Nobody would like to become the victim of a questionable play in a game of CS:GO. It happens most of the time while you are holding angles or waiting behind a smoke, then boom, you die due to some stray bullets. If it happens once, it pure luck. However, once it happens too often, one will raise the question about the validity of their opponents.
The case applies for pros, especially the alleged suspect is in the list of infamous CS:GO cheaters. It happened here in The Dreamhack Rotterdam Qualifier 2019.
The incidents
Recently, pro CS:GO player Alex "ALEX" McMeekin has tweeted that online Qualifier organizers should go public with their cheater database. This should help to prevent anyone on the list from participating in any official CS:GO tournaments. The tweet came up after Pharsyde player "Holmyz" landed a crazy headshot on ALEX in the match between Team Vitality and Pharsyde, during the Dreamhack Rotterdam online Qualifier.
Where the rages began
In fact, the two suspected Pharsyde players, holmyz and mauw1 have been forbidden to compete in any CS:GO FACEIT tournaments for their attempted cheating. However, the two still bypassed the system and participated in ESEA tournaments. This is because the ESEA anti-cheat system hasn’t detected any suspicious behavior from the two. The DreamHack Qualifier takes on the ESEA system and let the cheaters get away with their punishment.
There was actual evidence about one player's cheating act. It was on the 18th of August, 2019, a recording of holmyz admitting his cheating behavior in leagues was captured and posted on Twitter by pro player Kristian "akEz" Kornbakk. In the recording, holmyz alleged that he had been winning tournaments by using cheats with some people trying to expose him. However, he was pretty confident that they wouldn't find anything.
What do the pros say?
Despite all the suspicions and accusations, the Pharsyde hackers still got a free ride to the Closed Qualifier. This has triggered the whole community when cheaters were still allowed to play. Many pro players have raised their voices about the case, from Dennis "dennis" Edman to Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev, and they all blamed ESEA for letting this happen.
Until now, ESEA hasn’t taken any action to tackle the issue, despite all that coming from the community. Consequently, the alleged cheaters still went unpunished.