ESIC lift HUNDEN ban

The Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) has announced that Nicolai “⁠HUNDEN⁠” Petersen is allowed to participate in ESIC-member events with immediate effect. The Commission has stated that the decision came “in light of a constructive engagement” between the two parties.

The statement says little about what the discussion between the two entailed other than that it resulted in HUNDEN agreeing to undertake “relevant training” and in ESIC promising to “review its policies and procedures to ensure they are consistent with good industry practice and fit for purpose.”

The case relating to HUNDEN no longer features in ESIC’s public Open Investigations Register, where the watchdog shares their findings relating to the cases they undertake.

HUNDEN was banned on August 19, 2021 for breaching ESIC’s Code of Conduct, after he was found to have shared confidential material from Heroic‘s strategy folders with a member of a competing team ahead of IEM Cologne that year.

At the time, ESIC saw the act of sharing the folder alone as a threat created to the integrity of an ESIC-member event despite the fact that the recipient never opened the sensitive material in question, and decided to ban the 31-year-old Dane for two years.

Before being slapped with the two-year ban, HUNDEN had served a 12-month sentence stemming from ESIC’s investigation into the use of the infamous coaching bug, for which around 40 coaches have been banned to date and which is still believed to be ongoing over two years since it began.

More to follow…