It seems like April is the “air all the dirty laundry” month, as early this morning I woke to the news of the illegal gambling going on in the Korean StarCraft scene. A few days ago, American StarCraft player Dan ‘Rekrul’ Schreiber started to blow the whistle on illegal betting and match set-ups with an illegal gambling group.

He wrote in his blog:

Savior, anytime, luxury, and many other progamers have been caught 100% proven cheating. Being arrested and taken to court no joke.

Their ‘slumps’ happened because betting sites/rings paid them 10-20k at times to throw games and they finally got caught.

The korean esports world is handling it as quietly as possible so that the industry isn’t harmed by the news which is why you merely only see rumors floating around, but they are no rumors.

He then followed up with a couple of video blogs listing his “known” offenders. The videos have since been removed by the author, but apparently he drunkenly openly speaks about the mischief amongst the top players. He mentioned that savior had made around $2,000,000 betting against himself. He also mentions on average each player would receive about $4500 from throwing each game. Retired pro-gamers, coaches and a commentator are also said to be involved.

While many people are disgusted by what has come about, we all must remember that illegal gambling and match rigging is nothing new in competitive sports. If we replaced the game of StarCraft with the game of Quake, I can guarantee the exact same thing would happen. Also I really don’t think that this will be the beginning of the death of StarCraft, as many sports which are notorious for match-rigging are still popular (one pro-gamer has even admitted to throwing a game and people still are huge fans of them).

It seems that when there is a mixture of money and sport, there is the temptation to influence the outcome unfairly. This has been going on since “forever”, as it is reported that the Ancient Olympics were almost constantly dealing with allegations of athletes accepting bribes to lose a competition and city-states which often tried to manipulate the outcome with large amounts of money.

Click here to watch the drama unfold on TeamLiquid (with the first post being updated with new developments).