PSG.LGD Dota 2 coach xiao8 allegedly bet against his own team, his ex-wife claims

After a nail-biting best-of-five Dota 2 series, Team Spirit won the TI 10 grand finals against PSG.LGD.

Team Spirit will go down in history as one of the greatest dark horses in the tournament's history. Coming from the tier-2 and tier-3 Eastern European Dota 2 scene, they swooped in and convincingly took the aegis.

PSG.LGD, on the other hand, were the crowd favorites going into the tournament. They were undefeated throughout the group stage and main stage. The grand finals was the only series they lost.

Most of the Dota 2 community attributed their loss in the decisive fifth match when they were tied 2-2 to not banning Magnus. With the Chinese Dota 2 community becoming vocal in its criticism of questionable drafting in the final game, the fire has been further stoked by Zhang "xiao8" Ning's alleged betting scandal.

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Dota 2: PSG.LGD's coach under betting scanner

The betting shenanigans that xiao8, PSG.LGD's coach has been accused of may potentially involve the TI 10 finals. However, as for the actual proof that xiao8's ex-wife posted, it only ties him to betting on a PSG.LGD vs Aster series in the China Dota 2 Pro Cup from 2020.

After ceding the first match, PSG.LGD ultimately won said series 2-1.

There are also numerous inadequacies in the proof provided. Most importantly, there is no way to confirm that the screenshot is not fabricated and actually on xiao8's personal computer, as the allegation claims.

Regarding any betting issues at TI 10, Zhao "XinQ" Zixing and Zhang "faith_bian" Ruida already confirmed the same on a series of Weibo posts. They said that all five PSG team members collectively made the drafting decisions.

In the final game, they let Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov get Magnus, his most successful offlane pick because they thought they had an answer for it.

They pinned the reason for their loss to a lack of early-game aggression and a tier-2 dive that swung the game around for Team Spirit.

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Chinese Dota 2 teams have been accused of match-fixing before

Chinese team Newbee, the finalists in TI 7, were pulled into one of the biggest betting scandals in esports history. They were found guilty of match-fixing in an SLI Minor Season 3 series against Avengerls, where the latter threw the game.

Both organizations received bans from the CDA, and after an investigation from Valve, all of their players received lifetime suspensions from all Valve events.

It remains to be seen how xiao8 reacts to these allegations.