Nikhil ‘forsaken’ Kumawat has finished his five-year ban for using software to cheat in CS:GO tournaments and can now play in Major events.
The now-retired player finished his ban from the Esports Integrity Coalition in 2023, but he was still barred from competing in Valve events until September 19, 2024 due to the developer changing its tournament guidelines in 2021.
forsaken is infamous in Counter-Strike and esports for getting caught playing with a cheat program at the eXTREMESLAND Asia Finals event on October 14, 2018. Anti-cheat flagged the player’s stage PC during his first game at the tournament, and officials found a program running on his computer in the background.
In a now-infamous video, forsaken closed and deleted the program while the official was over his shoulder investing his machine. However, the tournament admin team recovered the cheating program file under the unsuspecting name “word.exe.”
The exact moment when admins at #eXTREMESLAND2018 caught forsaken and he attempted to delete the hack pic.twitter.com/rZG7aYBdbD
— CSGO2ASIA (@CSGO2ASIA) October 19, 2018
The OpTic India team was disqualified from the tournament, forsaken was fired from the squad, and the team later disbanded. He was banned by Valve and ESIC and deleted his social media presence soon after.
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He said in an interview shortly after his ban he wished he had never played the game, and only cheated because he though he could get away with it after fooling his teammates during an in-person bootcamp.
“I saw the holes in the system and I took advantage of it for my own blind, selfish reasons. And I have nothing but regret,” forsaken said in 2018.
Since the scandal, the Indian player has become a part of esports lore as multiple video documentaries have been released covering the incident and its impact across the Counter-Strike landscape. forsaken’s name for his cheating software has also become a meme because of how conspicuous it was.
forsaken isn’t expected to return to the esport or enter into any CS2 tournaments, as he has not spoken about the situation or engaged in the community since 2018. But, if he wanted to play CS2, he theoretically could.