So It's Come To This: Betting Scandal Hits Professional Gaming

Professional StarCraft is serious business in South Korea, and match-fixing allegations have local media comparing it to the Black Sox Scandal. And this is Korea, where they know baseball. So that's not just uninformed hyperbole.

Televised StarCraft is unfathomably big over there. (Video games in general, actually. It's reached the point where they're attempting to block underage gamers from playing after midnight.) There are two separate channels devoted to gaming, and the top StarCraft players are treated like, well, star athletes. Big ratings mean big business, and when there's that much money in play, gambling is sure to follow.

Well, the gamblers got to the players, allegedly paying many of them to throw matches. And throw them they did.

One of the biggest stories in recent years has been the struggles of top player "sAviOr," thought to be smarting from a big loss to rival "Bisu" (seriously, I'm not making any of this up). But those numerous losses to longshot opponents certainly look different in the light of sAviOr's being implicated for taking dives in exchange for money.

It took baseball the better part of a decade to recover from the Black Sox Scandal. Let's hope it takes professional gaming at least that long.

South Korea Rocked By StarCraft Betting Scandal [Kotaku] StarCraft cheating scandal rocks Korea [GamePron]