SK Gaming Team Penalized for Reduction of Prizes After Proven Cheating

Even though SK Gaming managed to come out as Champion at ESL One Cologne 2017, it turned out that there was a controversial thing they did when they competed in the Final against the Cloud 9 team. What is this controversial thing?

In the second map, namely Train, at 10-10, the SK Gaming team did a possible Technical Timeout to break the tension of the players. But it turns out that they used the Technical Timeout phase to discuss strategies to deal with the Cloud9 team.

This was caught on camera where SK Gaming members typed into each other in Team Chat during the Technical Timeout. The jury who saw this immediately asked the SK Gaming team to stop what they were doing because it was a violation.

According to the rules, it is not allowed to speak or type during the Technical Timeout phase and the penalty for this violation is a reduction in the prize that will be received by the team which will later be distributed to 15 other teams.

Even though they had to lose some money because of their cheating actions, but did their discussion of strategy have an impact on the course of the match? But beyond that, the SK Gaming team deserves to be said as the best CS:GO team at the moment with a series of victories they have achieved such as the ECS Season 3 tournament champion and the recent Dreamhack Open Summer.

The following is a snippet of the SK Gaming team communicating during the Technical Timeout phase: