Counter-Strike hit by another match fixing scandal

Valve’s Counter-Strike has been rocked again with yet more evidence of tournament match fixing.

The Daily Dot claims to have evidence that a match between iBUYPOWER and NetcodeGuides.com played last August as part of the CEVO Professional Season 5 was fixed. It saw the favourites iBUYPOWER crash to a 16-4 defeat, with the players behaving oddly in game and laughing at the result.

At the time the team blamed the defeat on jet lag and lack of familiarity with the map, but now several sources have emerged claiming that the result was linked to a betting ring that netted over $10k as a result.

The latest evidence comes from texts sent by former iBUYPOWER player Derek dboorn” Boorn to an ex-girlfriend in which he admits the team intentionally lost a match this past week” and that he placed bets for them.

There is also evidence of Boorn being involved in other betting on fixed matches, with Vietnamese player Duc "cud" Pham also implicated. The latter is said to have used multiple accounts to bet on the results of a games fixed by a Chinese team, netting almost $12k as a result.

Boorn has subsequently not denied the authenticity of the texts but has declined to participate in what he refers to his ex’s revenge mission”.

In addition, Cloud9 player Shahzeb ShahZam” Khan has openly admitted to being tipped off about the fixed iBUYPOWER match by Netcode Guides founder Casey Foster.

He made it very clear the match was going to be thrown,” Kahn said of Foster. I didn’t want to get involved with any of it but I changed my bet, as I thought would be logical at the time while also sharing this information with a friend whom I assumed to have bet the same.

I regret first and foremost not contacting league officials and telling them what was going to happen. I didn’t have all the details and didn’t know any specifics as I was not the one engineering any of this. Also, given my past immaturity at the time, I wasn’t sure if anyone would believe me.”

Kahn, whose sole source of income at the time came from Netcode Guides, claims that Foster pressured him to keep quiet, telling him that the news would be a huge blow to the North American competitive CS:GO scene and cause iBUYPOWER to lose their sponsor”.

So I denied everything, I stayed quiet, and at the end of the day I took the heat of the crosshairs when this first surfaced months back through an article very similar to this one,” he added.

I know I wasn’t the only person to have known, but I was definitely in a position to do what was right and come forward with this information and I didn’t because I was scared. I’m sorry. I’ve never been involved with any type of match fixing and I never will be, neither would any of us at Cloud9.”