CPL Strikes Back

Yesterday G7 launched an attack against the CPL, now it is payback time.

The mud wrestling has really started and it seems certain that G7 will retaliate after the CPL statement.

CPL states:

Fnatic announced today that two teams from the G7 organization (SK and Fnatic) are not attending the CPL Winter Event in Dallas. The main reason given is: “the organiser does not show the will to actually proceed with [prize] payouts.”

We are saddened that two teams that were made famous and somewhat financially independent by competitions and cash prizes at the CPL have engaged in this type of action for reasons we are told are less honorable than “representing the community.”

Sam Mathews, from Fnatic, did present the CPL with a small list of teams claiming they had not received prizes, mostly from licensees of the CPL holding their own cash tournaments with their own sponsors. The CPL explained that while it is not responsible for prizes promised by third-parties, it has repeatedly attempted to contact these third-parties on behalf of the gamers.
The CPL also explained that threatening the league with a G7 boycott was improper and that our organization does not cooperate under threat. Still the CPL Commissioner went through the list and explained the issues involving each claim.

This was obviously insufficient for Mr. Matthews as he decided to act on his threat, and while the CPL respects his right to publicly post his views and to refuse to attend the Winter Event, management believes his action may have other motivating factors.

As a matter of record it is important to also state that the CPL does operate under strict deadline policies which are disclosed in the Terms and Conditions Agreement [link], and communicated repeatedly to all tournament winners via email after the events. Failure to comply does result in a forfeiture of prizes. It is also important to note that less than 2% of our winners in ten years have failed to comply with the deadlines and did not receive their prizes.

The CPL will continue to assist in any possible way the gamers that did not receive prizes promised at unofficial tournaments, but will not agree to blindly hand out checks just because some organization threatens it with negative publicity.

There is a couple of very interesting paragraphs. First of all CPL renounce all responsibility towards the money prizes, claiming that it is a third party who is responsible for this. Is it possible to run a tournament like that? As it seems a lot of gamers are missing money from CPL at this point. Even though the CPL do not guarantee for third party money, there should be some legal actions that can be taken, since one can’t just host a tournament and not pay the money for it.

Second, the CPL takes a lot of credit, for the succeess of fnatic and SK-Gaming. That seems kind of misplaced.

Unconfirmed sources claimes that the “small list of teams” contains the following teams:

fnatic
SK Gaming
PGS
wNv
4kings
mibr
mousesports
MYM
NiP

Look forward to next chapter.