Today I'm applying for an Axie Scholarship from 
Who am I?
My name is Matheus Sousa; 27 years old; Brazilian. I live in a city near Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil, and in the years prior to COVID I was attending college in a physics course that I completed only half. There was a point where I decided that it wasn't bringing me anything good, and I dropped college and started working as a professional Bartender, which I had studied before and it was always something that I liked. Months after that COVID pretty much closed every establishment in town, so I was unemployed just as I had dropped college.
From that point on my life became a lot less predictable, but a lot more enjoyable to be honest. I started working in anything that I found and in the mean time I learned a lot about investing, crypto and eventually got hooked on Splinterlands and Hive, and I'm pretty glad for that. I'm still not exactly financially stable, although I can go back to work at any time if my savings run too low, but I'm starting to see a path for my future as I discover more about everything blockchain related, so I thought I'd give it a try for real.
Gaming Life
When I was a child I had a SNES and that was a hell of a first experience that would never leave me for all my life. I loved the genre of platformer games and adventure games, so I played lots of Goof Troop, Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Bomberman, Mega Man and all such games. Through my teens I had a PS1 and PS2 which I played a lot too, but mostly casual games.
I really got into more hardcore gaming when I started playing a Chinese MMORPG called Perfect World (PW) back in ~2008 (not sure). I played this pretty much every single hour I had after school, and I learned more than I could have learned in any school during this period. To give a little context, in PW there were Territory Wars between clans which were exactly like a MOBA with three lanes such as DotA2 or LOL, but with 80 players in each side. I was among the top 10 players that had higher responsibilities within the clan so coordinating players, dealing with people, team play within parties, and anything else you can think were things that we needed to do perfectly. It took almost two years for us to form a clan out of nothing and take down the one clan that dominated the server for years before, after that achievement most of the important players, including me, had no motivation to keep playing so many hours and we stopped.
After playing this for more than 3 years, it looked like a lifetime had passed, and by accident I started playing another game that would take me for years too, DotA. This was around when DotA2 was released, but my PC couldn't handle DotA2 and many players weren't playing the new game, something like the migration of Counter Strike 1.6 to CS:GO. I played DotA and eventually DotA2 in a very high level for years, and tried to gather and form a team to play competitively. This was the hardest thing I've probably done, and it was very hard to find people that could actually commit the time needed to improve and form a cohesive team. Even without that we gather some talent, and played equal with some Tier 1 teams in tournaments, but we lacked the consistency and resilience of a real team, so we never made it to professional level.
Had to go to a 2012 facebook post to find this one of me playing on Garena
I have only played casual games from here and there after that, and I still love the platform style of play, and my name on Hive is dedicated to Hollow Knight, which is for me a very especial game.
Why should I be given this Opportunity?
As I said before, I am giving my all into this project of trying to make a living out of my earnings in the blockchain, so I have the time needed, the passion and the skills to make the job done and I this could bring me a lot closer to make that a reality while I could have lots of fun playing Axie!
Thanks for Reading!
