eSports Gaming League Will Drug Test Its Players

A popular Esports personality Kody ‘Semphis’ Freisen has admitted to using the drug adderall whilst competing in a Counterstrike Go tournament causing to the ESL, The Electronic Sporting League to look at making changes to there policies and rules in response to this statement.

Adderall is an amphetamine that improves cognition and reaction time.

In a statement made to Wired.co.uk Anna Rozwandowicz head of communications at ESL responded by saying

“The integrity of our sport is and always will be our biggest concern.

When we first saw [Friesen’s comments], we focused immediately on kickstarting a policy-making process and adjusting the rules. We have worked on changes in our rules, reached out to authorities for support, and will be ready to announce our next steps in a couple of days. When that comes out, you can treat that as our full statement on the issue.

Our rules forbid participating in the tournament while on drugs but we don’t have a list of repercussions that we can match to every incident in a straightforward manner.

There has never been a case of us finding out a player took drugs — any kind of drugs — during our events, and as such we never had to punish anyone for it.

There are a couple of things we need to make sure we’re not forgetting about.

First of all, Friesen is an ex-Cloud9 player. He is not on the team anymore, nor is he involved with them in any other way, and he has been let go of due to his and team’s poor performance.

In short, there are grounds to suspect Friesen may have been trolling as much as owning up to drug use, perhaps looking to cause trouble for his former team whether he was being honest about Adderall use or not.

We have no way of knowing whether he is telling the truth, or just being upset about being removed from the team and trying to annoy them.

We’ve had cases of players admitting to cheating, but then denying everything once they found out they can get disqualified and banned for it. Upon investigating, it became clear that the games were played according to the requirements and were protected by anti-cheat software, so no cheating was possible.

Secondly, we only have his word for it. We can’t punish him and/or the team in any way if we don’t have any proof. The ESL One Katowice event was four months ago, so we can’t perform any tests to determine whether they were or were not using Adderall. If I walk into a police station claiming I killed someone; sure, I would get arrested, but not convicted without proof and a trial in court.”

She goes on in detail to discuss the pressures personalities are put under whilst completing infront of large crowds for upto millions of dollars in prize money.

“For what it’s worth, most esports players are young and it can be overwhelming.

There are team houses who employ psychologists and mental coaches that have regular sessions with the players and help with balancing all elements of their lives.”

Looks like the Esports scene is a lot more series than some people might first think.

Did you find this brief look into Esports interesting, as the issue develops I will keep updating you fellow nerds on the situation.

Have you ever competed in an tournament before?

Does the pressure really take that much of a tole you resort to doping?

Let me know in the comments below.