Chinese team Wings Up have been withdrawn from the Wuxi Villa Cup 2 tournament and disqualified for six months due to a suspicious match against After on Thursday. Tournament organizers claim that Wings Up did not aim to win the match because a loss would allow it to avoid facing Let’s Quit at the playoff stage.
In this way, the team hoped to avoid a conflict of interest: one of the Let’s Quit players, Quanqing «qz» Wu, is one of the owners of Wings Up and is the older brother of Hui «DD» Wu, who plays there. The tournament organizers announced that they considered such behavior unacceptable and banned the Wings Up team from participating in other events hosted by Wuxi HeJu Cultural Media for six months. The questionable actions of Wings Up players were captured on several videos: for example, in some moments of the match they ignored the opponent in sight or made obvious mistakes.
In addition, the representatives of the HLTV portal announced that they will stop covering this tournament, as it does not meet the requirements for professional competitions. Several years ago, HLTV had already suspended coverage of Asian tournaments, with the exception of World Cup qualifiers, due to frequent suspicions of match-fixing. Part of the problem is that Asian organizers insist on using the round-robin system, which leaves more room for abuse than the group selection scheme.