Warcraft III sensation and professional player Manuel Schenkhuizen, better known as Grubby, made the decision to start playing Dota 2 a few months ago. After mainly playing other RTS games like the Age of Empires series and Starcraft, he decided to take on the new challenge of playing one of the most complicated MOBAs. And now, he calls it one of the best decisions he’s ever made, going so far as to say that he regrets not starting the game earlier in life.
Now that he has been retired for over a decade from the RTS esports scene, Grubby streams full-time on Twitch. His current streams have left him at the tail end of his A to Z challenge, where he wanted to learn everything about the game by playing through all the heroes in alphabetical order. Along the way, he hit 100 hours of Dota 2 and was given the option to play ranked games to calibrate his Matchmaking Rating (MMR).
After playing 10 calibration matches, Grubby received his first medal: Herald V. The medal tiers go all the way from Herald -> Guardian -> Crusader -> Archon -> Legend -> Ancient -> Divine -> Immortal, with each tier having five levels to progress through, depending on your MMR. Grubby started off as Herald V and then worked his way up to Guardian III. It was going well until he got into a losing streak.
Following his successful run so far, Grubby has said that his recent failures will not impact his performance going forward. As shown in this clip captured by Dotagush, Grubby refuses to accept defeat and drown in “MMR Hell,” keeping up his infectious positive spirit that garnered attention from a lot of pro players and Dota 2 personalities.
Understandably, Grubby has only had a few hundred hours of Dota 2 to his name so far. While this might be good enough for most modern MOBAs, veteran Dota 2 players will tell you that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Going forward from here is going to be a slow climb but Grubby is sure that he will succeed because he is currently at a sweet spot in his ranked game experience where he feels he can experiment with anything and everything before the game inevitably turns more serious.
With all the pro coaching he has received so far and with his prior experience in RTS games at the highest level, we can’t wait to see how high Grubby can fly.