You have probably stumbled across iBUYPOWER stickers once or twice on the Steam market. There is an interesting story about that, a lot of you who did not play or follow CSGO in 2014 probably know nothing about.
The most expensive iBUYPOWER sticker is from ESL Katowice 2014 and it costs roughly 1250,00€ while the HOLO version of that sticker costs around 7,000€. Why is that?
ESL Major Series One Katowice 2014 Stickers
This tournament was the second CSGO Major ever. Back in the days, stickers were not so popular and fewer people bought them. The player base was also smaller which also means fewer people to buy them.
So we can compare this sticker to olds cars actually, let’s look at them as they are oldtimers. The production stop, no more products are produced, it is less of them every day and the price only goes up.
Basic economics, low supply + high demand = high price. Those stickers are just rare and that is what makes them expensive. But why are iBUYBUYPOWER stickers the most expensive ones? This has something to do with the team background. What is iBUYPOWER actually?
iBUYPOWER
Back in 2015, iBUYPOWER was one of the best teams in the whole world. This North American organization was created in 2013 as one of the first professional CSGO teams. They were one of the most popular teams in the NA for sure.
Skins were introduced in late 2013 with “The Arms Deal” update. With skins trading, someone thought to make a gambling site where you can gamble your skins. One of those sites was CSGO Lounge.
The site became pretty popular and users could trade skins there and bet on some CSGO matches. Players from iBUYPOWER saw an opportunity to make money there and that is when it all started.
CSGO Fixed Match
Yes, this actually happened. Despite being clear favourites, players from iBUYPOWER decided to bet against themselves and win some skins instead of winning money.
The match happened on August 20, 2014, in the CEVO Professional Season 5. They were playing against NetCodeGuides. iBUYPOWER was supposed to win that match but they lost it with 16-4 the final result.
It was too obvious that something is not ok, they were attempting knife kills, some silly lineups and everything else except to win. You can watch the highlights of that match here:
The very next day, screenshots of a conversation with Shahzeb “ShahZaM” Khan came online. In those screenshots, we could see that he confirmed that the match had been fixed and that iBUYPOWER will lose.
ShahZaM later denied everything and refused to reveal who is behind that. In January 2015, the case came back to light when a former girlfriend of iBP player posted some incriminating text messages between herself and Derek “dboorn” Boorn.
He confirmed that the match was fixed and that he had to place bets using alternate accounts. They got around $10,000 in skins. Finally, Valve announced its public statement:
Professional players, their managers, and teams’ organization staff, should under no circumstances gamble on CS:GO matches, associate with high volume CS:GO gamblers, or deliver information to others that might influence their CS:GO bets.
Consequences of CSGO Match Fixing
As a result of that iBUYPOWER players and NetCodeGides owner were permanently banned from all future events sponsored by Valve.
Tyler “Skadoodle” Latham was the only iBUYPOWER member that refused to accept skins and therefore he was not banned. He later joined Cloud9, replaced shahZam there (karma) and even won a Major with them.
That is the story about iBUYPOWER, this team no longer exists, therefore, there will be no new stickers for this team on any other Major event. However, iBUYPOWER participated in ESL One: Cologne 2014 and DreamHack Winer 2014 and there are still some stickers left on the market.
You can find regular stickers for around 15€ while Holos are around 70€. Try to buy it, it may be worth a fortune someday, who knows?
