Tyson “TenZ” Ngo, one of the most popular professional Valorant players, has stepped down from the Cloud9 Blue team, as well as competitive play as a whole.
TenZ announced his shocking decision in a video posted on the official Cloud9 Twitter account. “As of right now and going forward, I’m going to be stepping down from the Cloud9 Blue team to pursue content creation,” he said.
“Stepping down from the team is a personal choice of mine,” he added. “I’m just going to be doing content creation until maybe COVID’s up and then I’ll kind of re-decide what I want to do when there’s LANs and stuff like that.”
Check out the tweet and the video below:
The original member of #C9BLUE @TenZ_CS has elected to step down from the team and competitive @PlayVALORANT to pursue content creation
Thank you for all you’ve contributed to Cloud9 competitively – time to watch you shine in content! pic.twitter.com/moppk8q8pW
— Cloud9 (@Cloud9) January 12, 2021
TenZ added during a Twitch stream that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the move to home-based competitive play are major reasons in his decision to step back from competitive play. “I’d say for me, COVID is probably one of the things that’s making it hard for me to stay playing a professional player online. Just because I play with 60 ping and everyone else has sub-30 or sub-40,” he said.
The professional player later said on his personal Twitter account that he “hope[s] everyone can support me in this decision”, while noting that he will “come back to competitive play when I see the time is right”. Read his full statement here:
Hope everyone can support me in this decision. During this time while I am off the team, I will be dedicating it towards my personal stream/YouTube to produce some more content. I’ll come back to competitive play when I see the time is right. Until next time everyone! https://t.co/PJb0ZUZ3RH
— TenZ / Tyson (C9) (@TenZ_CS) January 13, 2021
TenZ first started off his eSports career in 2017 on Valve’s popular tactical shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. He joined Cloud9’s CS:GO team in 2020, before moving over to Valorant in April of 2020.
In other Valorant news, Episode 2 of the game went live today (January 13), bringing along with it the new agent Yoru and significant changes to ranked mode. The update also includes nerfs and buffs for several Controller agents, as well as a brand-new battlepass.