The Brakpan North resident, who represents professional e-sports team Goliath Gaming, recently qualified to represent South Africa in the World Electronic Sports Games (WESG) in China in March where he will take on the best of the best in the military science fiction media franchise game StarCraft II.
“I started playing StarCraft when I was 13 years old and have been playing StarCraft for almost eight years now,” said Williams.
“My older brother was the one who got me into StarCraft II and competitive gaming.
“I remember playing all kinds of real-time strategy (RTS) games with my brother like WarCraft III, StarCraft Broodwar and Command and Conquer.
“In 2011 my brother bought StarCraft II and I instantly fell in love with the game.
“He helped me build my first ever gaming computer and helped me out with internet so that I could play and that’s pretty much where everything started.”
This isn’t the first time that the local electronic gamer will fly the flag for his country in China.
“The first time I qualified for China was when I played in the African and Middle Eastern qualifiers in Dubai in August 2016 where I got second place and qualified for the grand finals in January 2017.
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“The second time was when placed first in the South African qualifiers in January 2018 and qualified for the grand finals in March 2018.
“This year will be the third time that I will be playing the grand finals in China.”
The local is hoping to make it out of the group stage and place well at the WESG.
He added that competing at the highest level on the world stage ‘is one of the best experiences ever’.
“One of my favourite things was being able to meet all the professionals that I only ever get to see on stream and being able to talk with them was so awesome.
“Also, having the opportunity to travel overseas to compete in a big tournament like WESG is amazing and it is such a good feeling to be able to play on stream representing SA especially knowing that all my friends and family back in SA are cheering for me.”
Williams said that one of his most memorable moments in gaming was his first tournament win.
“It was at Emperors Palace and the first prize was a headset.
“I was 14 years old when I won that tournament and I remember how shocked some people were when I won because I was not the favourite.
“One of my greatest achievements in StarCraft was making it to the Grandmaster League, grandmaster being the highest league in StarCraft where only the top 0.2 per cent of players feature. Making it to grandmaster was a goal of mine ever since I started playing StarCraft and in 2015 I did it.”
The StarCraft enthusiast added that his goal has always been to make it to the very top (being the top 50 rankings in Europe).
“Currently I am in the top 150 so I am not that far off, but I still need to put in a lot of work to get into the top 50.
“I also really want to make it onto the pro scene and qualify for tournaments other than WESG like Dreamhack, Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) and StarCraft II World Championship Series (WCS).”
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