Valve issued a mass ban of Dota 2 pro-player accounts: what happened

Dota 2 developers conducted a surprise ban wave targeting smurf accounts among esports players. Even Alimzhan 'watson' Islamov and Dmitry 'Fishman' Polischuk from Entity lost their accounts.

This information was shared by the pro players themselves on their social media accounts. Commentator Alexey 'Storm' Tumanov also reported it in his Telegram channel.

"Wow, they banned smurfs for the guys, Stinger got banned right during an official match"

This incident prevented Steven 'StingeR' Vargas from entering an official Mad Kings match, resulting in a technical defeat for his team.

High-level smurf accounts were also removed. For instance, Fishman lost an additional account with a 12,500 MMR rating.

"Goodbye, my 12,500 smurf"

Another valuable loss was watson's, who lost his second account that held top positions in the official Dota 2 ladder. Thanks to this account, the Entity player could occupy two positions in the ranking simultaneously.

Aldar 'Jamba' Jambinov, the manager of 9 Pandas, also confirmed the Valve ban wave. He stated that he would share detailed information about the situation later.

Valve likely responded to widespread complaints on Reddit, where the community demanded bans for pro players using smurf accounts, a practice explicitly prohibited by the rules. One of the most notable scandals involved StingeR, who was allegedly accused of account boosting.