Wind and Rain and Pecado Squad Gaming Receive Life Bans for Participating in Fake Matches

The official blog of the North American league Dota Pro Circuit reported that the administration conducted an internal investigation into fake matches involving Wind and Rain and Pecado Squad Gaming. The commission in charge of this case found strong evidence of the involvement of players from both teams in suspicious activity.

As a result, all representatives of the rosters received a lifetime ban from Valve to participate in all events.

According to available information, Valve conducted an investigation without notifying the players about it, and their Twitter post was quite unexpected for the representatives of the accused teams. Wind and Rain players have commented on the situation and say they are not involved in fake matches.

Ilyas 'Steel -_- Borco' Kaukenov says that he would like a different end to his career and he did not deserve such an attitude towards himself:

I swear by everything I have. I have never committed any match fixing or any suspicious activity. I was really happy to play and compete in the American Dota Pro Circuit division. I replied in a reddit thread that I have never made a bet in my life. Such an end to my career is not for me. I swear I was not involved with Wind and Rain and had no idea what they were up to. Moreover, I played only two episodes, and then I got kicked. I knew nothing about their deeds

Vladimir 'yol' Basov, in turn, made a post on reddit. There he said that he was very surprised by what he saw:

First, I have no words. I was shocked when I saw this post. I have no idea how this relates to me.

Then Vladimir told the story of how he took part in the matches with the participation of this team:

Anyway, a friend of mine who is in management asked me if I wanted to try to qualify for DPC Season 2 in North America. I said, 'Of course, what kind of roster is there?' He replied that it was Frogoos, satesate, RRL, Sword and me. At that time, I did not know any of them, but I replied that I was ready to try.

We lost the first qualifier in the quarterfinals, and on the next we got to the final day. I went to bed, and in the morning the manager told me that we didn't need to play, as he somehow arranged a merger with another team that already had a slot in the second division. I was a little surprised. The manager explained that RRL wanted to play for 5ManMidas, so he took Szabo as mid lane. After the merger was approved and all the formalities were settled, we started training with new teammates - Steel -_- borco and Szabo. Things were not going well for us: on screams we won only two matches out of 30, and then lost two official series. As you can imagine, the atmosphere in our team was terrible, so we decided to replace Steel -_- borco with Madara, and Szabo moved to a more familiar fourth position for him. These rearrangements helped us a little, but nevertheless any official match turned into some kind of chaos for us. SateSate said almost nothing, Sword had to literally play with his little child on his lap and mute the microphone every 30 seconds, and Madara's microphone was loudly popping and making other noises.

Yol said that things were going very badly in the team and he just wanted to play out all the remaining matches in the league:

Even then I realized: `` Okay, this team is a complete mess, but we have to finish the official games. You just need to relax and play Dota 2. '' When we were 1-4, Madara got banned from the tournament because he said something racist to his friend in the pub and another player took a screenshot and sent it to Valve. At that moment, I was not even surprised that something like this was happening in our team. Then right before playing 5ManMidas I had a health emergency so I had to skip the game. Because of this, we were given a technical defeat.

Our last game against felt was very important because if we won we could play tie-breaks for sixth place and make some money, but unfortunately we lost. The next day I saw a message on reddit that the quotes had changed a lot before the match and people began to suspect us of 322. My reaction was: `` Haha, if only they could hear how we argue during matches ''... As I said before, all our games were in total chaos, whether it was screams or official matches. I smiled and forgot about this situation, but then late at night I saw a message that my team and I were forever banned from all Valve tournaments due to fake matches

Vladimir summed up his speech by saying that Valve did not provide any evidence about the ban, and therefore their punishment was issued undeservedly:

All I want to say is that nobody paid me and I never bet on my games. I only played DPC S2 with the mix for fun. Just because I had the opportunity. I don't want to blame a specific person, but if some guy on our team made a few bets, why should the rest of the players who didn't know about it have to suffer? Valve made a statement without any evidence and simply banned the entire team. Is it fair? I don't know what to add to this. Hopefully Valve can shed some light on this situation and innocent people will be acquitted.

Pecado Squad Gaming and Wind and Rain have left the North American League and now everyone else has the opportunity to continue their journey into the next DPC season in the lower division. D2 Hustlers and Arkosh Gaming took the first places at all and advanced to the top division.