Its been a long road for the teams fighting to reach the Smite North American LAN Tournament. Grueling weeks of competition all leading up to a chance to compete for a prize pool currently worth over $1 million dollars. For those teams that didn’t perform well enough to guarantee a slot, there is still a chance to get in via the Wildcard series. Unfortunately, for Team Five Angry Men, that chance has just been swept aside. Following questioning from some members of the eSports team, and an investigation by the Hi-Rez Admin team, it has been discovered that in Week 7 (oct 11, 2014) Team Acceleration “threw” their match against Five Angry Men.

Apparently, this was orchestrated by team manager “Clow” in order to improve their chances against VishusNDelishus. Upon examining the chat logs, it was discovered that members of Five Angry Men and Acceleration had in fact been in contact before the game, discussing a “fix”.  As a result, Five Angry Men have been stipped of their winnings in weeks 7 of the Challenger’s Cup and have been discqualified form the Wildcard event in North America. Team Acceleration meanwhile, will be stripped of all wins in week 7 as well as receiving a one year suspension of competition eligibility, to be lifted on Oct 21, 2105. This affects Jellly, oddtunes, mystx, radiomyst and dre10, collectively referred to as Team Acceleration.

The Wildcard will proceed with 3 teams.

Hi-Rez’s full log of the incident can be found here.