One Ring To Rule Them All: The Inner Circle Story (Part One)

It didn't take long after the introduction of skins for North America to create a betting group dedicated to beating the bookies. Over time it became the number one match-fixing hub.

North America was always likely to become an epicentre for the esports match-fixing epidemic for a number of reasons. The first is that because sports gambling was an illicit practice in almost every state outside of Nevada due to the introduction of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992 – although we are now seeing its approval spread since 2018 rulings. Even in Canada it was the law you couldn’t place a bet on a single match and could only place parlay bets from 1985 onwards. At the time of typing this the Canadian government has agreed to change that curious ruling. Because of the fact that sports betting was something that existed in a state where it was simultaneously illegal but talked about in the open by pundits, a unique betting culture has always existed around it. To wit, that if you’re doing something illegal anyway, why not look to beat the bookies with whatever other means are at your disposal.

So it is for as long as there has been people willing to take action on sports there has been a premium placed on the insider information that will give anyone an edge. Knowing if a star athlete has had a late night or a stomach flu before the big game can be the difference between backing the “sure thing” with the other mug punters or turning a hail Mary bet into big winnings. You may hear it joked about that sports gambling has a better intelligence network than most governments but when there’s this much money on the line, for the bookies, for the mob, for the casinos and for the big bettors, you better believe people are on this 24/7.

In addition to this sports in America, particularly at the collegiate level, has a huge discrepancy between the money you make for other parties and the money the athletes take home. This is especially in an issue in a country where there is an almost expected high quality of life for people with elite level skills and yet the NCAA rules still hark back to a time that most likely never existed. When athletes have scholarships taken away from them because of the pittance they earn from a YouTube channel showcasing their talents, but NCAA athletic departments made $18.9 billion in 2019, you’re heading for trouble. The values that supposedly shut down corruption are the major contributors to it, something we’ve seen time and time again with scandals revolving around college sports.

In Canada they don’t even have real match-fixing laws. No, really. I don’t even know how that happens but I guess as a nation they just think everyone is just too honest to not give it their best out there. An unfortunate side-effect of this reality is that, as you’ll see from this story, many of the esports match-fixers are Canadian. They do it with impunity because they believe they aren’t breaking the law and, as we’ve already established, they might even be right.

What does all this mean for the average, committed sports gambler? Well, you’ll have noticed a cottage industry in sold expertise, subscription to tipster groups where you bet along with their picks and in doing so you can win. You pay them a flat fee for access, they tell you which way to bet, you do it and you supposedly profit. The success of these groups is negligible and while you certainly see them promoting the many times they were right in the form of testimonials with proudly displayed betting slips, obviously nothing is said about the failures. All these groups come with very heavy “buyer beware” caveats that essentially mean that if the tips turn out to be wrong it isn’t the fault of the tipster because after all they are not a clairvoyant.

There are numerous examples of these groups that promise insider information on fixed matches and for a limited amount of paid subscribers they will share these sure things. From the hundreds you can find with a basic Google search many will be complete bunk. Remember, to get this precious information one has to be seriously connected. A lot of these sites are scams, even to the point where the real goal is to swipe your credit card details. The websites are generally bullshit but you can get invited to private “dark web” groups, many of which are now hosted on Telegram, where you can see people sharing intel from across the world. A handful of these will be low level organised crime operatives, some of whom are tasked with directly coordinating the fixes.

The introduction of skins to CS:GO in 2013 generated a number of unforeseen consequences. One of these was to act as an accelerator for the growth of the game, which had plateaued following the previous iterations, both in terms of players and by extension esports viewership. Another was that they created a whole new subset of enthusiasts, those who wanted to accrue as many skins as possible and display their inventories. These two worlds colliding would be the start of the whole mess.

The cosmetic items, obtained either through direct trades or, more typically, by opening cases that provided a percentage based chance to acquire skins of increasing value, essentially acted as an early type of cryptocurrency. Despite the fact that it was the intention of Valve that there would be no use for them beyond trading and selling on Steam, the fact that their API was also open to use saw websites look to create businesses around the skins economy. Among other things these included casinos where you could stake your skins on the outcome of a match and a websites where you could effectively “cash out,” selling these in-game and walking away with money that left Steam.

CSGO Lounge made skins betting accessible and drove viewership to CS:GO tournaments

The largest of these sites was CS:GO Lounge and their existence changed the entire face of how the CS:GO esports ecosystem operated. Them featuring a lower tiered match was the difference between it being watched by thousands of bettors or nobody at all. Tournament organisers, teams, players and even commentators would all openly petition the site to feature matches that no reputable bookie should ever have been taking action on. Because this arrangement worked for everybody it was enacted more often than not.

Such was the influence of this one betting platform they would routinely go to battle with tournament operators knowing that their services would drive viewership at a critical time for the sport. In 2014 they demanded free advertising from DreamHack for their Stockholm event and when that wasn’t forthcoming they simply didn’t host the matches leaving many bettors confused as to why. The subsequent reduction in viewership showed that a not insignificant number of fans wouldn’t waste a weekend watching a tournament unless they could bet on the action.

The founder of ESEA, Eric “Lpkane” Thunberg, had openly stated that CSGO Lounge had attempted to pressure his league into promoting them in exchange for hosting their matches. “They're threatening to exclude matches from tournaments that do not do what they want” he said. “A professional league having direct ties to a sports bookie is not something that will happen under my watch.”

Thunberg was seemingly one of the few people at that time that could see the inherent dangers to competitive integrity that this line blurring was likely to have but failed to identify that his league was the breeding ground for the first wave of North American match-fixers. Even if he’d had the stomach to try and weed out the problem by the end of 2015 he was gone. German based ESL wanted to expand into the growing North American market and bought Thunberg’s league. A notorious new-money asshole he wasn’t kept around in the management reshuffle.

It was against this backdrop that saw the rise of the notorious Inner Circle group. Founded in October 2014 the Inner Circle forums were registered in the Czech Republic by Kevin "Krook" Bhasin, a journeyman CS:GO player of no particular notoriety who had become a dedicated esports gambler, the website was originally intended to only feature successful and connected bettors. There were strict entry requirements all curated by Bhasin so as to keep it exclusive.

“So just to start off Krook hated me” former member Amir Khair would tell me in a recent interview. “Like I don’t even know why but I suspect it was from random ESEA scrims or something, but he really didn’t like me. There was a guy called joemygod who really liked me and he was the only person I ever really spoke to. All I used to do was just bet on the games back in the CS:GO Lounge days, you know, back when Asimovs or Fire Serpent (skins) were worth $60 each so you would stack four Asimovs to bet real big and before I would bet I would just ask Joe.

He was always bragging about his ratio… On Lounge you could show how much you had bet and how much you had won and he was always posting screenshots of his winnings. One day I won really big and he asked about the bet and then asked if I wanted to join the Inner Circle forum. I asked what is it and he explained that they only invite people who win regularly… To get in you had to show your graph and if you’d made a certain ratio of money then you could be invited. It wasn’t based on the fact I had played ESEA Invite. It wasn’t based on being friends with anyone. It was just based on whether or not you could make money regularly.”

“I have been a member since late October 2014, about a week after its conception. I was in the first 15 approved members, despite being number 90 signed up” another former member told me.  “Signups were limited to I think it was 25 at most at any given time? I was the most active member basically my entire duration there, as you may be able to tell from the post count. I didn’t manage the spreadsheets, but I probably spent between 6-8 hours a day researching games, cashing out at over $60,000.”

Example of an Inner Circle account

A mostly complete list of members at this time was:

Kevin "Krook" Bhasin

Brian “Ver1zon” Rank

Joe “Joemygod” Demarco

Amir “kire” Khair

Brett “Siiignal” Hunt

Michael "agM" Abood

Vertunicle

Henryz

Andrew “wigg” Resnik

Duc "cud" Pham

Warren “hades” Rettich

Sean “BruiN” Weld

Chase “lowrider” Releford

Mik “seoulkiM” Los

Bilal “SPAMMER” Ali

Anthony “IrNoobTrainee” Nguyen

Tarik “Tarik” Celik

Calvin "dellzor" Le

It was a mix of amateur players and aspiring pros, although some barely played CS:GO at all. The one thing they all had in common was they understood skins betting was a shortcut to getting rich and one with appreciable downside. All you had to do was know which way to bet and these members all backed themselves to.

In 2017, as I still worked on trying to stem the tide of esports match-fixing, I was contacted by a former senior member of the site. They sent me everything that had been preserved before the forum was wiped following a less than amicable split among the more active members, a large part of it related to one of their roles as a whistleblower for my own iBUYPOWER story. It was them that made me understand that the collective hadn’t always been a hub for match-fixing. Rather it was designed to be a place where those who had inside information could share it to beat the oddsmakers. Here I’ll publish the lengthy extracts from their correspondence:

“I’d like to clear up some misconceptions about the site first and foremost. It was not a site dedicated to shady things, although shady things were gotten up to later. It was a site dedicated to information gathering and hoarding. We didn’t even all bet on the same things. Everyone did their own thing, because you know, internet and egos. There is a massive database of team and player links, notes, and the like. I’ve taken thousands of screenshots of results pages and ESEA stats. Most of us are friends with many pro players because we would pay them for information on games. The best information was always roster changes or people being tilted. We profited considerably from a member being able to learn that a player was extremely tilted before going into a pro-league match as a favourite, which they then proceeded to lose. Work was delegated to try to spread the load, however a lot of people only had confidence in their picks once they had done their own searching to affirm.”

The spreadsheet had data points for hundreds of active players in multiple leagues

Included with the first email was an example of one of the databases. It was huge and had cells for the player’s name, their ESEA account, their Steam account, a screenshot of their recent hours played (used to bettors could assess how much practice teams were engaged in) ESEA’s statistical performance measurements and any personal information that might influence their playing. The member that had contacted me was essentially one of the largest contributors to this system that everyone in the group would have access to. The forums were initially just a place to argue about what all this information meant and who was going to be which way.

“They got me because I grew up playing versus pretty much half the pros you saw in CS:GO in the early stages of the game and there were no rules back then” former member Bilal Ali told me in a recent interview. “There was nothing that said they couldn't share like information such as what maps they might play or something like that. We had our own forum and I would communicate that information with them or check my Steam friendslist to see / make educated guesses on maps that were likely to be played in an upcoming series so we could make more accurate predictions. We would then have a group discussion as to who we wanted and it was personal choices. You didn’t have to go with whatever someone like Krook would say. Personally I always took risks on underdogs and my biggest win was on Envy when they lost in a bo1 at some LAN I  forgot against some shit team… I won like 32 grand.”

“There were a ton of games where we were just told information and we decided how to bet with it” Senior member Brett Hunt confirmed. “For example, we learned that Zeus was tilted prior to a match where Na’Vi was an overdog in a BO1 on Dust2, which at the time, pretty much guaranteed them a loss. We did our best to have someone from each team providing updated roster/scrim information. It was never asking them what they thought about games though.”

In the dump of bits and pieces I received in 2017 there would be images that showed the process of intel gathering. A player would be approached on Steam and offered skins or keys for cases. Below is one example of a senior member approaching Robin "robiin" Sjögren. I include this one because it’s indicative of just how commonplace it was for players to be approached to throw matches and the fact that it clearly shows Sjögren to be someone who was categorically unwilling to throw a match.

Any players who were in the group were expected to provide regular and accurate information about the state of their fellow competitors and this was especially true for those further up the food-chain. The most famous name on the list, Tarik Celik, was already an established player at this time representing a team called “Mousespaz” that had been formed from the ashes of the roster sponsored by Netcode Guides. Celik would regularly be interrogated by the members for insight into the world of the top tier players but he was a much better player than he was an informant it seems.

“I remember signing up at some point through a friend for advice on making bets since they had a reputation for being the top dogs who always got the picks right” Celik told me “but I got removed since I wasn’t posting or giving insight and they wanted to keep it tight knit. I can’t recall much more than that to be honest.”

Another anonymous user has a slightly different spin on the removal.

“Tarik was a member until they qualified for MLG. We bet on iBUYPOWER to beat them specifically because he wasn’t confident in winning… And then they [Mousespaz] won. Tarik had been saying that they hadn’t practiced and hadn’t expected to beat iBP, but krook went quite big and lost.”

https://www.hltv.org/matches/2293749/ibuypower-vs-mousespaz-mlg-x-games-championship-qualifier-1-north-america

Rettich, who represented both Mythic and Netcode Guides during his membership, would also be kicked for information that turned out to be less than stellar. Despite this he would maintain a friendship with Rank that will come into play later.

“Krook got tired of losing money on hades’ information” one member explained. “He would tell us to bet on them as underdogs, that they were confident, and then they would get stomped. Eventually he banned him.”

Losing the group and especially Bhasin money was a cardinal sin that wouldn’t be tolerated for long. According to several members he was gaining an increasing taste for betting and accruing maximum profits. So even as we moved into 2015 many of the group were still focused on gathering intel, and members of the group were making thousands of dollars of skins in profits, too many “sure things” turned out not to be sure things. Some sizeable losses prompted a change of direction for the group, with Bhasin and Rank both deciding that since as there were so many fixed matches taking place in CS:GO anyway, they may as well start to try and get involved with that. This led to the creation of a private forum that only a handful of trusted members could access where communications about fixed matches took place. People with access to this would actively go and contact players on Steam and ask if they intended to or would be willing to throw a match. They would then screenshot the conversation and share it with the rest to prove it was genuine. If a player refused to throw they would also upload a screenshot as a reminder not to approach them again. Essentially they created an inner circle within Inner Circle.

Several members of the group I interviewed confirmed the division of labour. Bhasin was the founder and ultimately the individual who had the say over who was in or out of the group. However, he wasn’t very “hands on” when it came to the day to day of match fixing operations. “Despite the information that is already public and is known about him” one member explained “he is a genuinely caring individual but is also greedy as shit as you will learn or already know.” Hunt was more tech minded, which suited Bhasin who himself was incredibly gifted when it came to coding, but was more of an archivist as he refused to actively participate in match-fixing activity. Rank was the individual who was hands on when it came to approaching players and paying for information and services. DeMarco was the most notorious member publicly, his role being both to gather information and sew disinformation as appropriate. He would use his many contacts to bring new people in to the fold or to obtain information about fixed matches from other regions. Outside of this four everyone else was expendable.

In addition to directly approaching players themselves, they would also make it known to players who engaged in match-fixing that if they shared the information about matches they were fixing, then they would reciprocate by sharing information about other matches so the players could bet accordingly. One source said corrupt players would directly receive payments from the person asking for the information. This was verified on the record by Ali who explained “For NA they had like people like joEmygod, Krook, Wigg and myself but I believe for EU the way it worked was they had some other guys and they would give certain players from teams skins for info like $60 AWP Asimov or something.”

Once they had someone confirm one way or another the outcome  of a result it was practice to then screenshot them for proof. Even among the senior members trust was thin on the ground so the agreement was nothing was considered a “sure thing” unless a screenshot was taken and uploaded. These would be then shared with the select few who could then bet accordingly. In the 2017 forum dump I was sent a number of these screenshots that had been saved by the person who leaked the forum to me.

For example former Mythic and Winout player Michael "agM" Abood, who initially would only post information on the forum under the username “agm52,” eventually would graduate to asking the team he played for to throw matches. Even if they refused he always had the option to simply not try in the game.

This is a conversation between Finnish player Joel "jOELZ" Aalto and Russian player Saveliy "jmqa" Bragin. Aalto, who according to sources at Inner Circle was a heavy bettor and would regularly share information about match fixing with them, asks Bragin if his team intend to lose. Bragin confirms they will saying it will be easy money. The match that this date corresponds to indeed sees Bragin’s team, PiTER, lose to the German team of UX.

https://www.hltv.org/matches/2297190/ux-vs-piter-xfunction-masters-season-iii

The scope was now way beyond that of just North American players. If a game was featured on CS:GO Lounge, preferably in some small meaningless cup, then the members were encouraged to reach out to the players and ask if they’d be willing to take a dive, assuming they weren’t already. There were a number of these screenshots uploaded to the forums confirming pre-arranged outcomes for several matches.

On the regular forums talking about match-fixing openly was mostly met with derision and disbelief. For a lot of the original members it felt cheap and not a good use of their skills. Beating a bookie was one thing, rigging the game so you can’t lose another.

“I heard about them setting up throws but i never once involved myself with that” Ali said. “That was towards end of my innercircle days where I heard they would try to organize throws or "attempt" to and as soon as one of the members who was quitting said that to me I got out because I would rather lose money then scam people. I'm not raised like those kids and I only gambled to pay for my student loan.”

Another user said that the players who would go on to be kicked discouraged any talk about match-fixing in front of them, even in jest.

“Talk of match-fixing wasn’t something that happened often on the main forum. It never happened when Tarik was a member, nor Hades. They would have never come in and said a game was being thrown and if people asked them seriously they were usually met with “lol dude are you fucking serious” or something along those lines.  There were definitely people who would joke about things, but the vibe definitely wasn’t shady.”

Khair was another user who also initially thought the forum wasn’t doing anything unethical. “I always thought Krook, Verizon and cud… Cud wasn’t even officially on the forums he used to post under someone else’s account… Anyway, I always thought it was just about those guys having really good ratios and they just used to gather up gossip… Stuff like “this guy has a stomach-ache” or “these guys were in Europe bootcamping” or whatever it was. I never really thought too much more of it.”

“It probably sounds egotistical” Khair continued “but I was one of the few who had played at Invite level, and even though I’m sure I’m one of the worst players in Invite history, I was there for like five seasons. I felt that was my edge. That I knew how pro players played, I knew how they practiced and I thought my edge came from that experience. Cud had played Premier so he had a solid resume for that too. But I always wondered how Krook, someone who had only played in mediocre ESEA Main teams, how he would win everything. How did he get every single bet right? It wasn’t every single bet but you know what I mean… These guys had ratios like way beyond mine. I think I won something in the region to $7,000-$10,000 in skins at that time but I remember Krook posting his and the dude was up $250,000 and I was like what in the fuck. That is like inhuman. That was when I figured something was going on.”

The creation of this two-tiered membership system would be the root cause of a lot of early members drifting away for two reasons. For the wilfully ignorant it just appeared that the forums were becoming inactive because match-fixing over information gathering became the priority. For those who knew match-fixing was occurring, it was simply better to be away from it. This was mostly due to the fact that if you were caught you’d likely be banned from placing bets on CS:GO Lounge and for many people with connections in the scene it was free money.

The iBUYPOWER ban was sewing discord between the Inner Circle members

There was already tension between the senior members after the revelation that one of the site’s key members, Joe “JoeMyGod” Demarco, had actively helped expose the iBUYPOWER vs Netcode Guides match-fix that would see five of the best players in North America and one of the site’s own forum members receive bans from involvement in Valve events at the end of January 2015. However, for the most part, Joe’s intel was too good and too frequently forthcoming to reject, so even though he had done something that should have seen him excommunicated, he was forgiven his transgressions this time. One member would say “Joe was kicked multiple times for being a shithead. He is the biggest diva I have ever seen on the internet and literally only cares about himself. Odds are he’s a psychopath.” It also helped that both Bhasin and Rank held Pham in little regard, often mocking his claims to be a master bettor behind his back. Pham was mostly of use due to the sheer volume of Steam accounts he had access to, enabling him to place huge bets and sometimes on behalf of others for a cut of the proceeds.

The high profile ban had put anyone with aspirations of playing at the highest level on edge and would eventually see other members of the group leave. Another consequence of the iBUYPOWER story was that fans could openly talk about match-fixing as a viable explanation for strange results. Between 2014 and 2015 it’s impossible to tell what percentage of matches were fixed but I can say with a degree of certainty that it’s more than you’d want to imagine and that it went all the way to the top. The problem was that now half baked ideas and whispered rumours were peddled as established fact. While only a small number of people knew about the Inner Circle group initially, each time it was mentioned more and more would learn of its existence. Soon almost every time there was an upset result in a match in ESEA someone would invoke their name. Some would claim to be members who weren’t and put out incorrect information in a bid to try and sway betting odds. So even though the operation wasn’t a well kept secret anymore, it was actually harder for people to discern what was true due to the sheer volume of bullshit. In many ways what should have been a hindrance helped the group out immensely. “Towards the end of my Inner Circle days where I heard they would try to organize throws or "attempt" to and as soon as one of the members who was quitting said that to me I got out cause I’d rather lose money then scam people” Ali told me. “I'm not raised like those kids and I only gambled to pay for my students loan. Shit, when I started my gambling career I only had $5. All those rats probably did [match fix] though and made their fair share. I wouldn't be surprised.”