The Loadout - Matthew "KiSMET" Tinsley

My name is Matthew Tinsley. I come from a small town in South Carolina called Greenwood. I grew up playing sports. I love my family, love my girlfriend, normal guy.

Champs Sunday was—it was—it was funny. It was the first tournament I’ve ever actually played where I didn’t have nerves. We were standing in the back, I remember—it was like a tunnel—and we saw the whole crowd. You could see glimpses of them, and you could hear them start roaring. I’ve never been this excited to play Call of Duty before. I don’t know, something about it—it was an itch. I’ve always lived for that moment.

The MVP was cool. I think it’s a mixed feeling because, like, if someone got MVP, we’re like, “That’s cool, whatever.” Like, if we won, it was for each other. But I will say that one felt a little sweet. It made me feel good because I felt validated in who I am as a player, leading up to this tournament, all the hard work and hours that I put in meant something.

My team now is myself, Hydra, Skyz, and Sib. Sib is the very like Stone Cold killer; he gives that vibe of just pure confidence. He oozes it, and it’s a good thing for the team. Caesar, he’s confident, but he’s the opposite. He is the most goofy kid you’ll ever meet. You won't not laugh at him; he’s funny, he’s a great teammate. I love the guy. And then Paco (Hydra), he’s kind of like a little bit of everything.

So I use SCUF. For me, SCUF—the biggest thing is paddles. I don’t like to do the claw thing, and I’m in fear that I’ll get carpal tunnel and my hands will be done for forever. So I play with paddles, it helps me be comfortable with the controller. Then outside of that, the biggest thing is the tap triggers. So my layout for SCUF is similar to this. The only difference mainly is the paddles on the back. Most SCUFs come with four. You can actually take out these two paddles here, so there’s only two. That’s what I do just for comfortability’s sake. You can still use all four, but—and then the only difference is the sticks. So these sticks here are PS5, but I like Xbox One sticks.

We actually have like a fitness coach where you stretch out your fingers and you do your finger taps, and then you do the wrist rotations and you squeeze and pull extensions—just different things like that to get them good to go. Yeah, I don’t have these. I don’t know what I’d do.

So we have like a Playbook. I guess we don’t have like a literal Playbook; you can’t go in our PPA and try to steal, “Oh, we got New York strats.” It’s more of like a mental thing that we kind of take note of. We have our baseline strats, but then from there, there are probably like a hundred different adaptive ways that we go about it. If we see X, Y, and Z, do this, or if there’s a stun here, if there’s a nade here—there are so many minute little things.

Preparation is pretty—everybody has their own little ways of doing things. Pre-routine: I make sure I always wake up relatively earlier than what I would expect. I usually give myself an extra hour just so that I’m fully awake and all my cognitive skills are going.

I have a lot of pressure; I want to make my fans happy, I want to make my family happy, I want to make my teammates happy. There’s just a lot of emotions with that, with also pressure. And it’s good pressure though; if I don’t feel that, I’m not going to compete anymore because I feel like that’s that moment that builds those butterflies, that builds that anticipation to get on stage. And without that, I feel like it’s not really worth it.

A lot of teams like to look at someone as their leader. We like to look at all of us as leaders. We believe that each of us can see and make play calls based off of what’s happening on the map, and we have enough trust that whatever you’re saying isn’t going to cost us a map. Every time you play, you can’t always win.

It’s like a postgame ritual: no matter what, win or lose, we take our time to reset ourselves and come back out of that in-game moment of like you’re hyped up, you don’t know what’s happening, you’re just making plays. And then after that, you just talk about things, you know, just how we could do better. So win or lose, no matter what happened in the situation, we always take like 10 or 15 minutes to decompress. Because a lot of times, like what happened a couple years back, we would win or lose, and we would instantly start talking, and our emotions were high. Sometimes you might say something you didn’t fully mean, or you might not comprehend something in the moment because, you know, just emotions are going—you don’t think as clearly.

So Call of Duty’s given me everything. I mean, I’ve obviously had low points in my life where I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I came out of high school, and I chose the path of gaming, and it was, at the time, very scary. It’s given me an outlet to be who I want to be. It’s given me an outlet to accomplish goals that I didn’t think I was going to be able to accomplish. I love it.