Fnatic was one of the best teams in the world at the time, coming in to Dreamhack Winter 2014 in Jönköping, Sweden. They were easily the top dog with players such as Olofmeister, JW, Flusha and Krimz who most to this day are still competing at the pro level. With some controversy of Flusha having cheated in the past and gotten VAC banned on another account and the usual hate that fans have for the big teams that are used to taking the trophy home - this tournament started differently for them.
They had a really hard time at the beginning, losing against Hellraisers who had one of the upcoming stars S1mple who is today considered to be one of the best CS:GO players in the world. This lit up the hate for Fnatic even more as the audience like to root for the underdogs. They made it through to the quarterfinals by being second in the group to face the French Team LDLC who were considered the second best in the world at the time. It was a final come early as potentially the top 2 teams in the world were facing eachother in the quarterfinals.
The game started on Dust 2 with Team LDLC winning a map for the first time against the Fnatic roster, Fnatic replied with winning the next map Cache by a big margin and they went onto the deciding map which was Overpass. The excitement for the game was rising as this would be the final map, Overpass is considered to favor the Counter-Terrorist side and that showed by Fnatic losing their Terrorist half by 12 to 3. Sides switched and the pistol round was as important as ever for Fnatic to win and that's when they deployed their secret tactic they had been working on.
Here in the video you will be able to see the boost being being executed where one player has another player standing on top of him until he finds a spot that lets the player above stand on the edge of the wall even though the player under leaves his position. Even though they used this in the pistol round for information they still ended up losing the pistol round when Team LDLC decided to go for the B plant instead. They were still not aware of what Fnatic was doing and what followed in the next rounds shocked the casters, the audience at Dreamhack and everyone watching at home. The advantage this boost gave was a gamechanger.
Fnatic win the 2nd round after pistols with only a Scout on Olofmeister and from there on they keep winning rounds while LDLC have no idea what is happening. At 13-12 LDLC just attempt to rush A side as they suspect something weird is going on and they are running out of options but the boost happened so quick that the info to the players at B to switch to A made it in good time. In the next round LDLC managed to figure out where the boost was happening but never managed to kill Olof before he killed them with an Automatic Sniper.
LDLC are completely destroyed and don't manage to win a single round throughout their whole Terrorist side and Fnatic wins 16 to 13.
Even though Fnatic were playing "at home" due to a lot of the players on the team being swedish and they had a lot of fans, this so called victory over the french team fueled the haters even more and the backlash over social media was immense. Fans even pointed to a Dreamhack rulebook from 2013 that mentioned "pixel boosting" was not allowed but according to officials who had sent out that years rulebook to the teams in advance, that rule did not exist in the new version.
The admins of the tournament decided to go through the game again and found that two players from Fnatic were in fact breaking the rules through this boost so they wanted to replay the match from the first half starting at 12-3, what they had missed, though was that LDLC used a similar boost that broke the rules as well earlier. In the end Fnatic forfeited the match completely which meant that LDLC were through.
The backlash from the community was so harsh that many of the players wanted to leave the team completely, even though both teamed had boosted in the match - the fans were mostly lashing out at Fnatic and made them to be the villians in the CS:GO competitive scene. Krimz and Olof especially who were new at the pro levels did not anticipate the hate that would be coming their way for using game mechanics the way they saw fit, especially not considering they were loved by everyone up until that one map.
