The History of Twitch’s Most Famous Emote

For most of Twitch’s history, one emote meant hype: PogChamp. When a clutch play landed or a world record fell, chat filled with that wide-eyed, open-mouthed face. It’s still one of the most recognizable emotes on the internet — but the face behind it has changed, and the story of how that happened is one of the strangest in streaming.

Here’s the full history: where PogChamp came from, why Twitch removed it in 2021, what replaced it, and why “Pog” refuses to die.

The face belongs to Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierreza fighting-game personality who co-hosted the web show Cross Counter TV with Mike Ross. On November 26, 2010, the channel posted a blooper reel in which a camera got bumped mid-shoot, and Gootecks pulled a ridiculous surprised expression in reaction. That frame became the PogChamp face.

The name came from a different Cross Counter video: a 2011 promo called “Pogs Championship,” in which Gootecks and Mike Ross played the 1990s POG milk-cap game. Put the two together — the “Pogs Championship” and that hype face — and you get “PogChamp.” It became a Twitch global emote in 2012 and quickly turned into the platform’s default reaction for anything exciting, later shortened in chat to just “Pog” or “POGGERS.”

One quirk of the emote’s history: by his own account, Gootecks didn’t originally know his face was being used as a Twitch emote, and has said his likeness was used for years before a licensing arrangement was worked out. It’s a recurring theme in early emote culture — faces became global shorthand long before anyone thought about the person attached to them.

On January 6, 2021 — the day of the U.S. Capitol riot — Gootecks posted a tweet about the events that drew immediate backlash. Twitch removed the PogChamp emote that same evening. Its stated reason, posted by Twitch Support, was direct:

“We’ve made the decision to remove the PogChamp emote following statements from the face of the emote encouraging further violence after what took place in the Capitol today.”

Crucially, Twitch drew a line between the person and the sentiment, adding: “We want the sentiment and use of Pog to live on — its meaning is much bigger than the person depicted or image itself.” In other words, the company wanted to keep “Pog” as a hype word while cutting ties with the specific face. Gootecks later publicly called the removal a “knee-jerk reaction.”

Rather than kill the emote outright, Twitch ran an experiment. Starting January 8, 2021 — from an idea floated publicly by Sean “Day9” Plott — the platform rotated in a different streamer’s face as PogChamp every 24 hoursspotlighting a new community member each day.

That was always temporary. In February 2021, Twitch held a community vote it dubbed “the PogChampening” to pick a permanent replacement. The finalists: a streamer and an open-mouthed Komodo dragon — the same lizard already used for the older “KomodoHype” emote. The Komodo dragon won in a landslide (around 81% of the vote) and became the official PogChamp.

That’s still where things stand in 2026. Type PogChamp in Twitch chat today and you get the Komodo dragon — Twitch never reinstated the original face.

Twitch got its wish: the word outlived the image. “Pog,” “poggers,” “PogU,” and “PogO” are still everywhere — mostly through third-party emote extensions like BetterTTV and 7TV rather than Twitch’s native set. “Poggers,” for instance, is a wide-eyed Pepe the Frog that was never an official Twitch emote at all, and “PogU” is a different frame of the original Gootecks reaction served through those same extensions.

It’s spread well beyond Twitch, too — “pog” and “poggers” turn up in Discord servers, TikTok comments, and everyday speech as a way to say something is awesome, used both sincerely and ironically. Not bad for a word born from a milk-cap game. For more on the culture that produced it, see our guide to what a streamer is and how streaming works.

The short version, for the questions that bring most people to this page in the first place.

From a fighting-game blooper to a milk-cap promo to a Komodo dragon, PogChamp has had a stranger journey than almost any piece of internet culture — and somehow, more than a decade later, chat is still Pogging.