Another match fixing case comes to surface in Southeast Asia, this time involving a Mongolian lineup, Team Kobolds.
Beyond The Summit (BTS) Pro Series S14 for the Southeast Asian region began with quite a bombshell. A Mongolian team, Team Kobold, was suspended from the tournament due to suspicions of soliciting in match fixing. The case is still pending further investigation as Team Kobold is removed from the tournament. In the meantime, BTS Pro Series proceeds with the rest of the teams.
Team Kobolds is a Mongolian team comprising players of little information. The players are Skadi, ML-, invincible, tefam, and boybo. Team Kobolds often joins tier 3 tournaments scattered around the SEA and CN region such as the Moon Studio tournaments.
For the 14th season of the BTS Pro Series tournament, Team Kobolds was invited to play among 12 other SEA teams. The lineup includes tier 1 teams such as Talon Esports and BOOM Esports, as well as tier 2 teams such as XERXIA and SPAWN Team. EHOME is also a part of the tournament participants despite being a team from the China (CN) region.
On the day the tournament begins (28 January), BTS announced Team Kobold's suspension due to suspicions of soliciting match fixing. The case is pending further investigation and the BTS tournament will proceed with the remaining 12 teams.
"Pending further investigation, Team Kobolds has been suspended from BTS Pro Series 14 on suspicion of soliciting match fixing. For the time being, the event will move forward with 8 group stage teams," BTS announced.
BTS did not disclose the specific match where Team Kobolds was suspected of match fixing. However, we can assume that it happened in a tournament prior to the BTS Pro Series S14 since Team Kobolds didn't play a single match in this tournament.
Team Kobolds falls into the pit
This case marks the fourth time in only two months that any form of match-fixing or account sharing took place in the Dota 2 pro scene.
In December 2022, a Myanmarese player, KSH, was disqualified and permanently banned from Valve. He received the punishment due to using in-game scripts in the SEA Tour 1 Closed Qualifier. On December 18, a wave of Eastern European (EEU) players, including Virtus.pro's former carry, Koma, were hit with a permanent ban due to account sharing. Next, we saw a rising Chinese team, Knights, accused of cheating, though we haven't heard of any development in this case so far.
Stay tuned to Esports for more Dota 2 news and updates!