AT HOME with his family and friends, Victor De Leon appears to be an ordinary eight-year-old who loves playing with Cortana, his hamster, and cannot wait to see what Santa will bring him.

Yet something happens to Victor when he perches in front of a television screen with his hands wrapped around a computer game console. He turns into Lil Poison, master of a virtual universe of acrobatic combat, Ninja-like savagery and Xbox battles to the death.

The transformation of a shy New York schoolboy into a merchant of Microsoft mayhem has not only shaken up the increasingly high-stakes world of international computer gaming; it has also turned Victor into one of the best known eight-year-olds in America.

Lil Poison is beginning to earn a fortune from tournaments, commercial sponsorships and celebrity endorsements. His name will soon appear on a line of casual clothing and on special “skins”, or cases, used to house gaming consoles. His website proclaims him as the “world’s youngest professional gamer”.

His father, also called Victor De Leon, first handed the child a video game console to stop him crying when his mother went to work. Lil Poison was two at the time. He earned his first professional contract at the age of six.

Victor’s emergence as a celebrity is fuelling a surge of interest in what Americans are beginning to call “e-sports” or “cyber athletics”. It is also confounding parents, who are discovering that — at least for a lucky few — all those hours that their children apparently waste on video games can bring big rewards.

Lil Poison’s parents hope that he will make enough money from his video gaming to pay his university fees, which in America can exceed $30,000 (just over £15,000) a year. In addition to his tournament winnings, Victor charges $25 an hour for online tips on playing his favourite game, the popular Halo series, which features a science fiction war between future humanity and a group of alien races.

“Video games are now a true competitive sport,” claimed Matt Ringel, a former gamer who founded the World Series of Video Games (WSVG) to provide public tournaments for the world’s best players.

“Whenever you see some of these guys compete, it’s really like watching professional athletes up close and personal. It’s amazing to watch what they do.”

What they are increasingly doing is gathering at luxury locations and “fragging” (demolishing) their gaming opponents for prizes of up to $200,000. Sponsored by computer companies such as Intel and Microsoft, the gaming action is rapidly attracting television coverage and could become the 21st century’s answer to poker and darts.

At the WSVG finals in Manhattan this month, the “playing field” for a team game of Counter-Strike, which pits a counter-terrorist unit against Al-Qaeda-like bad guys, consisted of two rows of five television monitors attached to high-powered black laptops. Teams from Poland, China, America and Sweden battled for a $50,000 first prize.

While Lil Poison has made gaming headlines for his youth, the sport’s big money has gone mostly to a 25-year-old American named Johnathan Wendel, who has turned his Fatal1ty (sic) pseudonym into a multi-million-dollar gaming brand.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Wendel won $231,000 in tournaments last year but made twice that from licensing agreements with computer and clothing manufacturers.

Tom Taylor, 18, known online as Tsquared, has made more than $450,000 since he turned professional in 2004. He spends three hours a night practising his video moves and lifts weights and runs three to five miles a day to keep his mind fresh for virtual slaughter. Then he does his school homework.

Several leading gamers have claimed that their parents tried to restrict their activities. Dennis Fong got into hot water at home when he left university to play video games professionally and to found a gamers’ internet networking site. Then he sold the site to MTV Networks for $102m last April and his parents stopped complaining.

“Now kids want to be professional gamers, advertisers want to woo them and hot female groupies want to pursue them and tear off their clothing,” said Jeff Green, a columnist for Computer Gaming World magazine.

Even Lil Poison has been pursued by female groupies, but his father says he would much rather play with his hamster.

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