A Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player has been caught cheating during a professional tournament.
Cheaters never prosper, as they say. That’s doubly true in the world of esports, where being caught cheating can land you and your entire team in hot water.
That’s what happened in Shanghai last Friday when a professional CS:GO tournament kicked out an entire team when one of their players was caught cheating.
The Extremesland Zowie Asia CS:GO 2018 tournament is a big deal in Asia. It draws the biggest teams from China, India, Thailand, Japan, Korea, and more all to compete over a $100,000 prize pool. The whole thing is streamed online with millions of viewers tuning in to cheer on their national team.
One such team is OpTic India, the Indian division of OpTic Gaming (you might have heard of them--they’ve got CS:GO teams all over the world, as well as DOTA 2, LoL, and all the other acronym games). While OpTic Gaming shuns cheaters in all forms, one somehow managed to sneak his way onto their Indian CS:GO team, to disastrous repercussions.
Nikhil “forsaken” Kumawat somehow managed to place a hack on his game terminal just in time for the tournament. The hack is a pretty typical aimbot-style cheat that locks onto enemy players as soon as they enter the hacker’s field of vision.
RELATED: VALVE HAS 1700 CPUs RUNNING FULL-TIME TO CATCH CS:GO CHEATERS
It’s not known exactly how Kumawat installed the hack, as typically tournament machines are only accessible by players during the tournament, but it is known that an eagle-eyed tourney admin became suspicious and decided to check out Kumawat’s terminal.
Kumawat knew when he was busted and tried to delete the offending files before the admin could spot them. He even needed to be restrained as his PC was searched.
After being caught, Extremesland Zowie Asia booted the entire OpTic India team from the tournament. Shortly after, OpTic kicked out Kumawat in disgrace, and then folded up the team in order to distance the remaining players from the scandal.
Let this be a lesson to the rest of you: if you cheat in esports, just like in regular sports, you’ll eventually get caught.