It has been confirmed that a competitive Counter Strike: Global Offensive match played last year was a fixed match, with the list of people involved containing some pro-players and thousands of dollars in wagered money. Now Valve have taken action and placed bans on seven of the involved, stopping them from competing in events they have sponsored.

The match itself saw the favourites to win, team iBUYPOWER (what a strangely ironic name) lose their match against their opponents. However even at the time a few eyebrows were raised in some people, who thought that the team’s performance and demeanor suggested something was going on. Word began to slip out that the match had been rigged and eventually an eSports journalist with The Daily Dot began to dig a little deeper. What he found was that the rabbit hole indeed went very deep.

The game was rigged in order to allow for big payouts on bets made on CS:GO Lounge, a site that allows for wagers and item-trading. The site themselves had suspicions when they saw the betting patterns and traced back a number of them to a well-connected member of the pro CS:GO scene – Duc “cud” Pham.

Implicated in this were the former iBUYPOWER roster, one of North America’s top squads, as well as some other members of the CS:GO community outside the team who had advanced notice of the result and were able to make out like kings from their payout of the bets. Valve have now banned the following 7 players from events they sponsor in future:

• Duc “cud” Pham
• Derek “dboorn” Boorn
• Casey Foster
• Sam “Dazed” Marine
• Braxton “swag” Pierce
• Keven “AZK” Larivière
• Joshua “Steel” Nissan

Valve has also come out and said that as far as gambling in eSports go, no professional players, their managers or team staff should be betting on results or giving away information that could in any way influence bets.