Three Players banned for Cheating at ELEAGUE Boston Major Qualifiers

Open qualifiers for the ELEAGUE Boston Major in Europe started on Saturday and it did not take a long time before these qualifiers caught the attention of the wider CS:GO audience. On Sunday afternoon, it was announced that three players were banned from the qualifiers because they were caught cheating. Considering that there is zero tolerance policy for cheating in CS:GO competitions, all three players were disqualified from the competition.

CEVO’s Accusations

CEVO, the server-client host of these qualifiers, has reportedly banned KerZe, Ciocardau, and SodaH from any CEVO competitions because it was revealed that they have been cheating during their matches in the qualifiers. The first news about this ban came from Nathan ‘BNK’ Schmitt who is playing for G2 Esports as he mentioned these players on his Twitter account.

Ciocardau’s ban was issued by the client’s anti-cheat system as it did not take a long time for the system to discover the cheats. On the other hand, KerZe’s ban was issued by manually by the CEVO after inspecting his account and his actions during the matches. So far, CEVO has not announced whether or not, CEVO’s anti-cheat system has had anything to do with the discovering and issuing of these bans.

The third player that was banned was SodaH and this is not the first time that he was banned for cheating. SodaH was banned during the live game and only a few players have been commenting that issue as if they were all expecting that to happen.

As the consequences of their actions, teams for which these three players played, Invictus Aquilas, Team Optimistic, and PlanetenOG have all been disqualified from the competition. This was especially tough on PlanetenOG because they have managed to reach later stages of the open qualifiers. CEVO has announced that all the matches of these three teams have been overturned but they have not revealed what will be happening with teams in that part of the bracket.

The Response

The only team so far that complained about this ban was Invictus Aquilas who stated on their official Twitter account that they were surprised and disappointed by the CEVO’s decision. Besides that, they also claimed that Ciocardau could not have cheated in their matches and they have provided links for the demo of his matches in which it can be seen that he has not cheated in their opinion.

However, troubles for these teams do not end there as CEVO has revealed that another PlanetenOG player, EKLN is also under suspicion for cheating during his matches. Initially, EKLN was not included in this controversy. However, after a log of Steam chat in which he participated appeared online, he also became a subject of CEVO’s investigation. 

Final Thoughts

This is not the first time that players have attempted to cheat their way through a certain Counter-Strike: Global Offensive competition. However, with the new anti-cheat systems, those players are very easily detectable. Considering that this is a very start of the new CS:GO season, many will say that it did not start great. Instead of focusing on FaZe Clan win at the ELEAGUE CS:GO Premier, fans are exposed to news about the cheating and players being banned.