The best player in the world is currently Lee Young-Ho and he actually has the records and rank to back it up.
LinkHe has game mechanics and strategy down to the bone. Even retained his first place rank in the KeSPA pro-circuit through a damaged wrist. He's only trained in StarCraft but his level of understanding the mechanics of the gameplay as well as the meta-game is beyond anything most people seen. The only gamer that I know that could possibly give him a run for his money in high level gaming is Justin Wong (fighting games).
Also good gaming gear =/= game skill (well at least for keyboard/mouse). 90% of the people in professional Starcraft use those old white keyboards from the 90s early 2000s that run like 10 bucks at Wal-Mart.
After looking at his videos and such, he seems more like someone that would be furthering the public awareness of E-Sports rather than being a pro-gamer himself. Overtime (the magical age is usually 24) your gaming skills start to deteriorate due to being unable to keep your hands at optimal speed and precision. Despite that degrade, they usually retain a lot of high level meta-game (or "theory" ) and can give high level explanations of stuff (another example would be Day[9] ). This is not exactly a bad thing.
The "Best Gamer in the World" may be a gimmick intended for "over-the-top" style humor rather than actually literally being the best.
Speaking of StarCraft, I know that AtheneWins really is friends with Kiwikaki (who is a legit professional player). It is known that Kiwikaki does playon on this guy's account giving him the stats so that he can continue "trolling" the world. Either way, we do know that he does have ties with professional gamers and does indeed train with them.
More on the above, His "best protoss video" was actually AtheneWins giving Kiwikaki his account to gauge himself how good he was after lots of training or so (so his AtheneWins stats on the battle.net rankings is actually Kiwikaki's gameplay, not his).
[Edited by Neo7, 9/1/2011 1:07:31 PM]