Tyler “Skadoodle” Latham is a 29-years-old retired professional CS:GO player who is mostly famous for playing in iBUYPOWER and Cloud9 and becoming the first (and currently only) North American major champion, along with his four teammates, winning ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018.
Skadoodle retired from CS at the end of 2018 to try out for VALORANT. Latham played for teamT1 for 1.5 years until 2022. Tyler made a long way to the top of CS:GO at his time, but what do we really know about this humble player?
Skadoodle at Dreamhack Winter 2016. Image credit: Philip SlotteUsed to work with his father building houses, ride a BMX and run at least 5 miles a day.
Tyler grew up in a big family of his parents, six brothers and two sisters in a small place in Iowa.
Skadoodle has a twin ‘ Dylan, who was his common partner for playing soccer and other outdoor activities. During his school time, Latham used to help his father, who worked as a construction worker, doing frames for the basements. Tyler was fond of riding bikes such as BMX, until his friend knocked himself out in front of him, trying to perform bike tricks. Later, the future Boston 2018 champion liked to run tracks. According to his own words in a 2017 interview with n0thing [Jordan Gilbert], he used to run at least five miles a day, until he had to choose how to spend his free time in favor of video games.
From an early age, Skadoodle was known as a great player in any computer and console game. Skadoodle used to play any kind of games, including DOOM, Half-Life, Age of Empires as well as some racing games and he even had a steering wheel to race properly. The first time he saw CS:GO he didn’t want to play it, but, being a smart person, Tyler realized it was a great opportunity, too great to miss it.
Tyler’s first competitive game was Alliance of Valiant Arms, where he played for team Defkon.
Skadoodle at A.I.C. China 2012 with Defkon. Image credit: Skadoodle’s twitterSkadoodle’s first CS:GO team was mainly consisting of former Call of Duty players and was called HMO (Hold Mouse One). At that time they were performing a cut above any other teams, so the squad was quickly noticed and assigned by Team Curse. Skadoodle played with AZK [Keven Lariviere], stan [Stan Sukachov], adreN [Eric Hoag] and anger [Todd Williams], but the organization was not satisfied with their results and the players had to move on, joining Denial eSports, which was acquired by iBUYPOWER a month later.
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Team iBUYPOWER period: twice ESEA champions to the match-fixing
Team iBUYOWER was considered to have the best roster on the continent at the time, which was proved by winning ESEA Global Finals Season 15 and Season 16, defeating such teams as Titan (SmithZz, shox, NBK, Ex6TencE and ScreaM), Complexity (swag, Hiko, n0thing, seang@res, SEMPHIS) and Virtus.pro (TaZ, pashaBices, NEO, byali, Snax). Despite that, four players out of five (DaZeD, swag, AZK and steel) as well as several other people organized the match-fixing, throwing the game intentionally and losing 16-4 to the underdog. Later, all of them were banned by Valve indefinitely, while the Skadoodle refused to be involved in dubious affairs and was not banned.
Team iBUYPOWER. Image credit: Skadoodle’s twitterAfter the incident, Latham spent several months teamless, considering his next steps forward and trying to find an organization that would be able to have enough resources to play CS seriously: to attend events, to play at boot camps, to build a team. It turned out that C9 could provide Tyler with all he needed and their CEO, Jack Etienne, never regretted his decision of recruiting Skadoodle to his team.
Joins Cloud9 to become the first North American major champion
Tyler’s longest one-team run was Cloud9 ‘ he played for the light blues for almost 3.5 years in sum. As a part ofCloud9, Skadoodle played with almost every top North American player at the time in the team, including fREAKAZOiD [Ryan Abadir], shroud [Michael Grzesiek], RUSH [William Wierzba], tarik [Tarik Celik], Stewie2K [Jacky Yip], autimatic [Timothy Ta] and many others. Their top achievement is taking first place at the ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018, defeating FaZe Clan 2-1 in the Finals (Skadoodle had the best stats, 79-55 for the three maps in sum).
Cloud9 wins Boston Major 2018. Image credit: ELEAGUEFrom CS:GO to Valorant
After the triumph, Tyler continued to play for C9 until late 2018, then went inactive.
Where is Skadoodle now
Later, Tyler tried out for VALORANT, joining the T1 roster, where he stayed until 2022. Unfortunately, Tyler didn’t reach the same success in VALORANT, leaving the game to become a part-time streamer, according to rumors. During his break between competitive CS:GO and VALORANT, Tyler used to stream various FPS such as Call of Dutyand Battlefield, but he hasn’t come online for a while, sadly.
Ska’s approximate total winnings in CS:GO are $433,859 and only $8,850 in VALORANT.
Tyler isn’t really a media person at all, having almost no interviews and rarely spotted expressing his thoughts and opinions. Latham’s teammates described him as quiet, modest and humble while being incredibly good at the game. Skadoodle is also said to be talented in almost every game he played, his friends were surprised at how quickly he learned.
Has a workplace full of Logitech devices
Ska’s gaming place. Image credit: Tyler Latham’s TwitterTyler was last seen playing with a set of Logitech devices, his mice are Logitech G PRO Wireless of different colors, while his keyboard is believed to be Logitech G PRO X. Latham uses a Logitech G640 largeclothingmouse pad, which covers all the space under the keyboard and mouse. His monitors are 240 Hz ZOWIE XL2540. The headphones are also a Logitech G PRO X. Skadoodle used to play CS:GO at a stretched resolution of 1024×768 and a native one of 1920×1080 for VALORANT respectively. His CS:GO mouse settings were: 400 DPI, 1.9 sensitivity with 1.0 zoom sensitivity and raw input on.
Up to the present day, Tyler remains one of the most-known NA CS:GO pro players in the world, together with being the quietest and extremely effective with an AWP or in clutches in our hearts.
