An e-sports player ruined his career in Counter-Strike in front of thousands of spectators in 2018, but now the ex-professional is allowed to return.
Who is it about? In 2018, Nikhil “forsaken” Kumawat worked as an e-sports player for the CS:GO team OpTic India. At the time, OpTic wanted to help develop new regions. E-sports was not yet very established in India at the time and forsaken was even considered the country’s CS:GO hope.
Just a few months after the team was founded, OpTic India managed to qualify for a LAN tournament in Shanghai, where 16 teams from across Asia competed for a prize pool of $100,000, with the first place team taking home $40,000.
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However, the tournament was to take a disastrous turn for the Indian team. After OpTic had clearly lost the first game, things seemed to be going better in the second match. But then there was a technical timeout, during which the tournament admins took a closer look at forsaken’s computer.
The tournament management suspected that the Indian e-sports player might be cheating. This suspicion was soon confirmed when the referees discovered that another program was running alongside CS:GO: word.exe. However, this was not the Microsoft word processing program, but cheat software that Forsaken tried to disguise as “Word”.
The e-sports player quickly tried to delete the program, but it was already too late: Forsaken was caught cheating live – in front of over 6,000 viewers and running cameras. Today we know that he used an aimbot to help him aim.
No mercy for cheating e-sports players
What happened next for the e-sports athlete? For Forsaken, the discovery of the cheat also meant the destruction of his career. He was banned from participating in any e-sports activities for 5 years by the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC).
However, according to the e-sports database Liquipedia, this ban is set to expire on September 19, 2024. The online magazine Dexerto reported as early as October 2023 that Forsaken would be able to take part in competitions again.
However, a return to e-sports is generally considered out of the question for the former CS pro. He withdrew from social networks years ago. In addition, hardly any team would take him on. His career as an e-sports player is over and Forsaken has become a laughing stock. Word.exe – the name he used to try to hide his cheat software – still has meme status today.
Even though Forsaken’s return to e-sports is considered extremely unlikely, a comeback is not completely out of the question. It was not until 2023 that the respected e-sports organization Astralis signed the Dane Nicolai “HUNDEN” Petersen, who had already been banned twice before: Team signs coach who was banned in CS:GO for cheating – receives strong backlash from the community