The alleged attempts of match-fixing happened at the StarLadder Regional Minor Championship CIS closed qualifier at the end of 2015. 5TRYK#R, ⁠HObbit, and the rest of the players allegedly tried to place bets on their own team losing pistol rounds, a practice known as spot-fixing. This type of match-fixing involves fixing an outcome of an aspect of the game that is not related to the game’s final result.

5TRYK#R alleged that PARTY were meant to lose the first pistol round of each of their three group stage matches on purpose and place bets on it. Each player would have won around $5,000 with the bets, according to 5TRYK#R, but some of them were canceled by the bookmaker due to suspicion.

“We did not earn anything from the match because Fitch told other people [outside the team] and so the bets were canceled,” 5TRYK#R told Lewis. “We also had our team and clan tag banned by the bookmaker.”

The 31-year-old has shown conversation logs involving HObbit and himself, a TeamSpeak recording from a talk with the team, screengrabs of the bookmaker’s website, and commentary over the pistol rounds in question. All pieces of evidence are attached to Dexerto’s report. The team fell apart after they did not make it into the CIS Minor and 5TRYK#R said he left the team

The event, however, was canceled after the in-game capsules had already been on sale. As the report states, Tim “nawwk” Jonasson, who was an active player of the NiP roster at the time, “believes they have a contractual claim to the earnings from the sticker sales,” which hasn’t been paid to the players.

And the amount of money that is supposed to be withdrawn to each player is said to be from $200,000 to $300,000. The report explains nawwk is aiming to take legal action against the organization in order to get it to pay the money it owes to the individuals.

Nawwk’s claim is said to be held in section 5.4 of their player contracts, which says each player “shall receive 100% of the individual stickers money, which is allocated to the players.” Additionally, individuals are expected to be given 83.33 percent of the team stickers money, divided between them.

The report also provides a response from Jonas “calc” Gundersen, NiP’s Chief Operating Officier, which was supposedly sent to the players in a group text chat. According to the report, he said: “These were ‘Capsules’ created by the teams, and Ok’d by Valve, in order to survive the pandemic and keep paying salaries without any cuts, despite the complete lack of sponsorships and exposure,” it reads. “Therefore it’s not stickers as it would be normally – because there was no major. This was a desperation move for many teams because elseway something like half would have pulled out of CS:GO altogether.”

Gundersen follows by explaining he knows many teams had a different approach to this topic, with some paying “portions out to the players.” NiP, though, decided not to do that and “keep salaries and business” running as usual, likely due to the money earned through the stickers. The goal of these actions was to support the infrastructure within the organization to “make it an even better place to win majors.”

Last but not least, the report claims three players from that time, Fredrik “REZ” Sterner, Nicolas “Plopski” Gonzalez Zamora, and Hampus “hampus” Poser, don’t wish to talk about the topic to the public.

Ninjas in Pyjamas has been in a similar spotlight in the past. The outlet adds that in 2015, the organization owed $340,000 in sticker sales and prize money, which resulted in Per Lilliefelth, the CEO back then, leaving NiP.

Currently, NiP’s CS:GO division is participating in PGL Antwerp Major, where it qualified for the Champions Stage, which begins on Thursday, May 19.

In an interview with Dust2, the North America-focused branch of HLTV, Twistzz claimed that new and upcoming players are “moving to VALORANT because they just want the easy money.” He also said that those players made the switch because “the work ethic wasn’t there in [CS:GO] to become better.”

The NA CS:GO scene has been shrinking in size over the past few years. There are less NA players competing in the top-tier of competitions, less organizations competing with North American-based rosters, and less young players coming into the scene to keep it stoked with talent for years to come. In the same interview, Twistzz described the current state of NA CS:GO as “abysmal.”

There are only three prominent organizations competing in or near the top tier of Counter-Strike with North American rosters: Team Liquid, Evil Geniuses, and Complexity. Twistzz himself is in a very unique situation; he is the only North American player competing at the highest level as part of a European roster.

Many of the NA VALORANT scene is decorated with players who played in the first or second tier of NA CS:GO, but many of them feel that they were forced out, and take issue with Twistzz’s comments. Cloud9’s in-game leader Anthony “vanity” Malaspina said that he and his Chaos teammates “went from looking for apartments to get better ping to being orgless within a 2 week period.” This came after he led Chaos to a wealth of domestic success during the 2020 season, but the organization still released the roster and left CS:GO at the start of the next year.

The Guard coach Matthew Elmore referenced Twistzz’s comments directly in his response, bringing up the Louvre Agreement that partnered specific orgs with prominent TOs. The agreement was recently extended to 2025 and boasts FaZe, Liquid, EG, and Complexity as members. Elmore, in addition to pro VALORANT players Asuna and yay, seems to feel that tournament organizers like ESL and FACEIT played an active part in the fall of NA CS:GO‘s tier two and tier three ecosystems.

ESL operated 12 seasons of a North American Pro League from 2015 to 2020, but in the final two Counter-Strike seasons in 2020 they took away the path for tier two or tier three NA teams to qualify via qualifiers or ESEA Premier promotion.

The series kicked off on Vertigo, FURIA’s map pick. The Brazilian squad won it 16-12 thanks to an impressive performance on the CT side of the map. The action moved to Inferno and it could have gone either way, but G2 defeated FURIA 16-14 after Audric “JACKZ” Jug denied a one-vs-three clutch attempt from Kaike “KSCERATO” Cerato, which would have taken the map to overtime.

G2 had a good chance to win the series after they won the first half of Ancient 10-5. Their odds increased after they won the anti-eco and broke FURIA’s CT side economy early in the second half. The match would have gone differently if Andrei “arT” Piovezan didn’t flank G2’s players with the automatic pistol CZ-75 right after and got away with three decisive kills. ArT’s play changed the momentum of the game and FURIA went on to win nine consecutive rounds after that, thus closing out Ancient 16-11.

ArT’s highlight had an impressive impact on the series, but the best player on FURIA was KSCERATO. The star rifler finished the series with 63 kills and 54 deaths, plus an 80.5 ADR, and was the highest-rated player of the match (1.16 rating), tied with G2’s Ilya “m0NESY” Osipov.

While this match secured FURIA a spot in the playoffs, it also means that G2 are out of the competition. The international superteam made it into the grand finals of last year’s Major but didn’t qualify for the playoffs this time with the additions of m0NESY, in-game leader Aleksi “Aleksib” Virolainen, and head coach Rémy “XTQZZZ” Quoniam.

The Legends Stage of the PGL Antwerp Major will conclude today after Imperial and Copenhagen Flames play for the last Champions Stage spot. The $1 million tournaments will be on break tomorrow and resume on Thursday, May 19 live from the Antwerps Sportpaleis venue.