yellowhat.

When the Lebanese civil war began, yellowhat's parents and older brothers fled to France. He was born in Paris and learned to play card games from his father, who died when he was seven years old. His love of card games persisted, and he grew up playing video games with his second-oldest brother, who is nine years his senior. They were available on several consoles, including the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. They preferred sports games over other genres. When he was younger, he also played IRL soccer for a few years. When he was about twelve years old, he and his friends discovered paper Magic: The Gathering (MTG) during the sixth expansion set, Ice Age, and began playing it together. He had previously collected Dragon Ball and Star Wars cards. In high school, he spent a lot of his free time going to play MTG at a local gaming store where other MTG players would always congregate to play against one another. While there, he and his friends would also play Warcraft 2 on the computers. He and his friends eventually began competing in local gaming store tournaments by pooling each other's cards to build decks. His mother, on the other hand, was initially dissatisfied with his hobby because it was affecting his grades, but she eventually gave up because she realized he would just keep playing anyway. When he began qualifying for the international Pro Tours, his brother assisted him in convincing his mother to let him attend. Some American MTG players who were playing online poker between matches at one of the events he was attending introduced him to poker in 2003. When he got home, he opened an account and decided to put $500 in it. He ended up doing well, cashed out at $500, and continued with the help of friends. He went on to focus on playing poker professionally online for a few years after that, as there was more of a financial incentive to do so at the time. Later, he decided to put that on hold in order to pursue full-time online MTG streaming.

Yellowhat competed in his first Pro Tour in Chicago in 2000 while still in high school and finished in the top 64. The following year, he finished second on the Pro Tour in New York. He has nine times finished in the top eight on the Pro Tours and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2010. He began streaming on Twitch with his Pantheon teammates in April 2017 and discovered that he enjoys it, so he continued to do so even after many of his teammates stopped. After discussing it with his wife, they decided to give him until the end of the year to try to make it a career. Fortunately for him, it worked out, and he has since been streaming full-time.