CS:GO pros banned after hacking scandal

With Dreamhack Winter 2014 coming up this weekend, tensions were already running high for professional Counter Strike: Global Offensive players, but now things have been cranked up to 11. Some of the world's top professionals at the game, have been caught using third party aimbots and other cheating tools, prompting team management and tournament organisers, to ban them from future events.

While most of them had been slipping past the net for some time, when one CS:GO pro tripped a third party anti-hack tool, Valve did some investigations of its own and found several high ranked pro-gamers were using aimbots. High profile busts include Hovik “KQLY” Tovmassian and Gordon “SF” Giry, both of whom have been banned by their respective teams (Titan and Epsilon), even though it turns out they hadn't used any hacking tools during competition.

Both players have since apologised for their actions.

Dreamhack's CS GO prize pool is $250,000 so people may be looking for any edge they can get

Understandably with Dreamhack coming up, the organisers will no doubt be taking extra special precautions to make sure none of the people on its roster of talent managed to use an aimbot of some kind to improve their chances, though it would be foolhardy for anyone to try when there is this much attention on them.

While Kotaku draws comparisons with cheating in other sports however, you have to imagine that simply making all pros use specifically set up PCs with no networking capability beyond setting up the game and streaming it, would make it pretty difficult for anyone to use any third party tool that would have an effect. That's certainly less of the case when it comes to PEDs or similar.

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KitGuru Says: Are you guys pleased that this was found out before Dreamhack? Or do you think it paints the sport in a bad light when it was being put under the spotlight anyway?

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