A tournament in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was suddenly interrupted because one of the players was caught cheating. A professional CS: GO player Nikhil “forsaken” Kumawat and his team OpTic India were disqualified and unceremoniously sent home.

Apparently, Kumawat used the aimbot, which attracted the attention of tournament administration, and the entire tournament was put to a halt until they sorted things out.

This awkward moment happened during the second batch of the Indian team when administrator paused the action and came over to check out the Kumawat’s computer, and used his mouse, while, Kumawat tried to remove his hand. Seems that he tried to delete the hack, with no avail, and he and his team were disqualified and got a boot from the tournament.

There are pictures from the event that shows what happened, and among them is a picture of file explorer window showing a suspicious little program called word.exe

Concerning what actually happened during the game, the report shows that Kumawat’s crosshair could be seen snapping at enemies a locking onto them whenever he points near them. At one moment, Kumawat fired a burst shots that perfectly tracked the enemy hiding behind a wall, whom he couldn’t possibly see for himself.

Jesal Parekh, the director of international development for OpTic India, immediately apologized to the organization and to all other teams involved, stating that the other four players didn’t know about Kumawat’s cheating. He also apologized to the fans in India that supported their team and added that it’s unfortunate that one selfish person is capable of causing this.

However a few hours later OpTic India released the official statement, confirming that Kumawat’s contract has been nullified, but that the other team members have also been released to pursue other events. It seems that this roster of OpTic India is done for.

This isn’t the first case of cheating in esports, and we’re quite sure it won’t be the last. As esports grow in popularity, good results bring more prestige and, more importantly, more money. So the potential to gain for cheating is even bigger, which encourages more people to take the risk. This is one of the reasons why in-person LAN events have become the standard across all competitive leagues. When all the players are in the same room, using the same computers, unfamiliar to them, and surrounded by cameras it’s too easy to get caught while cheating.

Hopefully, this disgraceful situation will serve as a warning to anyone who contemplates making some easy money by cheating on the major esports tournaments. But, we are very aware this line of thought is unrealistically optimistic.