It's an unfortunate reality that sometimes people are going to cheat at competitive things. As a general rule, though, you don't want to cheat so blatantly that people can immediately notice and see you actively delete the cheating program. That rule got tested at the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive eXTREMELAND ZOWIE Asia tournament in Shanghai today when a player got his entire team booted from the tournament for cheating.

When OpTic India was facing off against Vietnamese team Revolution, the rival team and fans watching began to notice something was amiss. After an official accusation of cheating was lodged, the tournament organizers called for a long break where the competitors were asked to not touch their computers while the TOs investigated. When OpTic India's Nikhil “forsaken” Kumawat kept using his PC and refused to let administrators look at it, having to be physically stopped from deleting files, the jig was more or less up.

Whoops.

The entire team was disqualified for the installed hacks, which gave Forsaken aiming and tracking advantages in the match. He was subsequently fired from the team before they even left the arena. OpTic India's owner, Jesel Parekh, told HLTV.org that none of the other players knew about the hack and would not have played had they known.

For his part, this is actually Forsaken's second ban, though this time it is a permanent one. He had been banned from ESLGaming tournaments before for being VAC banned on Steam for cheating in 2017. The ESLGaming ban was set for two years, but was reduced to six months after Forsaken explained he merely sold his account to someone who then cheated and he himself had not done the cheating.

It seems unlikely that excuse will work this time.

[Source: Dot Esports]

I cannot for the life of me imagine how he thought he would not get caught during a streamed tournament. Or why he thought deleting the files in front of the TOs would be consequence-free.