Kephrii removed from CSGO ReadyUp Invitational after accusation of cheating

Twitch content creator Brian “Kephrii” St. Pierre was removed from the ReadyUp CSGO Invitational following complaints from several players after he and Gale Adelaide were accused of teaming on Sunday.

The tournament’s scoring system is based on points that are earned after each kill. A kill gives a single point, an assist grants 2 points, while a knife kill gives 5 points. A player with more points would get a larger share of the prize pool. In this particular case, Kephrii and Gale were accused of teaming up outside of the tournament’s rules and granting each other knife kills to boost their points.

The Mirage incident

A particular incident of note happened on the Mirage map, where Kephrii was defending a bomb site alone when Gale dropped down from another part of the map and got a knife kill on him. Kheprii claimed that he did not know players didn’t make noise when dropping down from a small height as he hadn’t played the game in a long time.

Kheprii explained his side of the incident in a Twitter post: “I genuinely did not hear him. I haven’t played CS in about 3 years. Afterward, I begged my team to swap me to the A side since he kept going B… I am a huge anti-cheat advocate; I sadly just suck.”

The two streamers had five knife kills between the two of them in a single game, which drew suspicion. A single game can go up to 30 rounds, and Gale had three knife kills on Kheprri by the 11th round. This is the equivalent of 15 points for the tournament. The teaming accusation was made by at least two different players who were threatened to be disqualified if they did not continue playing. An initial ruling was made that there were no concerns of collusion.

Both players faced heavy backlash on social media, and the incident became widely known after Jake Lucky, an esports analyst and owner of Full Squad Gaming, reported on the matter. Kheppri was removed from the tournament shortly after.

Lucky wrote a tweet one day after he reported the initial incident claiming that FACEIT, the tournament administrator, concluded that there was no collusion between Kephrii and Gale, although Kheprii would remain to be removed regardless “due to multiple other player complaints so the event could be finished”. FACEIT has yet to release an official statement regarding the matter.

About the tournament

The ReadyUp CSGO Invitational is organized by Twitch in collaboration with Sony to promote the company’s INZONE gaming merchandise. The tournament has a prize pool of $100,000 to be awarded to individual players for their performance in-game.

ReadyUp is an esports event platform that allows creators and publishers to host community events and drive engagement. The platform is able to sync with other services such as Discord to interact with other community platforms. The platform is trusted by multiple esports publishers and organizers, such as Capcom, Activision Blizzard, as well as PGL, to host their esports tournaments.