Match Fixing in Esports: CS, StarCraft and the Integrity Fight

On 21 August 2014, iBUYPOWER sat down to play NetCodeGuides.com in CEVO Professional Season 5 on de_season. iBUYPOWER were rated among the best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) sides in North America and went in as heavy favourites. What happened next made no sense at all.

They lost the pistol round, then bought full kit for round two, which good teams simply don't do. Players went hunting for knife kills. By half-time they trailed 4-11, and NetCodeGuides won all five remaining rounds to take the map 16-4. The casters spotted something off, travel fatigue got floated as the excuse, and on its own a bad map is just a bad map.

This one wasn't. Within five months, messages and a trail of betting accounts showed the match had been thrown, and in January 2015 Valve, the game's publisher, banned seven people from its events. The ban stood for exactly ten years.

That's match fixing in esports in miniature. Nobody needs a bent referee or a soft penalty. You just need players inside a server losing rounds on purpose. This is the esports chapter of our match fixing in sport series, and it runs through South Korea's StarCraft scandals, the Australian police case and the CS:GO coaching bug (cheating, as we'll see, rather than fixing) before finishing with what it all means for anyone who bets on esports.

Throwing from inside the game

The basic fix couldn't be simpler: a player or a team loses a round, a map or a match deliberately. In a five-a-side game like Counter-Strike, the players are often the only people who need to be in on it, and a round thrown on purpose can look an awful lot like an off day. In a one-on-one game like StarCraft, a single player controls the lot.

It's the same weakness that draws fixers to tennis and snooker: one competitor, one decision, no team-mates to talk round. The team games have their own parallel in football's spot-fixing scandals, where the fix hides inside a single moment rather than the final score.

Skins, small events and young players

We'd point to four things that leave esports unusually wide open:

• Skins became money. After the Arms Deal update in August 2013, CS:GO's cosmetic "skins" turned into a currency, some of them worth thousands of US dollars. Third-party sites let people bet skins on matches, outside gambling regulation in most places.
• Lots of small, online events. Plenty of tournaments are low-prize, played online and lightly monitored, if they're watched at all.
• Young players on low pay. When a single fix pays more than a season does, temptation isn't hard to find.
• No single regulator. Publishers and tournament organisers hand out the bans, and the police only step in where national law covers it, as in South Korea and the Australian state of Victoria.

These are the cases that shaped how esports thinks about integrity, from the Korean StarCraft scene to Australia's online leagues. One of them is a cheating scandal rather than a fix, and it's labelled as such.

A 4-11 half and a 16-4 hammering will raise eyebrows, but a strange map proves nothing by itself. What sank iBUYPOWER was the paper trail: the messages and the betting accounts.

The day after the match, journalist Richard Lewis was sent screenshots in which a player, ShahZaM, said the game was fixed. ShahZaM denied any involvement, wouldn't say who was responsible, and was not among those Valve later banned.

The breakthrough came in January 2015. A former girlfriend of player Derek "dboorn" Boorn published messages in which Boorn confirmed the fix and said the bets had gone on through alternate accounts on CS:GO Lounge, a skin-betting site. The bettor was identified as Duc "cud" Pham, who used nine accounts and won about US$10,738.26 in total, or US$1,193.14 per account. For a team at the top of the North American scene, that's a startlingly small price.

Valve's verdict

On 26 January 2015, in a blog post titled "Integrity and Fair Play", Valve permanently banned six players, cud, dboorn, DaZeD, steel, swag and AZK, along with Casey Foster, a part-owner of NetCodeGuides.com, from Valve-sponsored events. Valve said "a substantial number of high valued items" had moved from Pham's accounts to the iBUYPOWER players and Foster. Skadoodle, the iBUYPOWER sniper, was not banned.

ESL and DreamHack banned them too. ESL lifted its bans on 1 August 2017, except for Valve Majors, and DreamHack followed on 6 September 2017. Valve held firm for a full decade. On 26 January 2025, ten years to the day, the players were let back into Valve events.

Notice who did the punishing: the publisher and the tournament organisers, not a court. That's how esports worked back then. The people who owned the game were also the people who policed it.

South Korea's professional StarCraft scene had something the rest of esports lacked: a proper governing body, the Korean e-Sports Association (KeSPA), with the power to hand out bans that covered the whole professional game. Twice it had to use that power on a grand scale.

2010: Brood War's darkest year

The scandal broke on 13 April 2010. Professional StarCraft: Brood War players had been losing games on purpose for illegal betting sites, with at least a dozen games alleged to have been thrown.

KeSPA didn't mess about. Eleven players were banned for life from all professional StarCraft competition, and their prizes and awards were stripped. The biggest name was Ma Jae-yoon, known as "sAviOr", who was described as a broker between the bettors and the players. On top of his KeSPA lifetime ban, he was reported to have received a suspended prison sentence and community service in October 2010.

2016: the fall of Life

Six years later it happened again, this time in StarCraft II and to one of the game's biggest stars. Lee "Life" Seung-hyun was the 2014 StarCraft II World Championship Series champion, crowned at BlizzCon 2014, and one of the game's top earners with about US$475,000 in prize money.

On 29 January 2016, KeSPA announced that prosecutors in Changwon were investigating him, and on 21 April 2016 the prosecutors' special investigations division released its findings. Life was convicted in Korea in 2016 over two KeSPA Cup matches he lost on purpose, with 70 million won (about US$62,000) involved, and KeSPA banned him for life from Korean esports events. His sentence was reported as suspended. Another professional player and 11 financial backers and brokers were convicted too.

For us, Life is the case that should keep the sport awake at night. You could put 2010 down to a young scene finding its feet. Life was a world champion, and he still took the money.

The police case

Outside South Korea, esports fixing has rarely made it anywhere near a criminal court, which is why the Australian case stands out. It started in 2019, when a betting agency reported suspicious activity and six people were arrested across Victoria and Western Australia.

On 3 May 2020, Victoria Police's Sporting Integrity Intelligence Unit announced that five men had been charged in what was described as Australia's first criminal esports case. All five were from Victoria, four aged 20 and one aged 27. The matches were in the ESEA Mountain Dew League in 2019, and police said at least five matches and 20 bets were suspicious, with winnings estimated at up to AU$30,000.

The charges included using corrupt conduct information for betting purposes, and one man also faced two counts of conduct that corrupts a betting outcome. The maximum penalty was 10 years, and court appearances were listed for September 2020 in Melbourne and Sale. These were charges, not convictions, and nothing here should be read as a finding of guilt.

The ESIC bans

The Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) opened its own investigation into the Mountain Dew League in September 2020 and had issued seven sanctions by 23 October 2020. Then, on 22 January 2021, it banned 35 more Australian CS:GO players for between 12 and 60 months, taking the total to 42.

Those bans were for betting-related breaches of ESIC's Anti-Corruption Code on the ESEA platform: betting on events run by ESIC members, on their own matches, or against their own team. ESIC worked on a tiered system, and 23 of the 35 sat at level 1, which meant betting on esports but not on their own matches. Level 4, betting against your own team, is the one ESIC said gives strong suspicion of match fixing. Most of the 35 were betting breaches, not fixers. The players and some associates were referred to Australian police.

Not every esports integrity scandal is about betting, and one of the biggest ESIC has handled wasn't a fix at all.

On 26 August 2020, Wisla Krakow coach Mariusz "Loord" Cybulski went public with a CS:GO bug that let coaches see parts of the map and feed the information to their players. Valve patched it the same day, and ESIC started digging through old matches.

On 31 August 2020 it banned three coaches: Ricardo "dead" Sinigaglia, Nicolai "HUNDEN" Petersen and Aleksandr "zoneR" Bogatiryev. On 28 September 2020 it banned 37 coaches for between three and 36 months after reviewing about 20% of 99,650 demos, and coaches who confessed and helped could cut their bans by up to 60%. By 5 May 2022, ESIC was announcing that almost 100 coaches were to be sanctioned. Some coaches fought their bans, and one 7.5-month ban was lifted on 15 October 2020.

ESIC found insufficient evidence that players were involved, and in October 2021 it cleared the rest of Heroic's players of HUNDEN's allegations. In a separate case, ESIC banned HUNDEN in August 2021 for leaking Heroic's strategy folder at IEM Cologne 2021. That two-year ban was lifted early, in December 2022, and the decision drew plenty of criticism.

Both were serious breaches of competitive integrity. Neither was match fixing. The bug scandal was about cheating to win, not losing for a bet, and it's worth holding on to that difference every time someone says "esports scandal".

Esports has no FIFA and no ICC. Integrity runs through a patchwork of bodies, and the one that matters most is ESIC.

Lawyer Ian Smith founded it in 2016 as the Esports Integrity Coalition, and it became the Esports Integrity Commission in September 2019, with offices in Shrewsbury, England, and Parramatta, Australia. It's a non-profit members' association. Betting operators send it suspicious-betting alerts, and tournament organisers enforce the sanctions it recommends. In January 2021 its members included ESL, BLAST, DreamHack and WePlay. Our guide to how betting integrity units catch fixers explains how that kind of monitoring works across sport.

ESIC has its critics. In August 2021 it had just five full-time staff, and it has been painted as underfunded and short on game knowledge, with questions over its transparency and over HUNDEN's early return. In January 2025 it launched the International Games and Esports Tribunal (IGET) with WIPO's Arbitration and Mediation Center as a dispute-resolution body.

Punishment runs on three tracks:

• Publishers: Valve can ban players from its own events permanently, as the iBUYPOWER players found out.
• Organisers and ESIC: bans enforced by the tournaments, like the 42 Australian sanctions.
• The courts: only where national law reaches, as with the South Korean prosecutions in 2010 and 2016 and the Victoria Police charges in 2020.

The courts are the missing piece, in our view. A ban stops a player turning up at the next event. It takes a criminal case to reach the people putting up the money.

The cases tell you exactly where the risk lives. The Australian matches were in a lower-tier online league. The iBUYPOWER bets were skins placed on CS:GO Lounge, not cash with a licensed bookmaker. The 2010 Korean fixes ran through illegal betting sites. The trouble has come from the fringes, not the showpiece events.

A few things are worth keeping an eye on:

• Low-tier and online events. Smaller online leagues get far less scrutiny than a Major, and that's where most of the trouble has been.
• Results that don't fit the teams. A heavy favourite collapsing proves nothing on its own, but suspicious betting around it is exactly what bookmakers report.
• Players betting on their own scene. ESIC's Australian bans show how common betting breaches were among players, and betting against your own team is the red flag.

There's no single esports rule on settlement. Bookmakers' own terms generally let them void bets or hold back payouts where integrity evidence shows a result was manipulated, so know your bookmaker's house rules before you go anywhere near a niche market.

Our view is simple. Stick to licensed bookmakers, because a betting agency's report is what kicked off the Australian investigation. And favour the bigger tournaments and the main markets, where the sheer volume of money makes a fix much harder to hide. If you do want to follow the scene, our esports betting guide covers how the CS2, Dota 2 and LoL markets work.

Esports has crammed a century of sport's integrity problems into little more than a decade: a thrown match at iBUYPOWER, a fallen champion in Life and a first criminal case in Australia, all policed by an integrity body with five full-time staff in August 2021. We think the fight is heading the right way. Valve's bans held for ten years, KeSPA handed out lifetime bans and Victoria Police showed that esports fixing can be treated as a crime. The weak spot is that the sport still leans too hard on publishers and organisers policing themselves.

• Throwing is the classic esports fix. Players lose rounds or maps on purpose, and nobody outside the team needs to touch the game.
• The proof is in the money, not the map. iBUYPOWER was proven by messages and betting accounts, not by a 16-4 scoreline.
• One-on-one games are the most exposed. Both Korean scandals came from StarCraft, where one player decides everything.
• Charged is not convicted. The five Australian men were charged in May 2020, and charges are allegations.
• A betting breach is not a fix, and cheating is not fixing. Most of ESIC's 35 Australian bans were for betting, and the coaching bug was about winning unfairly.
• Small events carry the most risk. Stick to licensed bookmakers and the bigger tournaments.

Related guides

• Match fixing in sport: how it's done and every sport hit
• Match fixing in tennis: why it's the most fixed sport
• Match fixing in snooker: the cases and the bans
• How betting integrity units catch fixers
• eSports betting guide: CS2, Dota 2 and LoL

18+. Please gamble responsibly. For free, confidential support visit BeGambleAware.org. If an esports market doesn't look right, tell your bookmaker or report it to the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) or Crimestoppers.