Tarik launches 10-man private lobbies for Valorant pros to dodge crypto bettors
2023-01-23 15:12:00Valorant streamer Tarik "tarik" Celik sets up 10-man lobbies for professional players to avoid matchmaking suffering from crypto betting. First games were streamed live on his channel, featuring players like s0m, BcJ, and zekken.
In a comment section of the Reddit thread dedicated to the topic, fans shared their viewership experience as positive. The skill disparity in these servers was lower, and the main goal of avoiding bad actors was also achieved.
Tarik came up with this idea after facing match-fixing in the ranked mode of Valorant. The growth of unregulated crypto bookies allowed people to bet on matchmaking games and, as a result, to throw them to win money.
Betting on ranked games is nothing new in esports, but as a new game with a still developing ladder system, Valorant suffered the most lately. Riot knows how to combat the issue in LoL and will probably implement a system to save pro players from this. Same scandal also came up in Dota 2 few months ago.
