A e-sports player ruined his career in Counter-Strike in 2018 in front of thousands of spectators, but now the former professional player is allowed to return.
Who is it about? Nikhil “forsaken” Kumawat was an e-sports player for the CS:GO team OpTic India in 2018. At that time, OpTic wanted to help in building new regions. E-sports was not very established in India at that time and forsaken was even seen as the CS:GO hope of the country.
Only a few months after the team’s founding, OpTic India managed to qualify for a LAN tournament in Shanghai, where 16 teams from all over Asia played for a prize pool of 100,000 US dollars. The first-place team would eventually receive 40,000 USD.
However, the tournament was set to take a disastrous turn for the Indian team. After OpTic lost the first match decisively, it seemed to go better in the second match. But then there was a technical timeout during which the tournament admins took a closer look at forsaken’s computer.
The tournament management suspected that the Indian e-sports player could be cheating. This suspicion would soon be confirmed as the referees discovered that besides CS:GO, another program was running: word.exe. However, this was not the Microsoft word processing program but cheat software that forsaken attempted to disguise as “Word”.
The e-sports player tried to delete the program quickly, but it was already too late: forsaken was caught cheating live – in front of over 6,000 spectators and a running camera. Today we know that he used an aimbot that assisted him in aiming.
No mercy for cheating e-sports players
What happened next for the e-sports player? For forsaken, the discovery of the cheat also meant the destruction of his career. He was banned for 5 years by the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) from participating in any e-sports activities.
This ban is said to have expired on September 19, 2024, according to the e-sports database Liquipedia. The online magazine Dexerto reported as early as October 2023 that forsaken could participate in competitions again.
A return to e-sports is generally considered impossible for the former CS professional. He has already withdrawn from social networks years ago. Furthermore, hardly any team would take him in. His career as an e-sports player is over and forsaken has become a laughing stock. Word.exe – the name he used to disguise his cheat software – has achieved meme status to this day.
Even though forsaken’s return to e-sports is considered extremely unlikely, a comeback is not completely ruled out. Just in 2023, the esteemed e-sports organization Astralis signed the Dane Nicolai “HUNDEN” Petersen, who had previously been banned twice: Team signs a coach who was banned in CS:GO for cheating – receives strong backlash from the community
