Virtus.pro & LDLC betting scandal!
CSGOLounge has released a statement regarding the betting scandal involving Virtus.pro and LDLC.com.
On Wednesday, Virtus.pro and LDLC replayed their FACEIT Spring League 2014 match, with the French team eventually running out 16-7 winners to move up to second in the table.
There were no streams to follow the match live as FACEIT had another previously scheduled match at the same time Virtus.pro and LDLC agreed on playing this contest, which was yesterday at18:00.
Oblivious to the fact that the match had already been played out, CSGOLounge's admins kept all bets open until22:00, which was supposed to be the time of the match, due to a misscommunicationbetween them and the FACEIT admins.
It turned out that some players from both teams had decided to place bets on the game, this way getting a free pass to a sure win as they already knew the outcome of the match. According to Robert "ML" Yakubovski of CSGOLounge, Jarosław "pasha" Jarząbkowski, for example, made $450 worth of skins.
Below you can find the statement from CSGOLounge, who hope that, by going public over this matter, they will prevent further incidents like this from happening.
"First of all, CSGOLounge didn't know that the match was broadcasted with a recorded demo. FACEIT never told us that the match between Virtus.pro and LDLC.com was played before the scheduled time," Robert "ML" Yakubovski told fragbite.se
"Secondly, we've never checked the pro player's bets before this specific situation happened. We did it because there was a conversation in the FACEIT group conversation where people brought up the possibility of players leaking the result before the broadcast started.
"We looked up the player's SteamID:s and checked all ten players on our site, and after a discussion with some people from the pro scene we decided to go public. This was done to prevent players from abusing of our system in the future, players who knew about results and decided to use it for their own profit.
"I feel that none of the pro players takes skin-betting seriously, but in the meantime we can't ignore the fact that the average price for a skin i $15. Each weapon in the Steam Market has real value since people invest money in them. It's not just "pixels", because someone paid for these pixels. If you look at pashas bet, he would have won $450 worth of skins.
"Of course we feel that a lot of pro and semi players can abuse this, but now, next time they will know that these shady deals can be made public and we hope that less pro players will do these kinds of actions in the future.
"We know that Virtus.pro recently won $100,000 in EMS One Katowice, so of course we're aware of how silly this whole thing might seem. It might be silly or funny for them, but it's not funny for the rest of the community who bet, invest money and lose or win each day. CSGOLounge doesn't play in betting, we are the middleman. Users "play" against each other, so by placing a lot of expensive weapons on LDLC they took those ~$1,000 from people who made bets on Virtus.pro, and also for the people who bet on LDLC at first since they decreased their odds. I would say they played against their own fans."
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