Photo: LoL Esports
The Chinese league of League of Legends (LGD) is renowned for its level of play and its extreme competitiveness. She has won the Worlds three times, with Invictus Gaming (2018), FPX (2019) and especially EDG Last year. Even though France is struggling to keep up with the LPL, especially because there is no longer a broadcast in French, the community continues to respect the Chinese teams who have proven time and time again that they are among the best in the world. .
But behind this very flattering portrait, China is also known for a much darker side… The Chinese scene is regularly singled out for cases of cheated and of match fixing, often linked to online betting. We imagine that the league would like to do without this unrewarding advertising. But a new scandal has been made public. An investigation is underway and we will have to wait to see more clearly, but from experience we can still say that it smells very bad…
A pro player who purposely loses
This is Kevin Kim (Korizon) who brought the case to light by partially translating an article from Weibo, the huge Chinese social network. He tells us that a player from LGD Gaming, the historic structure of the LPL, had been accused of match-fixing. He would thus have communicated to an outside member his desire to lose certain matches, theoretically allowing this third person to be able to predict the result and possibly bet large sums of money. For those wondering, a single player can easily cause their team to lose by purposely dying through bad engages, face-checks, or a bad split push.
The player in question is mid laner Chen “Jay” Bo. He started the season on the bench but he quickly established himself as the team’s starter, playing around 20 games. With 2.5 from KDA, he doesn’t have very good statistics, but it’s not really worse than his teammates. LGD achieved a nightmarish Spring Split finishing in 16th place (out of 17) with 3 wins for 13 losses. It’s far from his standards at the time, but it’s not so surprising if there was an impostor in the team who purposely lost… Of course, until proven otherwise keep in mind that the player is presumed innocent. But if he is found guilty, it is hoped that the sanction will be heavy enough to deter this type of behavior which plagues esports.
China and cheating, a very long story
Some will say that we are being a little hard on Chen “Jay” Bo. But we must admit that this is not the first case of cheating in China and that we are starting to be a little scalded. The Chinese scene really needs to solve this big problem, which discredits the competition and the actors In addition, the problem of online betting is already well known, in sport but also in esports.
As a reminder, we have had the right in the past to this type of scandal in China:
- April 21, 2021 : more than 40 people are suspended for match fixing (between 3 and 24 months)
- March 27, 2020 : WeiYan is suspended for 24 months for match fixing and the team of LPL Rogue Warriors is fined over 400,000 euros
Afterwards, to be completely honest, China is not the only competitive region where there has been cheating. Last year at the Worlds, it was a PCS team that got people talking. Dog “Maoan“Mao-An (Beyond Gaming) had indeed achieved a huge CSC before getting suspended and fired.