Cheaters Won in Red Bull Counter-Strike Tournament But Were Banned Shortly After

In a recent Red Bull-sponsored Counter-Strike Tournament, it was discovered that the winners one of the competition cheated despite the presence of anti-cheat software. Organizers banned the players shortly after.

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Winners of Red Bull-sponsored Counter-Strike tournament turn out to be cheaters; Are banned shortly after

Red Bull recently hosted a Counter-Strike tournament, the Finnish Red Bull Flick, when the winners were caught cheating after the tournament concluded. The 2v2 tournament champions were jezayyyy and woldes who were supposedly going to represent Finland in the national finals on June 13. Both players will no longer be representing their country after FACEIT announced that they had been banned after a "technical update."

FACEIT was the company responsible for organizing the tournament on behalf of Red Bull. They are a third-party Counter-Strike matchmaking service that uses their anti-cheat system for players to use as part of the game.

Following the Finnish qualifier's end, an update from the FACEIT platform uncovered new cheats within the game. "Unfortunately, due to a technical issue introduced by last week's release, information on a few types of cheat detections was not temporarily available within our infrastructure by our Anti-Cheat operation team," FACEIT said.

"This lack of visibility and the fact that those types of detections were not yet managed with any immediate and automated 'kick & ban' strategy, created a delay for the two players to be banned (alongside 80 other players involved in other competitions across the FACEIT platform)," the company added.

Viewers also noticed troubling evidence of cheating

The Counter-Strike community in Finland already had concerns about the event when highlights of the game were shown in a YouTube video. It showcased some unusual crosshair movements and rigid aim. As of this writing, the video now has over 166,000 views. The best example of the use of cheats is located at the 2 minute and 17-second mark.

It's standard for some shady movements to be replayed over and over again by the sponsors and event organizers. However, due to time constraints, they had to give the win to both jezayyyy and woldes. After the duo was confirmed to have cheated, Red Bull promoted the team they won against onto the next round of the qualifiers instead.

FACEIT thanked everyone for bringing the evidence of the cheating forward, as well as apologized to everyone for having to go through the whole incident. "Thank you to everyone in the community who helped raising awareness of this case, and a sincere apology to all players who have been directly affected by the incident," the company said.