Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the past few months, chances are that you’re already aware of the infamous ‘spectator bug’ that has made it to the headlines on multiple occasions recently and is the reason behind the bans of several renowned CSGO coaches in the professional scene.
What is the spectator bug?
The spectator bug allowed coaches of CSGO teams to be stuck as a spectator in certain parts of the map while a match was underway, providing them with full vision around the area. Coaches abusing the bug could gain information on the enemy team’s whereabouts, economy, and tactics which would otherwise be unobtainable.
Needless to say, this bug could easily give players of one team an unfair advantage against the other. Coaches from big organisations were accused of abusing the bug on one or more occasions, which led to an elaborate investigation by the ESIC.
Consequences
Coaches who abused the bug didn’t go off unpunished. On September 1st, ESL announced that they were temporarily banning “dead”, “HUNDEN”, and “MechanoGun”, who are the coaches of MiBR, Heroic, and GamerLegion respectively for abusing the bug in tournament games.
But the wave of bans was just starting back then. On September 4th, the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) launched investigations into the abuse of the spectator bug in CSGO and worked alongside Michal Slowinski, the discoverer of this exploit, to hunt down coaches who abused the bug in professional games. Few weeks after the announcement, on September 28th, the ESIC issued bans 37 CSGO coaches who were found to have abused the bug in the past.
What’s even more shocking is the fact that according to ESIC, only 20% of the investigation has been concluded till now, which means, there are possibly a lot more bans to come. ESIC claimed that they’ll publish a detailed report towards the end of October to close the investigation.
Here’s a list of all the coaches banned in the investigation as of yet (Source: HLTV)
| Sr. No | Name | Duration |
| 1 | Slaava “Twista” Räsänen | 15.75 months |
| 2 | Peter “casle” Sørensen | 10 months |
| 3 | Rodrigo “dinamo” Haro | 10 months |
| 4 | Arno “ArnoZ1K4” Junior | 10 months |
| 5 | Allan “Rejin” Petersen | 19.8 months |
| 6 | Eliomar “glou” Hernandez | 10 months |
| 7 | Arthur “prd” Resende | 10 months |
| 8 | Alexey “NooK” Kozlovskiy | 7.5 months |
| 9 | Henrique “rikz” Waku | 10 months |
| 10 | Alessandro “Apoka” Marcucci | 5.4 months |
| 11 | Aleksandr “zoneR” Bogatiryev | 36 months |
| 12 | Germán “hellpa” Morath | 10 months |
| 13 | Egor “fuRy^” Morin | 7.5 months |
| 14 | Aset “Solaar” Sembiyev | 10 months |
| 15 | Nicolai “HUNDEN” Petersen | 8 months |
| 16 | Ricardo “dead” Sinigaglia | 6.5 months |
| 17 | Nicholas “guerri” Nogueira | 4 months |
| 18 | Faruk “pita” Pita | 10 months |
| 19 | Erik “AKIMOV” Akimov | 7.5 months |
| 20 | Ivan “F_1N” Kochugov | 8.75 months |
| 21 | Bruno “ellllll” Ono | 10 months |
| 22 | Pedro “peu” Lopes | 5 months |
| 23 | Robert “RobbaN” Dahlström | 5.5 months |
| 24 | Mariusz “Loord” Cybulski | 6 months |
| 25 | Anton “ToH1o” Georgiev | 10 months |
| 26 | Andrey “Andi” Prokhorov | 10 months |
| 27 | Milan “pepik” Gellebra | 10 months |
| 28 | Morgan “B1GGY” Madour | 7.5 months |
| 29 | Christian “chrille” Lindberg | 10 months |
| 30 | Sergey “starix” Ischuk | 10 months |
| 31 | Alexander “ave” Holdt | 6 months |
| 32 | Jasmeet “RoSeY” Gill | 10 months |
| 33 | Sergey “lmbt” Bezhanov | 7.5 months |
| 34 | Henrik “FeTiSh” Christensen | 3.75 months |
| 35 | Mikołaj “miNirox” Michałków | 3.75 months |
| 36 | Nikolay “pNshr” Paunin | 3.75 months |
| 37 | Casper “ruggah” Due | 3.75 months |
