a loophole.
The game’s ranking system is designed to match players with others with equivalent skills, by progressing them through a ladder of leagues ranging from Bronze to Challenger. Rather than climb the ladder, Ruiz played multiple accounts. He’d practice on an account until he reached a difficult level where the game forces players to fight at a disadvantage against much higher-level players. Instead of battling through, he’d abandon the account. He preferred crushing players below his skill level. “I liked being able to outplay people and to abuse the mistakes that people make,” Ruiz says. As Ruiz got better, he began competing in online tournaments but had a tough time because of his shoddy internet connection, a constant problem in Venezuela. Often, on the day of the tournament, his internet connection slowed and delayed his actions mid-game. For a game relying on speed and reaction time, it was a huge disadvantage. Sometimes, his slow connection prevented him from playing at all. Around the same time, Ruiz began attending college to study engineering. He took to the new environment with vigor and stopped playing games for his first semester. For a time it looked as if he might put games behind him. “I was getting good grades. I socialized a lot. I was excited about the career,” Ruiz says. After the semester ended, he received a dose of reality about the job market in Venezuela. Former engineering students told him that, if he was lucky, he would get a low-paying government job and, if he wasn’t, he’d end up driving a taxi. “Why would I spend six years studying engineering just to become a taxi driver?” Ruiz says. A 'cheat code' for life
His reputation as a top player created a lot of demand for his services. Before long, he was making $2,000 a month boosting accounts for Americans who paid in US dollars. This was a big deal in a country as dollar-hungry as Venezuela. When he sold the dollars to locals for bolivars, he made three or four times what he would make in an engineering job. “It felt like a cheat code,” Ruiz says. At first, Ruiz would boost for a couple of hours a day in between classes. As he gained more clients, he played more and more. His grades slipped. He was making so much money that he decided college wasn’t worth it anymore. “My mom wasn’t OK with it. She told me I was crazy and didn’t understand what I was doing. When I started supporting the family [with my earnings] she understood,” Ruiz says. Ruiz quickly ascended the game’s ranks when he was playing on his own account. It didn’t take long for the pros to notice him. A risk | ||
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Two years ago, 21-year-old Diego “Quas” Ruiz flew from Venezuela to Los Angeles for a job playing video games. It was a drastic move. Ruiz had no friends or family in LA, and he didn’t know how long his newly formed team would last. But for him America promised more stability than his native country.
As Ruiz got older, he desperately wanted to try computer games. There was one problem: Computers were expensive and rare in Venezuela. Luckily, Ruiz’s mother had purchased an internet café adjacent to the pharmacy. He persuaded her to bring one of the older units home.
The realization killed Ruiz’s enthusiasm for school. While he didn’t drop out, Ruiz returned his attention to gaming. He’d heard about a lucrative side job for skilled "League of Legends" players called ELO-Boosting. Top gamers could earn a fee by playing on other people’s accounts to help them attain high ranks. 
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Five global banks just proved that no one can stop Wall Street from breaking the law | ||
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This week, five Wall Street banks pleaded guilty to felony charges related to interest rate rigging and foreign exchange manipulation. The guilty pleas mean the banks are literally felons, and it's a distinct shift in the way law enforcement has dealt with Wall Street in the past. Lawsuits and legal fees are nothing new for the banks: since the financial crisis, they have essentially become the cost of doing business on Wall Street. Now, apparently, that cost includes both legal fees and criminal charges. The thing is, no one seems to be fazed. This case has nothing to do with the financial crisis. Rather, a couple years ago, traders from a handful of banks manipulated the London Interbank Offered Rate, an important interest rate used around the world as a benchmark for mortgages and other loans. Other traders manipulated the prices at which banks bought or sold currencies. No individual traders from the guilty banks, which include Barclays, Citicorp, JPMorgan, RBS, and UBS, have been held criminally accountable. But the banks are paying $5.6 billion in fines (together with Bank of America, which is only paying a civil penalty, not a criminal one). You might think the criminal charges are a big win for regulators. Finally, the banks are taking responsibility for their crooked employees, rather than pawning the blame off on overseas subsidiaries! But the reality is probably less of a triumph for regulators than it seems. Just labelsPeter Henning, a Wayne State University securities law professor, thinks the whole ordeal will be just another write-off for the banks, like any "one-time" legal fee you might find in a bank's earnings report. He wonders if, for the banks, pleading guilty to felonies and paying criminal fines is just "another cost of doing business" — a routine but acceptable drag on profits, no different than paying salaries, rents, and utility bills.
The banks are paying a hefty amount of money for the crimes (Barclays alone is paying $2.4 billion). But it's not like they haven't had to do that before. The difference this time is that some people were expecting that criminal charges – rather than civil charges – would lead to some sort of collateral consequence for the banks. Instead, all five banks were granted waivers from the SEC that will allow them to carry on with business as usual. They won't have to deal with any limitations on loans, deposit-taking, securities issuing, or other restrictions that they would otherwise have faced. The waivers thing is not new, either. SEC Commissioner Kara Stein, who is not a fan of the procedure, pointed out that Barclays has already gotten three waivers since 2007, UBS has had seven, JPMorgan has had six, and RBS has had three. In return for this round of waivers, though, the banks agreed to a three-year probation period in which they promise not to commit any more felonies.
That's a nice promise, but Henning believes this week's punishments are unlikely to change anything on the Street. He compared the criminal penalties to an individual getting a $100 speeding ticket: no matter how you label it, you're still going to be paying the money. "If it’s called a civil penalty or a criminal fine, do you care?" he said. "It’s the same $100. And with the banks, if you have to pay $2 billion or $1 billion, do you care what label it gets? Or which federal regulator gets it?" Wall Street ethicsThe news of the banks' punishments coincided this week with the release of a study on Wall Street's ethics from Labaton Sucharow and the University of Notre Dame. The study revealed that a quarter of finance workers would break the law in order to make an extra $10 million. It also found that 17% of Wall Streeters believe it is "unlikely" that top bosses would tell enforcement about illegal activity. The deeper worry here is that Wall Street's beliefs may have shifted from 'it's OK to do wrong, so long as you don't get caught' to 'it doesn't really matter, even if you do get caught.'
Bank executives reject this notion. They say their companies' crimes were committed only because of a few bad individuals. JPMorgan, for example, issued a statement saying the bad conduct was "principally attributable to a single trader (who has since been dismissed) and his coordination with traders at other firms." The firm's CEO, Jamie Dimon, said, "The lesson here is that the conduct of a small group of employees, or of even a single employee, can reflect badly on all of us." Likewise, Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins said, "I share the frustration of shareholders and colleagues that some individuals have once more brought our company and industry into disrepute." Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Here's What They Found Inside A Forgotten Wall Street Time Capsule  | ||
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This Berlin fintech company has the most simple-but-brilliant way of boosting your cash savings we've ever heard | ||
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Business Insider took a brief trip to Berlin as part of Socialbakers' Engage 2015 conference to meet with a bunch of startups in the city's thriving tech scene. Of all the companies we saw, WeltSparen (or SavingGlobal, its English-language brand) was the one that really blew our minds. It is working on a banking business that is so simple it's brilliant. It could totally change the way you handle money in your savings account, and earn you a lot of extra cash in the process. The company's founders — alumni from McKinsey, Deutsche Banke, and Goldman Sachs — noticed that within Europe, different banks in different countries offer wildly different rates of interest. That is a weird phenomenon: In an efficient, competitive market that is supposed to be governed by a single currency from the European Central Bank, all local banks should offer similar interest rates. (Those rates are close to 0% right now.) But they don't. From the lowest rate to the highest, the difference between interest rates can be more than double, as this chart from SavingGlobal shows (apologies for the image quality):
With a bank in Italy offering nearly twice the interest of a bank in Spain, you'd be crazy to keep your cash savings in Spain. EU law gives consumers the right to open bank accounts wherever they want in the continent, but ever since the crash of Icelandic banks in 2008 people have tended to avoid foreign banks. So SavingGlobal has developed a web site that lets people register once, and then dump their money at any cooperating bank in any country they want, for a fixed term of at least one year. If you're an avid saver this is a dream come true (especially when interest rates begin rising again as the economy strengthens). Why get 1% in Spain when you can get 2% in Italy? Even better, SavingGlobal is working to end the "hook offers" that banks have used to exploit customers in Europe for years. These offers entice customers to open new accounts at high rates of interest. But then, after a few months, the offer term expires and the rate resets back to nearly zero, or the cash is automatically rolled over into a low-interest account. Because opening new accounts is tedious work, customers tend to just leave the money there. Banks that offer accounts through SavingGlobal cannot use hook offers or rollovers, SG's head of Europe Katharina Luth told Business Insider. Cooperating banks get exposed to new customers, and pay SavingGlobal a commission for bringing them in, so the customer isn't charged for SG's services. In return, customers get higher rates of interest. The company has a long way to go before everyone can take advantage of it, according to CEO Tamaz Georgadze. For now, it is only available in Germany although a Europe-wide launch is planned. And customers must have at least 10,000 euros to invest. (That limit is coming down to 5,000 soon.) It's also, unusually, a desktop-only product. (A mobile app will be launched eventually but the target market of older, interest-chasing savers is heavily desktop-based anyway.) And, as Georgadze says, "the background logistics are difficult." The company must persuade each individual local bank to join up as a partner and let foreign customers sign up for accounts. It took SavingGlobal 15 months to get its first two banks to agree. Now the company has 10 banks on board. Here are some of the stats:
SavingGlobal is hoping to become "Amazon for deposits." In theory, the SavingGlobal model could eventually be rolled out globally. The main barrier to this is local banks' failure to be cool with doing digital business — most banks in most countries still require customers to physically walk into an actual bank in order to make a first deposit. Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Here's what happens when you drop an Apple Watch face down on cement  | ||
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The unlikely story of a 23-year-old Venezuelan who makes 6 figures playing video games in America | ||
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“Back in Venezuela, you worry every day about what you are going to do, what job you will get, how you are going to keep yourself going,” Ruiz recently told Business Insider. “I thought life in the United States would be easier, more advanced, less stressful.” These days, Ruiz gets paid to play "League of Legends," the world’s most popular competitive video game. He’s a star on Team Liquid, a professional team in the North American League of Legends Championship Series (LCS). He earns about $100,000 a year from salary, sponsorships, and revenue from the streaming website Twitch. Like all of his teammates, Ruiz practices 10 hours or more a day with few breaks. He spends his little off-time browsing Reddit, binge-watching Netflix, hanging out with his girlfriend, or video-chatting his family in Venezuela. On a recent Monday, Ruiz sat hunched on an air mattress in his team’s cramped duplex in Santa Monica. Dressed in athletic shorts, a T-shirt with Team Liquid’s stenciled horse logo, and rimless glasses, Ruiz looked more like a studious athlete than the slacker-gamer stereotype. As he fidgeted with his hands and rubbed his knees, the quiet gamer recounted his improbable journey to the US. It started with a game. Obsessed with games from the start
As a child, games fascinated him. The first one he ever owned was the classic Nintendo 64 game, "Super Mario 64." He was 5 years old. “Every day after school I would play it — I would sit there for hours,” Ruiz says. Ruiz associated gaming with the US because most of the games he played — including “Super Mario 64” — were in English. He taught himself to understand English so that he could know “what the hell was going on” in the games.
“I told my mom, ‘Every kid has one at school. It’s important for your grades,’” Ruiz says with a smile. The computer was a hand-me-down Pentium IV. He was amazed and hooked it up to the internet. The first thing he did was download a popular strategy game, “Age of Empires 2.” The 47-megabyte file took a week to download. “I didn’t realize how slow the computer was until we got another one years later. I just thought that was how all computers were,” Ruiz says. Finding a community of gamersBeing one of the first kids on the block with a computer was exciting, but the real thrill came when the soft-spoken teenager started visiting his mother’s internet café. There he found a community of gamers who shared his enthusiasm. The kids stayed for hours playing games he hadn’t heard of. The commute to the café was an hour long, but Ruiz began making it every day after school. For a kid very much in his shell, the café gave Ruiz a social outlet. The most popular games at the café were multiplayer online battle arena games, or MOBAs, like “Defense of the Ancients” and “Heroes of Newerth.” Unlike most games of that time, MOBAs were free and downloadable. When Ruiz was 17, the café gamers introduced him to "League of Legends," a new MOBA that became the next game of choice at the café. He hated the game at first. While League was similar to the other MOBAs, Ruiz thought it wasn't as freeform as other MOBAs, and required strategies he didn’t like using. Ruiz is an impatient person, he says, and if he doesn’t get a game at first, he quits. It wasn’t until a year later that Ruiz started playing "League of Legends" seriously. He began by exploiting a loophole.
The game’s ranking system is designed to match players with others with equivalent skills, by progressing them through a ladder of leagues ranging from Bronze to Challenger. Rather than climb the ladder, Ruiz played multiple accounts. He’d practice on an account until he reached a difficult level where the game forces players to fight at a disadvantage against much higher-level players. Instead of battling through, he’d abandon the account. He preferred crushing players below his skill level. “I liked being able to outplay people and to abuse the mistakes that people make,” Ruiz says. As Ruiz got better, he began competing in online tournaments but had a tough time because of his shoddy internet connection, a constant problem in Venezuela. Often, on the day of the tournament, his internet connection slowed and delayed his actions mid-game. For a game relying on speed and reaction time, it was a huge disadvantage. Sometimes, his slow connection prevented him from playing at all. Around the same time, Ruiz began attending college to study engineering. He took to the new environment with vigor and stopped playing games for his first semester. For a time it looked as if he might put games behind him. “I was getting good grades. I socialized a lot. I was excited about the career,” Ruiz says. After the semester ended, he received a dose of reality about the job market in Venezuela. Former engineering students told him that, if he was lucky, he would get a low-paying government job and, if he wasn’t, he’d end up driving a taxi. “Why would I spend six years studying engineering just to become a taxi driver?” Ruiz says. A 'cheat code' for life
His reputation as a top player created a lot of demand for his services. Before long, he was making $2,000 a month boosting accounts for Americans who paid in US dollars. This was a big deal in a country as dollar-hungry as Venezuela. When he sold the dollars to locals for bolivars, he made three or four times what he would make in an engineering job. “It felt like a cheat code,” Ruiz says. At first, Ruiz would boost for a couple of hours a day in between classes. As he gained more clients, he played more and more. His grades slipped. He was making so much money that he decided college wasn’t worth it anymore. “My mom wasn’t OK with it. She told me I was crazy and didn’t understand what I was doing. When I started supporting the family [with my earnings] she understood,” Ruiz says. Ruiz quickly ascended the game’s ranks when he was playing on his own account. It didn’t take long for the pros to notice him. A risk | ||
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