The Chinese closed qualifiers for a spot at the StarLadder ImbaTV Dota 2 Minor began today and the opening series stirred up a lot of discussion in the Chinese community already.

Avengerls are a team put together by high MMR pub players who made it this far in the competition coming from open qualifiers leg. In the Minor closed qualifiers playoffs upper bracket semifinals they were pitted against Newbee and took game one from them. Unfortunately, what looked like an underdog story about to be written, turned into a match fixing ugly prospect.

“I will eat shit if this match is not fixed,” exclaimed Zhang “xiao8” Ning live on stream, while commentating the second game between the two teams. (Match ID: 5248304670)

Close to the 20 minute mark, Avengerls had a bit over 13K gold advantage and DotaPlus was showing a 95% win chance probability when they decided to walk one by one into the enemy and chain feed until all the advantage was lost. Their suspicious actions continued through the entire game and at the end of it, Newbee posted the following on their Weibo page:

“We are so trash… They were about to take it 2:0 and all of sudden they just ran at us and started feeding. There’s nothing we can do.”

Game three (ID: 5248349736) unfolded pretty much in the same manner, Avengerls taking a considerable early lead only to throw the victory away by constantly taking 3v5 fights when they realized that they must be too far ahead.

Newbee made a second Weibo post after the series stating that their adversaries “let them win.”

“In game 3, our opponent, again, “accomplished a task with ease”, and let us win in the end. Our players really wanted to win, and some of them haven’t even played on the international scene… Sigh*, their form now… Hope we’ll adjust our form to play against the winner between KG and Aster.”

In the meantime, Avengerls have been eliminated from the contention by Keen Gaming in the first round of the lower bracket. It is unclear if they indeed had an arrangement with Newbee or if they simply threw the series intentionally, without having spoken with Newbee at all.

Regardless of what the situation was, the series is subject of match fixing in a Valve sanctioned tournament and it should be further investigated by all the parties involved. The Avengerls players are known in the Chinese community to accept some fees from betting websites to play in pub games with the “sponsor” tag in front of their name. They all are playing in the high MMR pool in China, for instance, their mid lane player, Deska being top 7 on the core leaderboards and top 40 for support role.

