On a hot June day in Los Angeles, Karim "Airwaks" Benghalia entered The Forum and looked around. He took it all in: the big crowd, the blaring noise and the spotlights shining down the walkway on which he would soon strut.
The last time -- in fact, the first and only time he visited Los Angeles before this trip -- the Swiss professional Fortnite player's esports career was on the line. He was traveling to L.A. to compete in the relegation tournament for the European League of Legends Championship Series. It was win or be relegated. A dream possibly destroyed. A potential major career setback.
But this time, he ended up celebrating a win -- something Airwaks did very little during his professional League of Legends career -- at the 2019 Fortnite Pro-Am at Epic Games' Summer Block Party.
In July 2016, Airwaks played his final game of professional League of Legends, followed by a brief stint in the minor leagues before retiring altogether. He returned home and kept playing League of Legends, hoping that one day another opportunity to play in the EU LCS would come. But it didn't, and his motivation, the one often challenged by repetitive losing, petered out.
That was when he discovered "Fortnite: Save the World," a player-versus-environment game developed by Epic Games, the creators of "Gears of War" and several other major titles, and Airwaks decided to give it a shot. For the first time in months, he was playing games for fun, enjoying himself, taking his time to figure out what's next.
He dabbled in other games, such as PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, a battle royale game that pitted 100 players against one another and allowed them to choose their spawn, gather weapons and armor, and fight to the death, all as a circle closed in, killing those who stood outside it. Airwaks liked it. It felt competitive, similar to how he felt when he began grinding League of Legends at 17 years old.
Soon, Fortnite released a new game mode, inspired by PUBG, its version of a battle royale. Airwaks didn't like it at first, but when the opportunity to become a professional streamer came along, followed by the announcement of a $100 million prize pool that Epic would award for a season of esports competitions, Airwaks was in.
In less than 18 months, he has become one of the top players in the world. In June, he and electronic music producer RL Grime won the pro-am at Epic Games' Summer Block Party, a celebrity tournament that paired pros or streamers with film, music and sports stars. On Friday, he'll compete in another Fortnite pro-am event with RL Grime. More importantly, his eyes are set on the Fortnite World Cup Finals, which will take place at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York.
Competing in the duos portion of the event, Airwaks has the opportunity to become a millionaire overnight if he wins.
"Everything will change," he told ESPN. "Financially, I actually don't realize it, but it's going to be insane. The fact that I'm going to win something in esports is going to feel like I actually achieved something. The pro-am is not really something. The World Cup means everything to me."
Getting to this point, competing against some of the best players in the world and being a true contender for this championship, hasn't come easily. During his time playing in the EU LCS for teams such as Team ROCCAT and Copenhagen Wolves, Airwaks had a .300 career win percentage, winning just 27 of the 90 games he competed in, according to ESPN Stats & Info. That challenged him. Was he the reason his team was losing? Soon he'd be on the chopping block.
"I asked before [ROCCAT] kicked me, I asked them to change me before that because I wasn't playing well, and I didn't like my teammates to lose," Airwaks said. "I felt like it was my fault. That's why I asked them to change me."
The losing had gotten to him. He stopped playing the game outside of team-mandated scrimmages. What once was a dream of his in high school -- to compete in League of Legends as a pro -- no longer motivated him. His passion was dulling, no longer a driving force that once took him to the third-highest solo queue rank in all of European League of Legends.
"Losing demotivated me, and I lost to some skill losing, and losing every time demotivated me," he said. "I stopped playing the game outside of scrims, and I started to be bad at the game. That's basically how it happened. I didn't like the game at all."
That motivation got a jumpstart, though, in March 2018 in Tours, France, when he competed with friends in the DreamHack Tours Fortnite tournament. He hadn't played the battle royale version of Fortnite for very long, but he decided to give it a shot.
His team made it to the grand finals. Maybe there's something here, he thought.
To earn an advantage over his opponents, Airwaks took lessons from his League of Legends career and applied them to Fortnite. First, vision -- the role of a jungler, his former position in the multiplayer online battle arena, requires a significant understanding of the map, using sight and wards to know where enemy champions are rotating. Second, video review -- in League of Legends, pro teams watch the footage of their games and critique themselves to improve.
"Everything, the way of training helped me a lot," he said. "I took good points in League training and [applied them to] Fortnite. That's working for now."
Another League of Legends lesson Airwaks is using moving forward is eliminating nerves on stage. When he steps on stage, he focuses on the monitor and the sound of the game, not the noise around him or the lights or crowd.
"The only way you can prepare is just by playing a lot, a lot, a lot," he said of being on stage. "When you get on stage and you feel like there is stress, you just do what you're trained for hours, naturally. You don't even think -- you just do it. Just play a lot and hope it goes well. That's the only way you can prepare. Just play a lot, a lot, a lot and be confident."
On Friday, however, Airwaks will compete in front of the biggest crowd of his life. Arthur Ashe sits nearly 24,000 people, and though the Fortnite capacity has not been released, tickets for the event have sold out. Airwaks isn't worried about the large crowd.
Airwaks, 24, is one of the oldest competitors in the Fortnite World Cup Finals, which features competitors who range in age from 14 to 24. Airwaks thinks this might help him because his previous experience competing as a pro in another game has driven him to take Fortnite more seriously than many of his peers. Unlike his competitors, Airwaks isn't out to become a celebrity icon like Tyler "Ninja" Blevins.
"I just want to win and play games," Airwaks said. "I guess if I can become a celebrity, so be it. If I stay pro, it's fine by me. I'll just play the game, and if people want to make me a celebrity, then so be it. That's it. I just want to play games."
Winning the Fortnite World Cup Finals will come with more than a few million bucks for Airwaks. He describes it as a make-or-break event for his Fortnite career.
"If I don't win [at World Cup], I'll feel like I missed the opportunity because everyone will catch up," he said. "I feel like we have the advantage right now. We have an edge. But coming into next year, I don't think we'll be that good. I don't think I'll be that good. I don't think I'll have the motivation for a whole year."