After investigating multiple allegations of match fixing in Cevo's latest Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament, Valve decided to drop the gavel on a group of pro gamers.

Valve has announced that it learned of match fixing going on between professional Counter-Strike Global Offensive players in IBUYPOWER and NetCodeGuides.com's ranks and has banned the players involved. The company has decided to blacklist seven pro Counter-Strike players for their involvement in any Valve-sponsored events due to their involvement with instances of match fixing at Cevo's Season 5 tournament (which has a grand prize of over $10,000).

"We can confirm, by investigating the historical activity of relevant accounts, that a substantial number of high valued items won from that match by Duc “cud” Pham were transferred ( via Derek “dboorn” Boorn ) to iBUYPOWER players and NetCodeGuides founder, Casey Foster," said a Valve representative. "Professional players, their managers, and teams’ organization staff, should under no circumstances gamble on CS:GO matches, associate with high volume CS:GO gamblers, or deliver information to others that might influence their CS:GO bets."

Valve dropped the gavel and banned the following seven pro gamers:

Duc “cud” Pham
Derek “dboorn” Boorn
Casey Foster
Sam “Dazed” Marine
Braxton “swag” Pierce
Keven “AZK” Larivière
Joshua “Steel” Nissan

Just a few months ago, we reported that DreamHack's world tournament for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was met with multiple redos, forfeits, disqualifications and substitutions due to multiple instances of exploiting and cheating. Valve has multiple referees officiating these events as well as anti-cheating police software in play that picked up on these exploits and irregularities.

We understand that devoting long periods of your life to the same first-person shooter can get people frustrated and looking to shortcuts as a means of climbing the ladder, but cheating in multiplayer environments is not cool, and we here at ArcadeSushi do not have any respect for those who resort to cheating or match fixing, regardless of what their prior conquests in gaming might be.

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