CS:GO Player "forsaken" Caught Cheating While Representing India In Global Tournament In China

People are often tempted to cheat in online games. Not only is it bad karma, it can also get you instantly banned from the game.

However, it's downright stupid to try it in a tournament at the professional level. Well, that's exactly what one Indian pro player just did.

OpTic India's Nikhil "forsaken" Kumawat - Extremesland/Facebook

Professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player Nikhil "forsaken" Kumawat was caught cheating at a tournament in Shanghai this past weekend. He was part of the roster for OpTic India (an offshoot of OpTic Gaming), participating at the Extremesland Zowie Asia CS:GO 2018 tournament.

Also Read: Not A Child's Play: Indian Gamers Are Getting More Professional, And This Is Just The Beginning

Yeah, not only was that on the international stage, it was also the finals ladder in a match against Vietnamese team RevolutioN.

The administrator suspected something was up when forsaken downed four opponents in a spray of bullets. A Twitter video captured him inspecting the player's system, and discovering the files for an aimbot hidden in a Temp folder. Worse, the video also shows forsaken shamefully attempting to delete the files, after which he had to be partially restrained.

The exact moment when admins at #eXTREMESLAND2018 caught forsaken and he attempted to delete the hack pic.twitter.com/rZG7aYBdbD

¡ª CSGO2ASIA (@CSGO2ASIA) October 19, 2018

As a result OpTic India was disqualified from the tournament, a perfectly reasonable move with a $100,000 prize pool on the line. This also ended up with the team unfortunately dissolving entirely later, in an effort to allow the rest of the players to distance themselves from their teammate's scandal. Kumawat's teammates say they had no knowledge of the cheating, and wouldn't have tolerated it.

more pics of @OpTicIndia at #eXTREMESLAND2018 when forsaken was caught cheating pic.twitter.com/SD6EvDWUvc

¡ª ĞÁζ¡£ (@liuxinwei0102) October 19, 2018

For his part, Kumawat has received a lifetime ban from Extremesland, as well as from the Asia Pro League. It's not even his first run in with gamer law either. Earlier in 2017, he'd received a six-month ban from the Esports League for getting a Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) ban in Counter Strike.

Kumawat and his teammates at the India Finals leg of Extremesland 2018 - Gwyn D'Mello

It may be one player, and one team, but the scandal is a huge blow to Indian pro gamers. It's hard enough to come up in the industry considering many Indian parents are more than hesitant to let their child "waste their time" trying to play games for a living. And while it's not considered a serious job here by many, Indian players are also often not taken seriously enough on the world stage.

And forsaken's actions have drawn a dark cloud over the Indian gaming scene, just as sponsors have begun to line up to represent Indian teams at the International level. Hopefully though, the rest of the Indian E-sports community can weather the storm and come out stronger as a whole.