OpTic India's CS:GO team has been given the boot from the $100,000 eXTREMESLAND Asia finals after player Nikhil 'forsaken' Kumawat was caught cheating during a match. A Dexerto report says that spectators realized that something was up when the match between OpTic India and Revolution was paused for no apparent reason.
The match was put on hold for more than 20 minutes before officials confirmed that hacks had been discovered on Kumawat's PC. The match was called, and the team was immediately dismissed from the tournament. According to CSGO2Asia, it took so long to ascertain whether Kumawat was cheating because he first refused to allow officials to have access to his PC, and then closed and deleted a program running in the background after he was ordered to alt-tab out of the game.
The exact moment when admins at #eXTREMESLAND2018 caught forsaken and he attempted to delete the hack pic.twitter.com/rZG7aYBdbDOctober 19, 2018
OpTic Gaming international development Jesal Parekh director told HLTV.org that Kumawat had been dismissed from the organization immediately after the disqualification.
"We want to apologize to all the other teams and organizations involved. It is unfair for everyone involved. We also want to apologize to our country and to the fans who have supported us. This will be a big setback for the country, and it is really unfortunate that one selfish person is capable of causing this," he said.
"I want to make it very clear that the other four players had no knowledge of this and would never have agreed to even play if there was even the slightest hint of it."
Nonetheless, OpTic India released a statement earlier today indicating that it has released its entire CS:GO roster, although it gave no indication that any other players were aware of Kumawat's actions.
pic.twitter.com/i1qRRgUHmOOctober 19, 2018
Pulling the plug on the entire crew is something of a surprising move because the team had been performing well prior to this, winning the ESL India Premiership 2018 fall title, and placing in the top four in the 2018 Toyota Masters SEA Qualifiers.
This is actually not the first time Kumawat has been busted cheating. In August 2017, ESL India banned him from taking part in ESL tournaments for two years after he was found to have been the owner of the VAC-banned account "rektmao." Kumawat claimed that he had sold the account sometime prior and was not actually the person cheating, but that in itself was "a clear breach of both Valve’s terms of service and ESL’s rules to sell or otherwise transfer or allow someone else to play on a Steam account." In that case as well, the team he was playing for—SemperX—was disqualified.
A "suspicious" clip of Kumawat's play against Revolution was shared on Twitter. It's not immediately evident to non-CS:GO players what he's doing wrong, but esports consultant Rod Breslau said on Twitter that he's employing a "toggled aimbot, which is then used as a wallhack in many scenarios."
