Prologue: No-one Really Cares About Match Fixing
Before we tell the history of Counter-Strike: Global Offfensive match-fixing we really need to understand how the scene and indeed myself got to this point.
My name is Richard Lewis, an investigative journalist who has wasted my best years writing about esports in the vague hope the industry could be shaped into something better than its analogues. In particular I am probably best known for my stories around the mistreatment of players and breaches of competitive integrity across multiple esports. In particular I have extensively covered match-fixing and gambling related scams since 2014. But it was in 2010, following the Starcraft: Brood War match-fixing scandal, that I became hyper aware of the problems esports was facing. I was a young editor of a European website with little Starcraft pedigree at the time but with help from South Korean colleagues and my own research I tried to bring detailed coverage of the matter to a Western audience. This wasn’t a tale from the bush-leagues. This happened at the highest level of the sport and involved some of the greatest players it had ever seen. It saw eleven players implicated and eventually banned by the Korean Esports Association (KeSPA) and saw legend and fan favourite Ma "sAviOr" Jae Yoon stripped of all his titles as well as given 120 hours of community service and a suspended sentence on a year in prison.
The scandal was utterly devastating to an esport often seen as the most advanced in the world and it didn’t set it back so much as secure its demise. The lack of faith in the sport was a contributing factor in the adoption of Starcraft 2 in the region as fans hoped for a fresh start with competitors they could believe in. By 2015 I would be reporting on another wave of match-fixing in that game too.
However, the story I will probably always be remembered for is the iBUYPOWER match-fix, a single incident that took me over four months to find enough evidence to convince a doubting community and Valve. In short I had been passed a screenshot of an errant conversation from a player, Shahzeeb "ShahZaM" Khan, who was telling his friend that a fix was incoming and he should bet on the favourites to lose. The friend in question was a junior journalist who reminded the player of this fact. He was subsequently told to ignore it. The two teams involved were two of the most popular in North American region, iBUYPOWER and Netcode Guides, with the added kicker that the captain of the former – Sam “Dazed” Marine – was the owner of the latter. iBUYPOWER had already qualified for the LAN playoffs of the tournament, the lesser American league CEVO, and a win for Netcode Guides would see them go through to those same playoffs as well. It was the perfect low stakes game where one team could bet on themselves to lose with little consequence.
The journalist, correctly believing that because he didn’t have a sizeable reputation or following he wouldn’t be believed, brought the screenshots to me. I asked around, had the information confirmed and then watched the game. It was glaringly obvious. A number of inexplicable tactical changes had taken place – such as a non-AWP player taking over that role from a player widely regarded as the best on that weapon at the time. Players were attempting spectacular plays instead of doing what was efficient. I ran the story.
What happened next was exactly what the junior journalist was hoping to avoid. I was called a liar by almost everybody.
No-one could understand why these players, players with a golden future, would throw a match for small financial games. “Everyone has off days” and “they were just fooling around because they had already qualified” were the prevailing narratives. Worse yet, the league issued statement that their investigation had found that the players hadn’t placed any bets under their names via their primary accounts, which is the bare minimum someone would do to hide such activity. For many this was seen as an exoneration.
Then came the media tour. The iBUYPOWER brand were obviously keen to wash the stink off and due to a mutual business association with one of the most popular streamers at the time, the players were given a softball interview that was watched by thousands. There I watched former friends state without hesitation that I was lying and denounce me as “a sad, attention-seeking old man.”
Not to be perturbed I continued to poke around the edges of the story. I interviewed players who told me how match-fixing was pretty much done out in the open. I got a statement from an insider who had helped sell the CS:GO skins for one of those involved. I then spent hours through evenings and early mornings working with an admin from the largest skin betting websites, CS:GO Lounge, using anecdotal evidence to trace bets to accounts that we could then see had placed bets on this single match. The final piece was when an ex-girlfriend of one of the fixers had publicly shown text messages detailing the fixed matches they would bet on, including one that directly stated the match was rigged. Incredibly these messages had been released to the public and ignored on the basis that they were almost certainly fake given the source they came from. After confirming they were real and checking numbers against phone records this was finally enough to send to Valve who banned all involved in January 2015.
While I was happy to have been proven correct any rejoicing was short lived. The ban was life with no appeal, in my view a brutally disproportionate punishment that was issued not based on the merits of what had occurred but instead issued to make an example of the players. That type of punitive measure might scare some people straight but it also is a gesture that implicitly states we’d rather simply have to not think about this at all, that it is so rare we can simply issue these draconian punishments with a wave of a hand. And of course as I would find out it wasn’t rare. In fact CS:GO was riddled with match-fixing and at the highest level too. My success in getting this story across the line meant every match-fix in the world was being brought to my doorstep, usually by angry bettors whose eyes, clouded as they were by rage-induced tears, could very well be deceiving them.
I chased down as many as I could and I found plenty of circumstantial evidence that could have damned at least half a dozen top players. But I would have likely spent another four months running them down all in the hope that one of them was stupid enough to have told a disgruntled ex-partner about everything they had done. I mean, the truth is, as blatant as the iBUYPOWER throw was, without that happening the fans of the sport would still have been utterly convinced of their innocence and I would have been ruined. I gathered what I could and shared it privately through backchannels but ultimately to no avail. For many who did care the fixes felt unstoppable, just a constant tide of shit creeping up the shoreline and seeping through the cracks under your door. Some of the staff at CS:GO Lounge had become so utterly dejected by the match-fixers using their platform with multiple bot accounts to maximise profit they just started betting along with them. They couldn’t beat them so they joined them.
What needed to happen once the iBUYPOWER story dropped was Valve had to agree to set up a taskforce and trace every single suspicious skins transaction between sizeable bettors and professional players. This was how pros were insulating themselves from direct implication. It would have taken some time, maybe a few months, but there and then you would have caught all of the people who had been compromised and I can tell you the history of the sport would look drastically different than it does today. It probably would also have seen so many high level players implicated they would have likely had to revise those lifetime bans to something more appropriate for esports. Regardless, they never expressed any interest in this. No-one did. No-one really cares about the match-fixing. As long as the matches go ahead and the money gets made we all believed that this one-off Earth-shattering punishment was going to deter everybody from ever mixing a match again.
The next year a project called the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) was to be launched. I first met their founder, Ian Smith, at the MLG CS:GO Major in Columbus Ohio in 2016 where he had been tasked with doing a “threat assessment” in the world of Counter-Strike betting by several parties such activities would affect. Needless to say, he was shocked with what he saw. Having come from the world of sports, particularly cricket, where he had twenty years of experience working as a lawyer specializing in regulation, he was astounded that there were little to no safeguards in place. Had it not been for his diligent work at this time the problems arising from the world of esports betting could have been a lot worse. I struck it off with Ian immediately. We both understood all the fundamental problems of esports and all the mechanics of match-fixing. We could talk about famous cases from “real” sports, although I know fuck all about cricket. I went on to be the journalist that gave him his first public interview in the esports bubble and I would later speak at their annual general meeting as a guest of honour. I was happy. I didn’t have to spend my time being Mr. Match-fixing anymore. There was actually going to be a body to do it for me.
But here’s the thing… I never stopped digging into all of this. In my mind I was always going to somehow complete the Herculean task of doing what we should have done back in 2015, that I was somehow going to get them all and eventually tell the complete story of match-fixing in CS:GO to the world. So every day when there was some spare time, when I was free from working on another story or project, I would go back to my old hard drives and laptops, dredge up the old notes and leads and see where they would take me. Mostly they would go nowhere but in 2017 I eventually managed to get a member of North America’s largest betting and match-fixing collective to provide me with access to a lot of stuff from their private forums. It wasn’t blockbuster stuff but it would incriminate some players I already had on my list. Interviewing some of the VIP members of the collective pretty much yielded a tale of how the co-founders got greedy and it shifted from being a place to share inside information into a place that started not only to share information about throws but actually go to great lengths to induce them. Eventually arguments about ethics and money would make it collapse. At the time it felt like writing that story was mostly a waste of focus as it wouldn’t have really achieved anything but, since as it is as essential part of how we have arrived where we are in 2021 Counter-Strike and it serves as further proof no-one really cares about match-fixing, I’m going to tell that story.
I’ve always kept an eye on the ESEA league ever since I was made aware of the existence of this betting circle. I have watched the numbers of fixed matches steadily increase down the years. I’ve watched as the fixers went from hilariously sloppy and ratting each out on the league’s official forums only for a new generation to take up the mantle. And for a time you could see that this was a pretty sophisticated operation that was going on, organised and with it never being too obvious. Then, at the tail-end of 2020, people once again started bringing match-fixing allegations to my doorstep and what I saw would have been comical if I didn’t care. Fixes out in the open, obvious throws and deliberate misplays, huge last minute shift in odds and results that show that cluster of betting to be incredibly prescient. Participants openly sharing betting slips to boast about their gains.
The matches were so obviously manipulated it just seemed to me that the people who run the ESEA league had given up. There was simply no way anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Counter-Strike couldn’t see it for what it was. I know it’s not as easy as it used to be. The supposedly sizeable ban they issued to a handful of players and one community commentator in 2018 was literally handed over to them by a betting company who had seen one of the players have a relative with the same surname place incriminating bets on them. ESEA paraded around like they had conducted some big investigation and caught Al Capone. Turns out the fact that they couldn’t even pin anything on the other blatant fixers sent a pretty clear message – we actually cannot fucking catch you even with an anti-cheat that has kernel level access that we would much rather turn into a Bitcoin Miner without your knowledge.
Then at the start of the 2021 I got sent a recording of three players, ones who played on teams that blatantly fixed games, plotting to fix two games. They made the mistake of planning it out in front of a newly recruited player, one who wanted no part of it. He grabbed enough incriminating audio and then left. Well, that was that then. I was ready to run the story and passed on my information to other parties who needed to know. And they told me they knew. They already had the recording. It’d been in circulation since September of the previous year and I was late to the party.
Think about that for a moment. Here, we had a recording of players who were plotting to fix matches, who had played on teams that had clearly thrown matches, with betting data that validated there were strange bets placed around those matches and everyone was sat on it like a mother hen. The official reason for this is that ESIC looped in law enforcement, which is true, but not the primary reason this investigation been crawling. No, the truth remains ESIC are underfunded, understaffed and even just chasing down the North American match-fixing in this one league is an overwhelming proposition. It’s my belief that any of the journalists with this recording, and there were at least four, could have essentially forced everyone’s hand by leaking it. But ESIC asked us not to on the basis that it could hamper their investigative efforts and so we chose that over the clicks.
The fixers continued to fix, some of them thinking they had dodged a bullet, as they too had been told of the existence of the recording. But when no ban came and ESEA did nothing it was back to as business as usual. And we’ve had to watch from the sidelines for months as they not only got rich but also paved their way to move to another competitive scene, one where they believe their actions in CS:GO cannot touch them. And they might be right about that because no-one really cares about match-fixing.
As the ESIC continues to (hopefully) gather steam, I’m sure a great many of the people involved in the match fixing and betting activities started to get worried. After all some were in jurisdictions where this could qualify as a crime, and those who felt no legal threat at least had to worry about the permanent stain to their reputation. However the reality is, and it is utterly damaging to print this fact, that none of these fears are justified. There are several reasons for this that I have been able to discover after hours and hours of digging. The first will surprise nobody: profit. The esports betting market is so small by comparison to even the smallest sports books, that it simply isn’t worth the many hours to dig into. To the owners of many of the websites used for side bets, the amount being effectively stolen is so small that it can be considered breakage. The simple cost of doing business in a growing space far from its peak. And just so it is explicitly stated, to paint this as thievery, the type that might drive anyone, even a mega wealthy business, to the point of anger and vengeance would not be an accurate representation. You see, even when the fixers win, someone, namely the punters lose. And as long as someone loses money, then the gambling companies come away with something.
So we arrive back at the word profit once more because, as you now know, this isn’t earnest burglary, but rather just a reduction in how much money is made. There is also the fact that the amateur hour bullshit ran by these teenagers is so brazen, that it often skews the odds so far as to be immediately suspicious and the protocols designed to protect gambling companies in these instances kick in. Because esports is so small, the bets are simply cancelled. Everyone gets their money back with an automated email as a souvenir of the time they nearly got burned. And you might think enough of these happening in a cluster, involving the same names or competitions might trigger an investigation serving as some pretty sizable breadcrumbs on a well lit trail. but you would be wrong. The only specific actions I’ve been told about from those who work with and for the gambling sites, is that they will on occasion blacklist teams so no action is taken on their matches. This is done on a name only basis, so it is easy for teams to work around. If you fuck up and get caught participating in too many dodgy matches, you just change your team name and wait for the next rigged tournament. If you’ve ever wondered why those same group of players consistently swap names over the course of a season, now you know.
I myself attempted to make contact with several betting platforms to share over 40.000 words of investigation including dates, times, names and even the betting data itself that I had acquired from an insider that monitored these matches in his own time. Not one took me up on the offer. The responses ranged from “There really isn't anything we can do” to “You should best hand that over to ESIC.” Only one even looked at what I had accumulated. It is also my understanding that law enforcement agencies that have expressed interest in this match fixing are mostly interested in whether or not the players could help make a case against the crime syndicate members they have interacted with. They barely know what esports is and don’t seem at all interested in trying to make a criminal case against the players. Because of the fact the legal system is so far behind where the internet is technologically, there is so much grey area it’s not even clear what laws you would say they have broken. In a world where some jurisdictions don’t recognise esports as a sport or cryptocurrency as money, how can you even begin? Not to mention the fact this has taken place with the involvement of people from all around the world. The Americans and Canadians went to great lengths to confer with fixers in other markets such as China and Mongolia. It’s not even clear how agencies could prosecute some of the conspirators even if they had the laws to back them up.
As I grew frustrated I contacted SportRadar who have been active for twenty years and using live and collated data to ensure the integrity of sports. It felt like a good call as I am told their Fraud Detection Service (FDS) even pinged ESIC a few times about compromised matches. “ I’ve been able to gather are names, a huge list of fixed matches with corroborating betting data (dubious odd shifts etc), methods of fixing and even what websites these betting circles use to place their bets and pay-out players” I told them. “I’ve sent all of this across to the Esports Integrity Commission that are currently investigating it although to preserve the integrity of that investigation they obviously cannot share anything with me.”
“I can assure you the scale of this fixing is shocking and the money that is being defrauded from these betting platforms is a significant amount, however I cannot seem to get the attention of these sites” I told them and then to pique their interest “It is my belief we are talking about the largest scale match-fixing operation in Western esports history.”
Nothing. It has been over two years. No-one really cares about match-fixing.
The sad reality you and I have to accept, is that even though what these individuals did habitually was ethically wrong and would be easily prosecutable were it not for a few linguistic driven loopholes. They will get away with it in a real sense. They will be issued bans from a video game they don’t even play anymore and they will get on with their lives. You can decide if that is enough for the dozens of players who stripmined a league for their own personal profit and turned one of the few ways for amateurs to progress to pros to a joke. All the while sharing Snapchats about the things bought with the dirty money.
The disappointing truth is why it is essential to police ourselves and to do so quickly. Letting someone accrue ill gotten gains over a period of years and then hitting them with a ban is absolutely toothless. The bans only function as a barrier to being a pro, which few of the guilty are even interested in. Even if they were, the amount you can make from habitually fixing matches even without crime syndicate involvement makes an average professional salary look insignificant by comparison. Only a swift punishment works, and it’s why leagues and tournament organizers need to be vigilant. Currently, while I admire and support the work of ESIC, they are woefully understaffed and clearly didn’t understand the scale and scope of the problem they were proposing to solve. While it is essential for their success that leagues defer to their expertise and rulings for match fixing to be tackled industry wide, the current agreement that tournaments simply defer to ESIC for all rulings is absurd and only plays into the hands of the matchfixers.
To this point, during the investigation into the matchfixing in ESEA, I reached out to a colleague at ESL that has influence on an operational level. I wanted to let them know that the league had become so compromised, that there were so many matches being fixed, that the best thing they could do would be to suspend play while this investigation was conducted. I was of the opinion it would be impossible for the league to withstand the scandal and would be the last nail in the coffin of a platform that was already slowly dying anyway. They didn’t disagree and they assured me that they shared my frustrations and wanted to get to the bottom of the problem. They were also frustrated by the snails pace of ESIC and said their hands were ultimately tied as per the agreement they have in place with them. Then I told them I had seen things that suggested complicity from staff. There was one incident where an admin refused to let a team forfeit a match against suspected fixers. I have never heard of a team being refused to forfeit a match before in all my esports years. Under what rule would that be enforceable? How could you compel someone to play? And yet that was the communication to this team, that if they didn’t play this match there would be ramifications for their status in the league. And this might just seem like a zealous official, but if you know that when matches are forfeited bets are cancelled and you also know that one of the teams involved in this match is filled with fixers, it’s hard to not think that decision is connected.
With occurrences like this in mind, I also that colleague to keep their eyes open and don’t mention the potential of corrupt officials or staff to anyone, which they agreed was sensible. I asked if an internal audit threw anything up and they would loop me in, and I would likewise share anything that would be of interest to the league. About 30 minutes later I attempted to interview a league admin to go over some suspicious activity that might have been able to provide some insight into. It was also going to be a good way to gauge their general awareness of matchfixing methods that the league officials had. They responded immediately by telling me they couldn’t talk to me. There had just been a company wide instruction for all staff associated with ESEA to not talk to me, and to simply issue no comment. They were also told there was no need to talk to me about any of its communications because they would be coming through official channels, such as ESIC and ESL. Neither of these things turned out to be true. I had been fucked over and I could only think of one plausible explanation as to why. Who knows what tracks were covered, what evidence was altered, what testimony suddenly changed? Another lesson learned, just about how few people actually care about cleaning up this space. Most would rather be up to their necks in shit than have to raise a shovel.
[Additional: It is worth noting that in the view of the person responsible for this incident that my opinion of the events is uncharitable. They state they were simply trying to create a direct and clear channel of communication for me to share findings and also to ensure that any information that came back to me came from a definitive source. Maybe I’m just cynical.]
Around that time another source had informed me that the decision of Mountain Dew, the former title sponsor of the ESEA premier league, to break off the sponsorship was because they were anxious about having their brand in close proximity to the upcoming negative headlines. I was assured by ESL this was not accurate and that the sponsorship deal had simply run its course. The account, they explained, had been brought in by someone who had worked with that brand before, and they had since left ESL and therefore there was no chance of an extension. It’s a plausible story when you know how esports works, an industry powered by cronyism, but I could also understand how detrimental it would be to admit sponsors were aware of the scale of the matchfixing even privately to a journalist. After all it would strongly suggest ESL must have known about the scale of the issues if it had gotten back to the sponsors and made them pull out. There could be no mock surprise when the bans started to drop.
Well I have waited and watched for over two years. So far there are literally only two players who have been banned for a significant amount of time, five years apiece, and the rest of the offenders are still out there lying to everyone’s face about it. The league that it happened in have, either through design or incompetence, enabled it throughout that period of time. I’ve covered dozens of competitive games in my nineteen years and it’s no secret Counter-Strike was always my favourite. Not just because of the game. You grow out of that. But because of what it took to be successful at it and the type of person that experience moulded. The sport as I knew it is dead, killed by selfishness and neglect like a sick dog left in the rain. Cheating scandals, morally bankrupt organisations, scam sponsors and tournament organisers determined to rule over the ashes rather than relinquish their quest for monopoly. So fuck this.
I had hesitated to write the definitive history of match fixing in North American CS:GO because of my experiences in 2014. To the young fans who don’t understand journalistic methodology witness testimony isn’t good enough, screenshots aren’t good enough, gameplay footage isn’t good enough, my word isn’t good enough despite a 100% accuracy record over my career and, as we now know, even recordings aren’t good enough. The esports standard for journalism is like no other standard in any other field. The evidence required to convince the average esports fan is greater than that you would use to convict in courts, so I have become conditioned to write to that standard and only to that standard. It has served me well but it has also probably allowed many wrongdoers to simply skate off into the distance. So what you’re about to read is the story as complete as I can make it with seven years of material poured into it. This information won’t alter the wretched trajectory of this game. Too late for that. Yet maybe this can all be taken and used as some sort of guide to avoid fucking things up as badly as this for another esport. It’d be nice to think this serves some purpose in the long run.
And one last thing, the title of this preface is a lie. I care about match-fixing.
The time has come. Can't wait for this series to get going.
Time to burn the house down, Richard.
Give em hell!