Why we exist
The OPLeague was founded to support hard-working people who have full lives, and perhaps even families to provide for, outside of gaming.
Some people make their entire lives about gaming, and that is fine, but we focus on empowering those who have other obligations with a means of making passive income through even their stress-relief hobbies.
With OPLeague, you do not have to sacrifice your day job or family to make money with gaming. You can live your life while building a personal gaming brand at your own pace, to the extent of whatever time and effort that you can put into it.
Defining our terms
An amateur is not someone who is bad at a thing. The word comes from the Latin word for lover: an amateur does it for love. A professional does it for payment. That is the entire distinction, and it is the only one the word has ever carried.
Nowhere in either definition is there a threshold of talent, a ranking, a sponsor, a following, or anyone’s permission. A professional is a person who gets paid for the thing. Someone can be world-class and an amateur. Someone can be ordinary and a professional. Both have always been true.
“A lover of.” Someone who does it for the love of it and takes nothing for it.
“To declare publicly.” Someone who declares it as what they do, and is paid for it.
Somebody once lost the Olympics over two dollars
In 1912, Jim Thorpe won the Olympic decathlon and the pentathlon in the same games. He was, by any measure anyone could apply, the best all-around athlete of his time.
A year later, however, officials stripped him of both gold medals. Why? Not for cheating, not for failing a test, and not because anyone had beaten him.
…but because, two summers earlier, he had played minor league baseball for somewhere between two dollars a game and thirty-five dollars a week. He was stripped of his athletic medals because at some point in his personal history, he had been paid. Nothing illegal, but that made him legally a professional, and professionals were not considered eligible athletes.
The rules were strict enough that a Hawaiian swimmer was kept out of the same games for working as a lifeguard. Not for swimming competitively, but for being paid to watch water.
George Freeth, excluded from the 1912 games
- 1912Wins the decathlon and the pentathlon at the same games.
- 1913Stripped of both golds for a few dollars of minor league baseball.
- 1992The Olympics drop the amateur requirement.
- 2022Restored as sole winner of both, a hundred and ten years on.
Culture evolves over time
Amateurism was marketed and thought of as purity. If you could only compete while unpaid, then you could only compete if somebody else was feeding you, which in 1912 generally meant you were rich or fully sponsored.
By “fully sponsored,” historians have been fairly blunt that Thorpe, a Native American, was pursued harder than a wealthier white athlete would have been during the time period, hence why he was paid.
However, the International Olympic Committee dropped the amateur requirement in 1992. As a result, Thorpe was restored as sole winner of both events in July 2022, a hundred and ten years after he won them and nearly seventy after he died.
The point?
The idea of what an “amateur” is has changed over time, with the ebb and flow of culture. For a century, the most powerful organizational body in sports drew a clear, definitive line between a professional athlete and an amateur in exactly one place: had money been earned in any way.
The OPLeague exists, then, to provide amateur e-athletes the opportunity to become professional by such definitions.
You just need one paying supporter.
You don’t need television coverage. You don’t need millions of subscribers. You don’t need to meet YouTube’s and Twitch’s increasingly difficult partner standards. All you need is one person who sincerely pays to support what you do.
Not a salary, not a contract, not a team. This site makes it possible to attain those as well, but they are not the bar for what it takes to be considered a professional. You just need at least one fan who decides that watching you play, or learning from your advice about playing, is worth money to them.
That is not a loophole, and it is not a shallow technicality. It is what the definition has always been, historically. Common culture just tends to forget.
Even if you only game on the weekends because you have a family to take care of, the moment anyone pays you for your gaming for any reason, you are gaming professionally, in the plain meaning of the word and in the same sense that stripped Jim Thorpe of two gold medals.
is the whole gap between a hobby and a profession.
Everything beyond that is merely a question of scale. Not “if” you are a professional, but “to what extent” you are one, pertaining to how much money you make… which is entirely up to you.
Part-time? Full-time? It makes no difference.
Whether you make enough to live on has nothing to do with whether you fit the definition. Nobody tells a part-time plumber they are not really a plumber. Nobody tells a musician with a day job that the gig money was imaginary. The word does not have a salary threshold attached to it, and it never has.
What matters is that the income is real and taxable. Not a gift, not a favor, not somebody buying you a drink. Money that arrives because of something you did, that you would declare if asked. Any amount of that makes you a professional.
Earning ten times as much may make you a more successful professional… but you are still a professional.
All three of these people are types of professionals
They all fit the definition.
The first one crossed the line. The other two are further along the same road. There is no second line; they all made it.
And playing alone is seldom the only thing you are paid for. The money comes from several streams related to their gaming, which this website facilitates, and most people who make it work are using more than one.
Supporters
People who back you monthly because they want you to keep going. The most reliable of the lot, and the one this site is built around.
Merchandise
Anything you make and sell. Books, prints, shirts. It does not have to be about games, it only has to be yours.
Company sponsors
A business paying to be associated with you. Smaller than you think at the start, and they care more about how you conduct yourself than your rank.
Prize money
Brackets with a pot. Unreliable as income, entirely real as income, and it counts the same as the rest.
Coaching and reviews
Someone paying you an hour at a time to make them less bad. The fastest first payment most players ever get.
Streams, videos & writing
Anything built on top of the playing. Slower to start and it compounds, which the others do not.
Every one of those is taxable income earned from playing games. Any single one of them, at any amount, settles the question.
Who this is for
The short answer is anyone. Almost any age, any skill level, any game we run. Nothing on this page has a qualifying round attached to it, and the site does not check whether you are “good enough” before it lets you in.
Why? Because this is the Internet: there are people out there who will pay just to see you fail. Skill, therefore, is not the actual variable that determines whether you become a professional. What matters is whether you provide enough of some form of value with your gaming that someone would deem it worth paying for… even if the value you are providing is laughter.
However, the longer answer is that this league was built with someone specific in mind: hard-working husbands and fathers who deserve a break, but want even their breaks to somehow contribute to the betterment of their family.
Men who work hard to support a family, then sit down at the end of the day with a game they have loved since they were young, because that is how they rest.
If they can build an audience for any reason, they can become a professional, turning even their restful fun, departed from their other work, into lucrative support for their family.
Our founder, while working around the clock to build other family businesses, realized that he could turn even his much needed work breaks for stress relief into a profitable contribution to his family.
With that in mind, we at OPLeague founded this organization upon the realization that our gaming was never the problem; our marketing was.
We believe that everything we do should give something back to our families in some way, shape, or form… even our personal fun.
What we do, and what is left to you
We are not going to pretend the hard part is the part we built. Here is the honest division of labor.
What OPLeague does
- Real brackets on a real schedule
- A rating that follows the rules and nobody can adjust by hand
- A public record of every game you played, with the replays attached
- A profile that looks like a professional has one
- A page where somebody can actually pay you, and the plumbing to get it to you
- A prize pool you can win a share of
What you do
- Turn up and keep turning up
- Be worth watching, or worth reading, or worth knowing
- Give people a reason to care that is not only your win rate
- Ask, out loud, for support, which is the step most people never take
- Keep going through the months where nobody is watching
- Be someone a sponsor is not embarrassed to stand next to
Never let your inner child die
So, are you with us?
Sign up. Build a fan base. Live the dream.