In the recent days, another major storm of controversy has surrounded the e-Sport arena of CounterStrike. This time, it’s in the form of fixed matches and betting dating back to a match in August 2014 between the two teams iBUYPOWER and NetCodeGuides.com.
As IGN says, “iBUYPOWER went in as the favorite to win, but ended up losing 16-4 at the CEVO Professional Season 5.”
The Daily Dot first received reports of this a day after the match with screengrabs from an unnamed source having a conversation with pro player Shahzeb “ShahZam” Khan, claiming to know the game was going to be rigged. Khan also boasted to having bets as high as $120 worth of skins for the match although you can make more by signup offer for betstars. Another trail of evidence towards the games being rigged stem from text messages released to the public by the ex-girlfriend of the now “Torqued” team player Derek “dboorn” Boorn, stating that he was instructed to bet on [NetCodeGuides.com] saying “they really did throw that match and I bet for them on alternate accounts.” He even went on further to add: “They intentionally lost a match this past week…I even told Dazed [captain of iBUYPOWER, Sam “Dazed” Marine] while they were playing to make it close and it was too obvious.” (DailyDot.com, New Evidence Points to Match-Fixing at Highest level of American Counter-Strike, which is a really popular game now a days, since a lot of people play it everyday, and even do research about the games at sites like http://mycsgoboosting.com/guides).
What also doesn’t help is the fact that “Dazed”, the captain of iBUYPOWER, is also co-owner of Netcode Illuminati, the parent company of NetCodeGuides.com
You can read the rest of the articles surrounding this controversy through IGN’s recap of events, or the original source DailyDot.
This is yet another unfortunate event in an area of gaming that is slowly claiming legitimacy as an accepted form of sports. We hope that the trend can end here, otherwise the hard work many other players putting in to make e-Sports legitimate will be mired of the actions by a few people.
For more on the history of e-Sports, particular First-Person Shooters (FPS) e-Sports check out FRAG: the movie
Other rigged/fixed/cheating scandals revolving around e-Sports:
Hacking Scandal mars DreamHack Tournament Winter 2014 CounterStrike: Global Offensive Tournament
Arrow Gaming team, a major DOTA 2 team, is banned from Summit 2 for “322 Scandal” and Match-Fixing
The major Starcraft Cheating Scandal of 2010