A few weeks ago I decided to interview a high profile bettor, who most people claimed was the most profitable and highest volume. His name was stormberg.

Now, as most of you know, he was recently banned for soliciting a throw in the OnlineBOTS vs Imperial Dragons match. The proof seemed pretty convincing, since he added one of the OnlineBots players, and their players showed skins transactions coming through to their accounts from stormberg’s main account. Long story short, he was banned by csgolounge.com

In my interview, I spoke to stormberg about his process of betting, using so many accounts (many people speculated at least 110, due to the way he named his accounts, e.g. stormberg042, stormberg110)

Q&A with stormberg

How long have you been involved in the cs scene? When did you familiarize yourself with the current teams and players that compete nowadays? Well, I played cs for 14–15 years now since 1.3. I got into CS:GO around August 2014, and learned about everything during that period. Did you play in a specific scene, like NA/EU/Asian? I played in the Asian scene Would you say you were a pretty successful bettor right off the bat, or did it take you some time (and losses) to get to the point you are now? I had around a month of a learning curve, but I’m quite good at analyzing games, got my hands on it quickly. Can you talk a bit more about that process? How did you become better? Was it a mindset thing? How you made your decisions on which team to bet on, where you did your research? Well, I don’t do anything special for research, information is out there everywhere, I just follow the scene and know the teams well. I got into it for fun at first, then I realized I could make a lot of money off of it. I previously played a lot of poker, so I had a good idea about odds. Do you find yourself doing more research if the teams are lesser known, since you already have a decent understanding of most T1/T2 teams from following the scene? Yes, I do So, just for brag rights… how much did you start with, and what has your net gain been so far? Well, I don’t really like disclosing that, but let’s just say I made more than 5000 times what I started with. How much time on average do you spend researching and gathering info before you make a bet you feel is very good? That depends on the teams, and the match. On average, probably 10 minutes at most. Do you tend to follow a set of rules when betting for each match, based on the odds? Sort of regardless of inventory size? Meaning, if the odds are right, you’d bet 5% of your inventory, be that $50, or $2500? Yes, I have similar rules, I cap out how much I bet for bo1s, or different stages in a tournament. What makes you skip betting on a match? Gut feeling, recent results, news, there are many factors. Can you give me a run-down of how you would calculate personal odds for a match with bo3 format, on lan, VP versus Dignitas, csgolounge odds are 60–40 for VP (dignitas being Team SoloMid) Well, I’d think about how their last matches within the week went. I don’t really want to disclose about how I calculate my personal odds, because that’s what people pay me for, lol. Does a lot of your strategy revolve around picking safe favorites and expecting some form of overpay, or have you been known to place multiple max bets on underdogs as well? Depends on how much confidence I have in the teams, and the odds. Pretty much the same for all games. Do you feel like there are any tools out there, that currently don’t extrapolate the data you want, that you’d like to see built/exist ? What would they be? Perhaps a site that records every match played and is stored and organized nicely by date. How do you usually figure out, assuming a team has not played an official match this past week, whether or not they have been practicing? (ESEA is the easy answer, but are there other places to look into?) Well, there are usually close friends, or just friends or professional players who I speak to, to find out how they’re doing in the week, or on the day itself. In terms of moving so many items to bet/and manage winnings, do you have any indispensable tools you use, such as Lounge Destroyer/Steam inventory helper? Being an automation engineer in the past, I would have an itch to automate certain aspects to make it quicker/less manual work, do you do anything like that? I do use LD and steam inventory helper, but I certainly wish there was a program that could manage returns off alts.

I had a lot more questions about how he calculated personal odds, how he determined the risk of a match, etc… Strangely enough, he said he usually felt most confident about the balkan/CIS games. He offered me a service once where he would tell me which team to bet on, and if said team won, I’d give him 20% of my winnings… I had already bet on the game he suggested, an only put $15, but they did end up winning. It left me curious about how he was so sure of a widely considered ‘skip / dubious’ match.

The odds were 23% to 77% (with favorite winning)

Now, I looked for his advice again, on 11/02/2015, mainly because I noticed odds were shifting on the OB — ID game and i noticed he was placing maxbets on his accounts… so I basically just wanted to confirm why a 70–30 match was turning into a 35–65 match. He told me ‘OB suck’. Now… I spoke to other people who actually predict matches, and they all told me OB are a pretty strong team… So this all seemed fishy. Then I noticed the comment on nugs’s profile from stormberg ‘add the discuss your team’. I think this is what led people to believe it was a throw. Then with the confirmation from OB with their screenshots of trades happening.

Now… a week later, I was here wondering what to do about this interview since Stormberg was banned, and things were dying down. So I decided to look up his skype name he had given me. This is where things get interesting… — the skype name he gave me was clementchilee, and just to confirm, since i don’t have SS of it originally, here are some other places I found where he was giving out this information

As you can see in this ownedcore thread, his username there is the same as his known reddit username: (http://www.reddit.com/user/haoweiwu)

Anyway, I’ll just leave this here and let you guys wonder whether or not he was involved in match fixing, and in which leagues…

It’s beyond me to understand why a high profile bettor would want to be hiring players to play in the RGN tournament.

I’m sure this won’t make much of a dent in the match fixing problem that comes with csgolounge, but I hope it at least makes people realize how much information about them is freely available.

gg no re stormberg