That French eSports team LDLC won the $250,000 DreamHack Winter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament wasn’t a huge surprise. They’re quite good and experts considered them quite capable of picking up 2-0 series wins in their playoff matchups. The real surprise was the LDLC overcame unusual circumstances that would have sunk other teams en route to that championship.

At one point, LDLC was out of the tournament after the quarterfinals having lost to Fnatic but a scandal over Fnatic using a “pixelwalking” exploit resulted in a protest, forfeiture and a storybook run for LDC to the DreamHack Winter Championship.

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