Camera phones flashed and car horns blared as the crowd surged forwards, pinning Freddy Siña against the wall of a shuttered Western Union building. It was a few days before Christmas in 2014 and Siña, a 22-year-old professional video gamer from Peru, had announced on Facebook that he would be visiting his hometown of Tacna. Unfortunately, the restaurant Siña had chosen as a meeting spot was closed. Now, a crowd of around 50 young men that had turned up to meet him was worked up into a frenzy and blocking the road. Chants of “Smash”, the name by which Siña is better known in the gaming community, carried into the warm December night air.

Dota 2 is one of the world’s most popular competitive video games, and at that time Siña was one of Peru’s most adored players. Competitors in Dota 2 are ranked according to a score known as MMR, a rating issued by the game’s publisher, Valve. Siña was among the first in the world to break the 8,000 MMR barrier, topping the game’s Americas leaderboard, and along the way achieved legendary status in the Peruvian Dota 2 community. His popularity gave rise to a meme inspired by the well-known Christian phrase “The Lord is my shepherd”. “Smash es mi pastor” was posted in Reddit threads and Twitch chat boxes whenever his fans came together.


But just over a year after Siña was mobbed in Tacna, opinion turned sharply against him. In March 2016, he was among five Peruvian players to be banned from Valve-endorsed competitions after the company concluded his team had intentionally lost a match at the previous month’s ProDota Cup. It soon became clear the ban was to be permanent. In a Reddit thread discussing the incident, most observers were unsympathetic. One simply wrote: “Smash es mi Judas”.

Data 2 is one of the world's most popular esports, attracting huge crowds to watch fiercely-competitive tournaments Suzi Pratt/FilmMagic

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Match fixing first emerged as a significant issue in esports in 2010, when the South Korean StarCraft player Ma Jae-Yoon, known as sAviOr, received a life ban for conspiring to throw a series of games. Since then, the scene has witnessed a series of high-profile incidents. In 2016, StarCraft II competitor Lee Seung-Hyun, also known as Life, widely recognised as one of the game’s greatest ever players, was convicted of accepting $60,000 to throw two matches. The three most popular esports – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), League of Legends, and Dota 2 – have all seen their own match-fixing scandals.

In the early days, before traditional bookmakers got in on the action, esports betting was wild and lawless. Gambling took place using skins, cosmetic in-game items which can be traded between players. Betting on skins sites was high-stakes, in more ways than one. Sites were known to shut down without warning, taking players’ skins with them. In 2016, the UK Gambling Commission raised concerns about the unlicensed nature of skins betting and the likelihood that sites were being used by children. In July 2016, CS:GO publisher Valve launched a crackdown on skins gambling, issuing cease and desist letters to more than 20 sites offering betting using skins traded via the company’s Steam platform.


These efforts did little to dampen the appetite for esports gambling. Betway, William Hill, Bet365 and other traditional bookmakers now offer odds on a bewildering range of games and matches, alongside specialist esports betting platforms such as Unikrn, a Las Vegas-based startup whose investors include Elisabeth Murdoch and Ashton Kutcher.

Pinnacle was among the first regulated bookmakers to offer esports betting, accepting a $9.55 wager on a Starcraft match in February 2010. The bet lost, and it was some time before esports’ potential became clear. “We'd get excited if we got a wager,” says Marco Blume, Pinnacle’s trading director. Soon enough, however, the company’s esports business went into overdrive. “We made our first million and it just kept on and on,” Blume says. “Every year we doubled up.”

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Esports is now the fourth most popular category at Pinnacle. Blume says he doubts esports will ever knock football from the top spot – but that it won’t be long before it’s firmly established at number two. “With the current investment in esports, I think it’s under five years,” he says.


As the esports gambling market grows, however, so too will the rewards offered to potential match fixers. “Matches are going to become big enough to be interesting to the kind of people who we just do not want interested in esports,” says Ian Smith, commissioner at the Esports Integrity Coalition (ESIC).

Smith knows only too well what happens when sport becomes a business. After moving to the UK from South Africa, he began his career as an employment lawyer representing athletes, before taking a job at the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA). Between 2010 and 2015, Smith spent his time dealing with a series of match-fixing scandals, first at the PCA and then at the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations. In 2015, he was approached by the parent company of video game tournament organiser ESL to look into integrity issues in the esports scene. Smith was up for the challenge. First, though, he had a question: “What's esports?”

After accepting the role, he spent three months immersed in the esports community, meeting promoters, travelling to tournaments and watching matches on Twitch. In late 2015, he produced his assessment, identifying a series of issues including cheating, doping and child protection. Match fixing, Smith concluded, was one of the biggest threats; a problem that “the industry is not yet well equipped to handle”.

As Smith saw it, part of the problem stemmed from a lack of governance. Publishers such as Valve, Riot and Blizzard may have been responsible for making the games but took limited interest in policing the esports scene. Tournament organisers were a disparate group of companies with little history of cooperation. “There was no governing body to go to,” Smith says.

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ESIC was intended to fill that void. Launched by Smith in July 2016, its members include tournament organisers and bookmakers. ESIC exists to raise awareness of the need for integrity in esports – among promoters, publishers, and players – but also to investigate accusations of foul play. When those investigations uncover wrongdoing, such as match fixing, ESIC members agree to ban offending players from their competitions.

About once a week, Smith receives a report of suspected match fixing. When that happens, he immediately sends out an alert to ESIC’s betting company members and launches an investigation. To date, ESIC has completed two match-fixing cases and four cheating cases, resulting in bans for the offending players. Smith says a further three cases of match fixing and one of cheating have been dealt with by tournament organisers or publishers privately, as a result of ESIC investigations. Several more investigations are currently underway.

The key to those investigations is data. ESIC works with Sportradar, a broker which collects data from sports federations and tournament organisers then supplies it to bookmakers and media partners. The system also works the other way; Sportradar collects information on odds movements from more than 500 bookmakers around the world, meaning it is among the first to notice when something suspicious is going on.

Under normal circumstances, sports betting follows the action. In the most basic terms: if a team is playing poorly, a surge of bets might be seen for the opposing team. Mark Balch, head of esports at Sportradar, says even the best players sometimes make mistakes. Suspicions only arise when those mistakes are preceded by high stakes wagers. “If the betting is predicting something happening, something happening that is entirely unusual, and multiple times, you get a pattern of the betting predicting what is going to happen,” he says. This can rouse suspicions of match-fixing.

In September 2017, Smith received a report of large bets being placed on a qualifying match between the Dx and Yellow Submarine teams in the Dota 2 Uprise Champions Cup. Upon investigation, Balch found huge bets had been placed with a number of bookmakers – including unregulated skins sites. “The top ten bettors on this match wagered thousands’ worth of items each,” he says. “All for one team.” Further analysis revealed several “completely illogical” plays by the team under suspicion and, unusually, two of the losing players posted suspicions about their teammates on social media. Balch filed his report and two Dx players confessed to throwing the match; ESIC issued two-year bans.

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League of Legends has been nominated for a plethora of esports awards. By June 2016, the game had already attracted $29 million in prize money

Esports enjoys a complicated relationship with the betting industry. Many esports companies, most notably the biggest game publishers, have been reluctant to even acknowledge that gambling on events takes place. But partnerships between bookmakers and esports organisations are now commonplace. In September 2018, Pinnacle became the official betting partner for the Blast Pro Series of Counter-Strike tournaments. In October, Betway signed a seven-figure sponsorship deal with the Swedish esports company Ninjas in Pyjamas, which fields teams in games including CS:GO, Dota 2, and League of Legends.

Paul Chaloner, an esports broadcaster and an ambassador for the Luckbox betting platform, believes these investments have been crucial to the growth of esports. “It benefits teams, it benefits players, it benefits organisations that run tournaments,” he says. “We rely on those sponsorship deals to enable us to be able to do those events.” As esports grows, Chaloner said it will attract sponsorship from other industries – but not yet enough for the industry to turn its back on gambling. “We still need that money,” he says.

It remains to be seen whether publishers will change their attitude to betting as they adapt to their role as sports promoters. For several years, Riot Games has overseen the League of Legends Championship Series. In January 2018, Blizzard launched the Overwatch League, taking direct responsibility for the game’s esports scene for the first time. For now, Riot bans competitors in the League of Legends Championship from accepting sponsorship from gambling companies. Blizzard’s rules for the Overwatch League also prohibit betting partnerships. Valve and Blizzard did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Riot declined to comment.

When publishers have been forced to confront match fixing, they have taken a zero tolerance stance. Valve has issued a series of bans to players in CS:GO and Dota 2. In 2016, the publisher made a statement. “To clarify, the bans for these players are permanent,” it said. “As the scene grows, it’s an unfortunate reality that some individuals will seek opportunities to take advantage of their fans. We will continue to take whatever action we think is necessary to protect the entertainment value created by professional Counter-Strike.”

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Smith is not a fan of lifetime bans. “They don't teach anyone anything,” he says. “And they are disproportionate.” But he is equally concerned about the lack of due process when publishers take unilateral action. “What's not right is the arbitrary and capricious nature of these sanctions, with no natural justice at all.” Smith says the industry needs to unite and agree a uniform approach to integrity issues. “If they don't, someone will do it for them and it'll be rubbish,” he says. “Because every time politicians interfere in sport, whatever sport, it's a disaster.”

While the top esports players are now incredibly well-paid, there are thousands of lesser-known and poorly-paid competitors trying to break into the professional ranks, who may be more tempted to break the rules. Paul Chaloner, an esports broadcaster, calls for more efforts to educate up-and-coming players, and questions whether enough is being done to support emerging talent. In particular, Chaloner criticises prize pools which see millions paid out to winning players and almost nothing to those lower down the field. “Those things help create people that are desperate,” he says. “And when people are desperate they will do almost anything, including taking money to fix matches.”

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Freddy ‘Smash’ Siña was 18 when he gave up studying for a degree in technical engineering and moved to Lima to play Dota 2 professionally. Making a living from gaming turned out to be hard. Siña slept on floors and used his meagre prize money to buy food. But largely, he was happy. Smash’s friend, Ramón López Beltrán, translating on his behalf, says: “He was given the chance to make a living doing what he loved. Every child in Peru wanted to be a professional Dota player but only one in one million can actually get it – and he was the fucking one.”

In December 2017, almost two years after the match-fixing controversy, Siña posted an open letter to Reddit in which he apologised to the Dota 2 community. “There were many things that motivated our team to match-fix,” he wrote. “There’s a point when you are close to shutting down due to desperation that you start to make bad decisions. Some people in the team had no money for food or to live on and what little we had to share was not enough to help them.” Siña claims he only ever threw two matches, intentionally losing in return for a few hundred dollars – most of which he was never paid. “He was just a kid who didn’t know how to deal with the situation better and he fucked up,” Beltrán says.

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Siña now earns more than he ever did as a competitive player, streaming Dota 2 matches on Facebook and teaching others who want to improve their game. He knows there is little chance he will be allowed to compete in official competitions again. Still, he says, he tries to support other Peruvian players, providing mentorship and occasionally financial support. “Since he didn’t have someone that would guide him through this complicated world, his main aim is to be that person,” says Beltrán, describing Siña’s efforts to become a “pastor” once again.

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