The Dark Side of Counter-Strike 2 - Exposing the casinos, influencers, and esports teams that rely on CS2 Gambling.

2mo ago

The Dark Side of Counter-Strike 2

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2mo ago

The Dark Side of Counter-Strike 2

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13 comments

Back before my gaming group fell apart we had this one teenager in the group. I watched the crate system (original CSGO) turn her into a full blown gambling addict for a while. It was pretty fucked up.
On the other hand I once upboxed a factory new knife and when I sold all my skins last year I paid off my credit card. I got lucky. Most don't.
That girl though, she was incredible, turned into a predatory scammer, seducing nerds and "borrowing" their skins. Factory new bayonets with rare skins, only to turn around and lose them in further trades and gambles. I was quite impressed with the first part, not so much with the way she failed to make a bag out of her grift.
She's doing really good now though. Grew up, got into medicine, now she works and is a far more valuable contribution to the community than I am. Just figured it was worth sharing the happy ending cuz it was pretty sad for a while there, at the time.

It was very funny at a tournament a few weeks ago which was sponsored by a gambling website (as most are), two of the teams were named and sponsored after two other gambling sites (BetBoom, Paravision). The tournament organizer I guess wasn't allowed by their gambling sponsor to say the team names so the casters and analyst referred to them as PVision and BBTeam.
There's a bunch of shit in ProCs: Other common sponsors include Durex, the US Airforce, potnoodle. Not to mention how Malta is a tax haven for esports through "Gaming Malta" and the Saudis own their own team (Falcons) and one of the largest Tournament Organizers (ESL/FaceIt). Saudi is trying a lot of sports washing stuff, they started the Esports World Cup in Riyadh.
- Real hellworld hours.

the one and only time my twitch got compromised whoever did so immediately bought a ton of tier 3 6-month gift subs to some CS skin grifter
- Fuckin brutal. Sorry that happened to you bro.
  
  all good i got the money back and it made me stop using twitch

Man I just wanted to pwn some n00bs with the awp on de_dust 2 when did gambling get involved?
- jumps back and forth in T spawn wasting your time for the first quarter of the round

Okay video, extremely critical support to Monarch for targeting other gambling grifters. I will say that the pacing is a little slow. I was actually surprised to learn that the gamble streamers are making $5M/yr. I think the whole thing could've been condensed into a single 30 minute video, and that all the special effects in the background don't actually add anything.

good video for what it is, pity guy is a lib and will fall short of identifying any root causes of this stuff. wild to hear someone discuss this topic over two videos without saying the word "capitalism", lol. maybe he will surprise me in part 3 but i doubt it. seeing him corner those sleazebag streamers was enjoyable though.
- I watched part 3 already, nah he just says "Valve has to be the one to fix it". He does recognize that they're not incentivized to, but doesn't look into why because he's a lib.

13 comments