Prominent esports organisation Immortals suffered a major misfire over the weekend when three members of its Counter-Strike team showed up late to a $US70,000 ($87,209) Dreamhack Montreal finals match, forcing them to forfeit the first map in a best of three set, per the tournament’s rules.
This put Immortals at a serious disadvantage against opposing team North, who won the “second” map, Cobblestone, pocketing $US50,000 ($62,292) while Immortals only got $US20,000 ($24,917) for their troubles.
The tournament was set to move at an accelerated pace, something teams were informed of ahead of time. Despite that, Immortals’ Vito “kNg” Giuseppe, Henrique “HEN1” Teles and Lucas “LUCAS1” Teles were tardy to the party. The reason why is not entirely clear. It all began when a member of another team Immortals faced during the tournament, CLG, (apparently jokingly) accused Immortals’ members of being hungover. Giuseppe did not take it well:
Image courtesy of Dot Esports.
Giuseppe vehemently denied that his team had been out partying, claiming instead that they arrived on time, and that Dreamhack forced them to forfeit “out of spite”. Lucas, meanwhile, said the team was resting to fend off jetlag and ended up oversleeping, a story it seems like Giuseppe eventually came around to agreeing with.
I reached out to Immortals for comment, and a rep replied that the organisation is currently doing an internal investigation for any “violations of team policy”, but could not offer clarification as to what exactly led to the team’s lateness. However, Immortals CEO Noah Whinston took to Twitter to let people know that, regardless of what happened, this “will not get swept under the rug”.
“We will address this internally,” Whinston wrote. “Actions should have consequences.”
Comments
2 responses to “Counter-Strike Team Blows $87,000 Championship Match After Being Penalised For Showing Up Late”
Yeah, I’d say hungover after the immediate thread and then saying they were held back ‘out of spite’.
I think he shot himself and his team in the foot with that initial response. If the reason really was just jetlag, he would have said that in the first place. The fact he invented a spite/conspiracy excuse first, then changed to the jetlag explanation later really suggests to me that the jetlag explanation is also bogus.
That doesn’t mean the hangover explanation is automatically legit, but it does make it seem a lot more likely.
Also note his initial reaction on Twitter is “prove it” rather than “not true”. I’ve always been told that the former is an attempt to sidestep the accusation rather than outright lie and say it’s false.