I’m posting this as a heads up for the people that didn’t know about the cheating that the canadian players were doing at Evo East.
These guys had a modded anniversary edition controller that worked only on a specific PS2 that the canadians brought. Their plan was to bait players to play money matches/tournament games on their PS2 with their specific settings in favor of their characters (e.g. Yun). This guy Saamir (the canadian I encountered) would say that his controller doesn’t work on the PS2 at the stations (during the tournament) because there was something wrong with his controller connector but he would refuse to use another controller for personal reasons. Then when you went to play, he would plug in his controller first to test his controller and go straight to arcade mode (3rd strike was the game) so you would only be able to do button configuration but not be able to check the options. When I went to play the 3S match with him, I was already suspicious about this guy Saamir since we tested his controller at 4 stations but I respected his decision and gave him the benefit of the doubt. During the first game we played I noticed that the damage was strange but since I wasn’t 100% sure at that time, I played the following game to confirm it. After I loss the match, I quickly realized this scheme and went to tell Seth about it but since no Evo staff was present to see it happen, I had to take my loss.
So the next match that was up, was Justin Wong vs Saamir. I went to see if he would do the same routine of his with the broken controller with Justin and he did. At this point I knew I had to stop him. As Justin went to start his match, I grabbed Justin and whispered to him that Saamir was cheating and he had the settings set in his favor. As Justin went to start the game, he told Saamir that he wanted to check the game settings but he pretend to ignore Justin and just jump straight to arcade mode. After Justin got into the game options, we saw that the settings had not been default. This reaffirmed me and after Justin won, we went over to tell the Evo staff about this scheme. As Saamir went to the loser brackets, he had to fight Smoothcat but this time James Chen was there watching to confirm if Saamir would do this scheme and he did. After Saamir loss his match with Smoothcat, I decided to confront Saamir but I got nothing but a guilty expression. While I was confronting Saamir, Nagata quickly came to his defense and Nagata said there was no evidence of Saamir “cheating” or changing settings but when MrWizard ask Nagata about this matter, he told Joey that he had filmed my match with Saamir but when Joey asked Nagata to show this match so he could confirm if this matter was true or not, he refused. After Nagata refused to show the match, Joey and the other Evo staff decided to ban Saamir from Evo.
Later on, while I was talking with Arturo on the 2nd floor lobby. Nagata passed by and overheard us talking about the canadians and cheating. He came up to defend himself and I told him that I wasn’t blaming him for Saamir’s actions but his actions made me suspicious of him. After explanations and arguing, Nagata finally admitted to cheating and he said, “Let’s keep it real between the OG people here, yah we cheating”.
