CSGO isn’t immune to drama despite their scene being one of the oldest ones in the esports industry. Twitch streamers Gale Adelaide and Brian “Kephrii” St. Pierre stand accused of teaming in the $100,000 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive ReadyUp Invitational tournament. Many players claim that despite being on opposite teams, they fed each other high point kills to get to the top.
The point system for this tournament is based on individual skill instead of the team winning points, so individual players with high scores are the ones competing for the grand prize. The points fall as follows:
- Kill – one point
- Assist – two points
- Knife kill – five points
Because players can hear you running up behind them, a knife kill is hard enough to earn five points. Nevertheless, Gale got three knife kills (15 points) on Kephrii, and Kephrii got two knife kills (10 points) on Gale. Jake Lucky’s tweet showed a clip in which Gale easily killed Kephrii.
This, and the other kills, made many players suspicious. A few players wanted to stop playing, but that would result in disqualification, so the game continued. Harrison “psalm” Chang, a very popular personality in the CSGO scene, was the first one to voice out his unconformity with the whole situation: “Glad that blatant teaming and cheating is allowed in a 100k CS:GO tournament and nothing is being done about it“
Kephrii maintained that he was innocent of any cheating scandal, in a tweet to Jake Lucky, he stated the following: “I genuinely did not hear him. I haven’t played CS in about 3 years. Afterward I begged my team to swap me to A side since he kept going B. This tournament gives 1 point for an Elim, 2 Points for an Assist, & 5 Points for a Knife. I am a huge anticheat advocate; I sadly just suck.“
As it is very easy to hear someone sneaking up behind you, it seems suspicious that two players could get five knife kills in such a short time. FACEIT began an investigation during the match and found Kephrii innocent of cheating after checking the alleged evidence.
“At least two opposing players have made these accusations, even his own teammates were suspicious. The two accusers were threatened to be dq’d if they refused to keep playing on. I was told an initial ruling was made that there were no concerns of teaming.”, Jake Lucky added.
But despite this ruling, the accused was later removed from the event over complaints due to many players being skeptical of the alleged teaming that went on. It may seem unfair to a lot of people, but if he isn’t cheating, his Counter-Strike skill level is too low to be in the tournament as he was giving away points for free and wasn’t a real threat to the rest of the competitors.
