I think part of the problem is this weekend circuit thing was originally set up to be a low stakes practice area to hone your skills and have fun. AFAICT, the games never count in any sort of tournament. But separately, someone set up a ranking system and these games do count there, which creates the incentive to manipulate it, and these weekend games exist in 2 states at the same time where they both matter and don't. And the pseudo random matchup system is prone to manipulation. Besides colluding to avoid playing each other the same gang is accused of "stream sniping" Bartels, where they allegedly would watch his stream to see when he was looking to start a new game and they would put up people from their crew at the same time to make sure he had tough matchups more often than chance would otherwise create. I'm not sure of either the legality or cultural ethics of that, but it's so freaking petty. It sounds like they went out of their way to impede this guy's progress out of insiderism and jealousy.
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