From Chess Kid to Game Founder

I reached the top of competitive gaming. Now I’m building my own.

For as long as I can remember, I have been competing. 

When I was four years old, my mother took me to a local chess club. I immediately fell in love with the game and became obsessed with mastering it. By the age of seven I was battling grownups and dreaming of becoming a professional chess player.

At 12, I discovered Magic: The Gathering. The complexity captivated me and I spent my days crafting optimal deck combinations.

At 17, I snuck into my first poker tournament. I was underage but determined to test myself. I loved the instant feedback. Win and you're rewarded, lose and it stings. No hiding. By 18, I was playing poker for a living.

A few years later, I attended a Magic Grand Prix in Prague. It felt like reuniting with a high school love. Hearing that some old friends had gone pro in Magic sparked something in me. I decided to give it everything I had.

A year later, I won a Pro Tour, the highest level of MTG competition.

For the next two years, I traveled the world playing the game I loved. It still feels surreal, looking back at it.

In 2014, Hearthstone arrived and shook up the competitive scene. I felt that familiar pull towards it, that desire to push myself, to compete. Everyone thought I was crazy to quit Magic at the top. There was no guarantee I'd find my footing in Hearthstone. But something about being part of this new thing felt right.

I went to a cabin for a month so I wouldn't be disturbed and could study the game 12 hours a day.

After two weeks I broke down crying because I couldn't figure out the best plays. I'd never felt so clueless. But I picked myself up and stuck at it. 

In my second month of playing Hearthstone I hit Legend (the highest competitive rank) for the first time.

In 2015, things started clicking. I won DreamHack Bucharest and StarLadder, which gave me confidence I could compete at the top level. I set myself a goal: reach #1 in the Gosugamers rankings.

I got there briefly in December 2015, and held it for a longer stretch in 2018.

The moment I'm most proud of? Winning the Global Games with the Czech national team in 2017. That one was for more than just me.

I still love these games. I play Magic with friends, compete in chess regularly (my current FIDE rating is 2420) and enjoy poker. But somewhere along the way, online competition stopped giving me what it used to.

Something was missing

When COVID hit in 2020, live events disappeared. The part of competitive gaming I loved most — the community, the travel, sitting across from your opponent — was gone. I took a job at a trading firm focused on EU stocks. Even there, the work felt familiar: playing the odds, calculating expected value, making decisions with incomplete information. Not so different from gaming.

In 2022, I co-founded a trading firm with two friends. Our crypto division did well, so we went all-in on that side of the business. But despite believing in the technology, I never developed that obsessive love for crypto. And I've learned that to compete at the highest level in anything, you need to love it deeply. The fire wasn't there.

In 2024, my son was born. During those bleary-eyed first weeks, I found myself playing Parallel, the leading Web3 card game at the time. You could earn around $30/hour playing it. But I wasn’t enjoying it – and neither were my friends from the competitive TCG world. 

If Web3 gaming is going to bring in real players, we need games that are actually fun to play, not just profitable to grind.

Back to the table

I called my two best friends from gaming. In three months, we had a physical prototype. Two months after that, Jan coded our first demo and we got backing from Miton, one of the Czech Republic's top accelerators. We found a CTO who built our entire Alpha version himself.

In April 2025, we launched closed alpha. Core gameloop only. Our goal was simple: prove people enjoy playing.

During that phase, we built an in-game tutorial and started sending game results onchain to MegaETH. Daily active users (DAU) spent 73 minutes playing on average. That stat gave us confidence to move to the next step.

In September 2025, we moved to open alpha. Over the next six months, we built in-game tournaments, delivered real-money matches settled fully onchain, and polished the visuals.

Our monthly active users grew from under 200 to more than 1,600. But what drives me even more: minutes per DAU grew from 73 to 88. Players aren't just trying the game, they're staying.

What's next? During open beta, we'll ship the Android app, VIP store, NFTs and Steam launch. Our focus is building the ecosystem and growing the player base so we can host major tournaments and create a thrilling competitive environment.

We're still early. Building a gaming company is a long road with no guarantees. But I genuinely love the work. Introducing new technology to people, solving problems, watching something grow from an idea into a real thing is what motivates me.

Almost all my closest friends came from competitive gaming. That's what I want Showdown to be: a place where competition brings people together, where players push each other to be the best.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, come play.

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