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The UK Gaming Tours (UKGT) Counter-Strike tournament has been cancelled before the end of its first season, after a series of long gaps in communication and complaints from players had led to the UKGT attracting a lot of negative buzz in recent weeks.
The UKGTours Twitter account, currently offline, posted a short tweet to explain matters: “UKGT is now cancelled indefinitely.”, before getting swamped with jokes and jibes from many followers and members of the CS:GO community. The account may or may not return.
It’s confusing. Shortly before iSeries back in April, an email from UKGT dug up by UKCSGO seemed to indicate that the series would be coming back for a second series, acknowledging the errors.
“Hi Guys
Firstly thank you very much for competing in our first season, it was messy in places and I’d like to apologise for this. However we have learnt a lot from the mistakes made which we intend to resolve for Season 2. We will also be bringing on a “player council” to help make the event better for players as well, and ensure the planning / organisation is suitable for your needs as well as ours.
The Finals are delayed right now due to the venue delays we are having, they offered us a date in April for the weekend after Insomnia which we accepted however they messed around so much that they had double booked. They then said the next available date would be June. This is too far away so we are currently looking at another option.
I understand the lack of communication & delays have worried people, but we have every intention to complete this league, and we are doing everything we can to fix these finals.
We also will be 100% committing to paying the prizes on the day of the finals, so when we have everything confirmed and locked down please be sure to bring relevant banking information.
I am available for questions, please feel free to call / email me any that you have.
Currently there is no DATE so I cannot help on that front right now.”
There’s been no word from UKGT regarding the prize money due to be paid to teams who have already competed, or indeed what the next steps are. I guess it is cancelled indefinitely, as per the tweet, but many players and fans will probably feel a little put out to be tossed out into the cold on this one.
Today, founder Ben Bagg went onto Ginx TV to talk about the event and said that it was due to investors pulling out or withholding money. You can view this on Twitch now, at 7 minutes in.
Watch live video from GinxTV on www.twitch.tv
This is a claim that is being attacked and refuted by several sources on Twitter, but so far nothing concrete has emerged. It’s a further unfortunate incident for Ben Bagg, who also got into bother recently over disputes between the CAZ eSports roster over money. It seems that this event will not be going a long way to redeem him. It’s worthj at times like this reiterating that there are many successful events in UK Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and this appears to just be bad luck, although we’ve reached out to UKGT for comment and will update this story if any is provided.
