Cover Image Courtesy: DreamHack - Jennika Ojala | Thumbnail Image Courtesy: Beyond the Summit
A player who was once considered to be one of North America’s most promising young talent, Braxton “swag” Pierce has announced his departure from CS:GO with plans to join Riot’s Project A. The 23-year-old tweeted that he was no longer with Swole Identity, “I have decided to take a step back from competitive CS and although I may still stream CS in the future, my main goal is to await the release of Project A.”
Despite being immensely talented the youngster was caught up in the infamous ‘North American match-fixing scandal’, where members of iBUYPOWER despite being the heavy favorites had bet against themselves, deliberately losing the match by a score of ‘16-4’.
In an investigation carried out by Valve, four members of iBUYPOWER were permanently banned from all Valve-sponsored tournaments and swag was one amongst them. Despite being unbanned from ESL and DreamHack tournaments by September 2017 swag failed to make it back to the upper echelons of Counter-Strike.
He states in the tweet that this move from him is being made to put his “ambitions of being the best in the world to fruition.” After giving more than 8 years of his life to the game and spending about 22,000 hours from CS 1.6 to CS:GO, the youngster is ready to move on saying that “I don’t regret any of it.”
While there is still no official news from Riot Games about the release date of the game being referred to as ‘Project A’, it has already generated a lot of hype with many prominent CS:GO personalities also finding it to be a great game. It will be interesting to see how well can it compete against the veteran first-person shooter.
