|
Ken Hoang gives a new meaning to the term
"gamer." Known to the gaming community as "the King of
Smash," Hoang is a professional at his craft. As the current
international champion of Nintendo's Super Smash Brothers Melee video
game, Ken has traveled the world from Japan to Australia to prove his
dominance.
Hoang uses his tournament winnings to help support his family. He and his
siblings still live at home to help pay the mortgage. It has also led to a
strong bond among his brothers and sisters. In fact it was his sister that
started his addiction to SURVIVOR.
While he may seem like an interesting choice for a game based in the
outdoors, this gamer sees it as an amazing opportunity. Ken is very
creative, and has a strong passion for art, a skill he is currently going
to college to fine tune. When not playing videogames or brushing up on his
art, Hoang enjoys playing with his pets, a Maincoon cat named Kinski and a
Husky named Monster.
He loves the fact that he will be considered an underdog because everyone
will underestimate his prowess at playing mind games. Nobody would look at
him and believe he climbed Mt. Fuji at the age of 20. Ready to exploit his
slight physical stature, Ken will trick his fellow players into seeing him
as a non-threat, only to smash them if they get in his way.
Ken is single and currently resides in Westminster, Calif. His birth date
is October 10, 1985.
|
Ken: "I am a professional gamer and I am the 5
time world champion for Super Smash Brothers Melee and basically the game is
about building up percentages and hitting other players and once they are
high enough you can knock them off the screen. It's a lot more complicated
than that if you do it at a professional level, there's a lot of mind
games. you have to trick your opponents, lots of technical abilities,
moving your fingers really fast, a lot of training goes into it. I've been
into gaming all my life. I think that I can tell them that I am good at
these puzzles, keep me around and I can do any of these puzzles. My fellow
members of the gaming community, they probably will be very jealous of me
for being on a Reality TV show, how far I've gotten in playing this game, to
the next level. Survivor is just the next level. They are going to be in
awe, their faces are going to be priceless. Being out here is great, I've
never been to Africa, a whole new experience. I already got like 12
bug bites, it's just the bugs are so attracted to me. They never had
fresh gamer blood before. They are calling all of their friends and telling
them to get this, it's rare. I might not look like this, but I actually
climbed to the top of Mount Fuji. I'm not scared of anything out here. I am
just going to enjoy myself. I want to test my ability to live outside in the
wild. I am the underdog coming into this, people are going to underlook me,
underestimate, they probably won't realize that I am here, to the point
where at the end, they are going to think, 'hey, he slipped right through
us, we didn't know what hit us, this guy is very dangerous.' When I
win, I'm going to help my family out. I want to open a family restaurant,
it's been a dream for me and my sister. To have a backbone for my family, to
have something that we can rely on. To be strong in this game, it's just a
weakness because they are just huge. How good is their balance? How
smart are they? How fast are they? I think I can beat them at
challenges. I don't really care about the money too much. Every competition
I've been to, I want the title more than anything, the money just comes with
it. To be the sole Survivor of my favorite TV show is going to be
amazing."
Jeff Probst: ''Ken the gamer is one of my favorite people
who has been on the show in a long time. He is convinced his gaming
expertise is absolutely in line with what it takes to win, that he knows
this game backward and forward simply because he's a gamer. But Ken is a
true nerd. I think when the show began he weighed less than [China's]
Courtney did.''
|
