Pogchamp Meaning – What Does Pog Champ Emote Mean?
3 minutes
Last Updated: May 28, 2024
The term PogChamp has been a part of the online world for over a decade. But we can’t blame you if it’s your first time hearing it. Are you here because you are wondering what does Pog Champ mean? Strap in, we got you covered.
Just like everywhere else in society, online communities have their own culture. From music and clothes preferences to everyday slang words, it’s a way of distinguishing yourself. And the gaming and esports community is no different.
You’ve probably never heard anyone use the term Copium or refer to something as a Resident Sleeper in real life. Now that you have a basic understanding of this, let us find out what is a PogChamp.
PogChamp Meaning
PogChamp meaning Pog Champion, was one of the oldest and most widely recognized emotes on Twitch. The popular snapshot uses the face of Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez with his mouth open wide, similar to the surprised Pikachu face.
What is Pog Champ Used For?
The motive behind the PogChamp usage is to express excitement or surprise both genuinely or sarcastically. This most commonly occurs during Twitch live streams when the PogChamp emote is spammed in Twitch chat after a highlight-worthy play.
Making an outplay or some clutch sequence, announcing exciting information can invoke this type of response from the audience. But they often know to go right at the entertainer, by trolling him with the emote after a misplay.
PogChamp Origin
To reveal the Pogchamp origin, we need to do a quick rewind. For more than a decade the PogChamp emote on the Twitch streaming platform was used as a reactionary symbol. The person behind it?
Well, Twitch took a cropped facial expression of Ryan Gutierrez, otherwise known as Gootecks, that had been circulating on online platforms and ran with it. At the time, Gutierrez was streaming fight games on the Twitch platform to a growing audience.
He and his friend Mike Ross created their own YouTube channel in order to grow their brands and influence in the fighting game community. In a video first posted in 2010, the duo published the bloopers of another video they’d created. Reactionary content on YouTube was thriving at the time, but little did they know that a blooper would become their most famous reaction.
Gutierrez made an exaggerated face with his mouth and eyes wide open in shock after the cameraman bumped into his tripod and shook the camera. And the rest is history.
As the snapshot of Gutierrez’s face started circulating in online circles such as 4Chan, Twitter, Reddit, and Twitch, many started wondering who the person behind it was. Gutierrez had already enabled the emote on his Twitch channel and he already had a substantial following.
It wasn’t after a year later that Gutierrez would become known as the Pog Champion. In a then-popular and entertaining game called Pogs, Ryan participated in a tournament and won the Pog Championship.
POG Meaning on Twitch
This sealed his destiny, as he became widely recognized as the PogChamp. By 2012, Twitch added the now-famous face of the surprised Gutierrez from the original video to its pool of global emotes with the name “PogChamp.”
These are the emotes that even users without a subscription can access, in any channel on the Twitch platform. This introduces many new users to the emote, further solidifying its popularity. On average, the emote is used over half a million times per day, often exceeding that number if there is a big esports tournament going on.
It’s reported that Gutierrez received a one-time compensation from Twitch in 2012 in the range of $50,000 and $100,000 so they could use his reaction across their platform. But it’s not like this former professional Street Fighter player didn’t boost his brand with the move.
After concluding his career as an esports athlete, this event made Ryan an entrepreneur. Apart from selling merchandise with his reaction on it, he also used his notoriety to create and sell courses and educational content.
Why Was PogChamp Banned?
In January 2021, the original PogChamp emote was removed from Twitch. This was in response to some comments made by Ryan Gutierrez, who posted a controversial message on the social media platform, Twitter.
As you might remember, the Capitol Hill riots took place then, and rioters even stormed the building in Washington D.C. Twitch wanted none of that affiliation, and they immediately cut any ties with Gutierrez and his intellectual properties.
