OpTic Gaming loses $12,000 PUBG prize after being disqualified for cheating

OpTic Gaming finished in second place at the recent PUBG Invitational tournament at IEM Katowice, earning it a tidy $12,000 in prize money. But that position and the prize have been stripped, as ESL has ruled that team member Ian "Bahawaka" Crowe took advantage of a bug that enables players to see through walls.

Any team found to be using any known exploit will forfeit their game upon the first occurrence of the exploit."

Bahawaka claimed on Reddit that he wasn't trying to exploit the glitch, but was actually just trying to hear what was going on outside. "We were playing with ear buds and noise canceling headphones on top. This leads to poor noise quality," he wrote. "I hopped in the corner to get as close as physically possible to their car rotation to track it's movement. If you watched the match live or are familiar with the terrain, there's no benefit to having vision of that hill during that scenario."

The disqualification means that OpTic loses all the points it earned in that game. As a result, it slipped from second place to fifth, and out of the money positions, and teams that had placed below it all move up one rank: Cloud9 to second, Noble to third, and FaZe Clan to fourth.