sAviOr — The Maestro Who Threw Games and Took Esports Down With Him

In 2010, Ma Jae-yoon — known across South Korea by the gamertag “sAviOr” and the nickname “the Maestro,” and regarded as one of the greatest StarCraft: Brood War players who ever lived — was exposed as a ringleader in a scheme to throw professional matches for an illegal betting operation. On June 7, 2010, the Korea e-Sports Association, KeSPA, permanently banned eleven players implicated in the affair and vacated Ma’s titles. A Seoul court later handed him a one-year prison sentence, suspended, with two years’ probation and 120 hours of community service. It was the first time match-fixing had been detected in Korean esports, and it remains the genre’s foundational scandal — the moment a video game acquired the permanent asterisk that organized sport had carried since 1919.

StarCraft was not a niche pastime in Korea; it was a televised professional sport with leagues, sponsored teams, broadcast channels, and stars who were genuine celebrities. That maturity is exactly what made it fixable. Where there are leagues, rankings, and broadcasts, there are betting markets, and where there are betting markets and underpaid players, there is a price for a thrown game. Prosecutors found that a network of illegal gambling-site operators had recruited pro gamers to deliberately lose matches, paying them per fix while the operators and their clients bet against the players’ own listed form.

The mechanics were the ordinary economics of corruption. Players agreed to lose, or to telegraph their strategies to opponents in advance, in exchange for payments reported at between two million and six and a half million won per arranged match — roughly 1,800 to 5,700 US dollars — with the larger sums reserved for the higher-ranked, more credible names whose losses moved the most money. At least twelve matches were thrown across the eleven implicated players. Ma, the most decorated of them, was identified as a central figure, the kind of marquee name whose participation made the whole enterprise viable.

The verdicts came on two tracks and pointed the same way. KeSPA’s permanent bans ended the playing careers of all eleven and stripped Ma of the achievements he had won under its governance — three MSL championships and an OSL title among them. The Seoul Central District Court, which began trying the case on June 4, 2010, convicted the participants criminally; Ma’s own sentence was a suspended year in prison, two years’ probation, and community service, a penalty that kept him out of a cell but cemented the conviction on the record. The bans were the sport’s verdict; the suspended sentence was the state’s.