When originally contacted the players didn’t want to comment on what had happened over the weekend, but with being unhappy with the way that Vince has described it they decided to share their side of the story. The original post can be found here.
Neil M – Ex Choke Gaming Coach.
My time in Choke was good with the players the whole time & the org up until i55. I first started having doubts when we didn’t actually have a hotel & tickets under our name until 48 hours before the LAN. When myself & Immi asked Vince about our hotel we just kept getting the “Don’t worry lads all sorted just keep headshotting”.
The players were obviously extremely worried that we weren’t going to actually attend iseries with these words until a day before LAN when we finally received our reservation for the hotel.
Also a lot of the doubts for the players I believe was the sponsorships for example skinarena. The org was receiving $1000 in skins a month solely because of the CS:GO Squad for 4 months. Out of $4000 of skins the team received one knife each ever worth about $200. The org kept telling the guys the money was going into the “Choke Bank”.
Iseries came and past and the guys wanted to leave the org because Vince assured them the funds are there securely to fund for future LANS including hotel/train tickets.
This is when I departed from the players on good terms but I believe things didn’t change between the players and org for funding for EPS UK Finals. Nothing booked nothing sorted for the players to again put the players in doubt on whether they will even have a hotel for the LAN.
I like Vince as a person a lot but I believe the way he’s handled things in his org to his players just simply isn’t the way you handle things in eSports.
Iseries came and past and the guys wanted to leave the org but Vince assured them the funds are there securely to fund for future LANS including hotel/train tickets.
Jacky, Free lance CSGO Caster.
Before MCM began I was contacted by Immi, asking me what I thought of Lewisham as he was showing me the housing that Vince had booked for the Choke boys.
The place itself was basically a council flat. The reviews for the place Vince booked states that the place was far too small for three people, never mind 5. From personal experience, I know that it would’ve been an absolute nightmare to travel to and from the ExceL.
I went to college in Lewisham for a very long time and I know it’s not a nice place I gave my thoughts to Immi about the area and the issues with travelling from Lewisham and they started looking for a new place.
I assumed that everything was okay after they told me that the new place had been booked.
I arrived at MCM on Friday morning and was preparing to cast the event and was doing rehearsals with the other staff members, as far as I knew, everything was fine with Choke at this point as I knew that all of the Choke members would be arriving in London that night. After the rehearsals, me and Kyan1te went to relax for a bit before the start of the event the following day. We were in Central London and I receive a phone call from Esio saying that he was trying to contact Choke but there was no way of getting hold of them so he contacted me as he knew that I was already in London for the event and because I was a long-time friend. He explained the entire situation to me; that they had arrived at an unfinished “luxury inn” that had no electricity, no heating and no locks of the doors. Esio seemed pretty shaken and was saying that most of the players just wanted to get out of there and/or go home. He showed me some pictures of the place and it showed how bad the place was. He then mentioned that there wasn’t even a fire escape and that the front door was to be locked by the owner at night, leaving no exit for occupants if the place was on fire. He did not feel safe in an environment like that and I certainly can’t blame him, who would feel safe there?
To add onto the chaos that had ensued, it turned out that Vince had not even paid for the accommodation which meant that they probably weren’t going to stay there anyway. After finding out about that, me, Kyan1te and Gumpster started looking for new places for them to stay and we attempted to pool our funds together as we were planning to just book a place for them to stay so that they didn’t have to worry anymore. We didn’t care about how much it would cost at this point, we simply wanted to get them somewhere safe where that they would be able to stay and rest their heads.
We found them a place to stay so I spoke to Esio, Max and Immi and explained that if they needed us to book this now so that they would 100% have somewhere to stay, we would. However, whilst I was speaking to them, Vince paid the money for them to stay three nights in the “luxury inn”. The players felt that they were forced to stay there at this point. Due to them knowing that Vince would have to pay a cancellation fee if they did leave, they felt like it wasn’t the right thing to do and they decided to just deal with it. I explained that they are under no obligation to stay there in that unsafe environment. But as I said, they dealt with it as they felt like they needed to stay there as Vince had paid for it.
The next day I met with the players at MCM and they explained the situation to me and showed me some more pictures of the hostel. Things were worse than I initially thought. According to the players, the place stunk of weed, they witnessed a domestic disturbance at around 4am and that there was constant shouting and screaming coming from the nearest room. The players had next to no sleep due to the fear of being robbed and due to the lack of heating in the place, they were forced to have three people sleep in the same bed. The players turned up to the event with at best, around 3 hours of sleep between them. Most of the players just slept backstage for the entire time before and after their game because at least it was warm and safe on the bean bags which were located backstage. I can quote Immi: “If MCM didn’t close, I’d just stay on the beanbags backstage because at least it’s safe here”
After all of Saturday’s games, I took all of the guys to my hotel room to let them put all of their stuff in my room – they had to bring all of their luggage with them as their rooms weren’t locked inside the “luxury inn”. We put all of the luggage in my room, got changed and went to the ESL party. We were all enjoying ourselves at the ESL party until Max was contacted by Assad, the owner, that if they didn’t get back to the hostel by 12am, they would be locked out and would not be able to get back into the place until the following morning. First off, this was simply an impossible task. They would need to leave the party, head to my hotel room, get all of their stuff, sort travel back to the hostel and then hope that the door would be open. After a lot of hassle, Max was able to convince the owner to leave the door open for them so that after the party had finished, they would be able to get back into the hostel.
We headed back to my hotel after the ESL party had finished and Choke got all of their gear from my room. However, just before they were about to leave for the hostel, they were contacted again by Assad who told them “When you enter the apartment please go to the second floor. Turn right the 2 rooms are yours the checkout is at 10:00am
Vince has only paid me for 2 nights of stay. Do not enter first floor building as they are fully booked. There is no light on second floor, therefore to use hot water facility you can use the first floor toilets. Thanks and have a pleasant stay.”
Joint EX-Choke line up
First off, we didn’t want to put out a statement. However, after reading Vince’s statement – we felt that we were required to put out a statement as it had shown us in a bad light.
We joined Choke Gaming in June 2015. We had all sorts of high hopes, being promised this, that and the other. Our agreement was that we were going to have tickets and hotel paid for and that we would be given computers at each event to play on.
For our first event, EpicFIFTEEN, we were told that we would have PCs provided, GTOmega chairs, tickets and hotel. Due to Choke’s LoL team winning the previous Epic event, Choke didn’t have to pay for anything other than the hotel. However, they did not pay for anything as we ended up booking the hotel ourselves as they (Choke) had taken a long time to do anything. Because of this, our hotel for the event was located in Corby. Just to get a perspective, we were required to travel 11 miles every morning/night. This hotel was booked around a week before the event due to “sponsors being slow”. We weren’t phased by this as we just assumed that sure, sponsors were slow.
We arrived at the event to be greeted by no chairs but weren’t that bothered as they weren’t a part of the initial agreement. The contact from the organisation during the event was lacklustre. We had no member of Choke staff at the event until the Sunday where Vince, the owner, showed up halfway through the final map and then left within an hour of it finishing. We won the event and decided to ask what we would need to do to get travel paid for – Vince said that a top 3 finish at iSeries would let us get that.
For our second event, i55, we were told that we would have the same thing as we were told for EpicFIFTEEN – this means chairs, PCs, tickets and hotel. However, with 3 days until the event started, we still had no tickets booked and had no hotel booked either. When we asked Vince about the entire thing, he would just say “Keep popping heads” or “It’s gravy, baby – keep playing”. He would do this instead of saying that the sponsors are slow or that they were having financial issues. It’s worth noting that due to Eclipse Computers sponsoring Choke, they were able to provide tickets for free/at a discount due to being an exhibitor at iSeries. 2 days before the event we get given our tickets for the event and are told that the hotel is booked – we only receive an address/website link on the Thursday of the event. We then realise that this hotel is also located a bit far away from the event and that we will need to travel roughly 5.5 miles to and from the event each day.
We arrived at the event, checked in, saw that we had no chairs again and just assumed that he was unable to get them again. We then travelled back to the hotel and found out that we were essentially in some sort of village which felt like it was miles away from any form of civilization. Before the event, we were told by Vince that we would be given cash to help pay for travel to and from the event. We spoke to various sponsors at the event. One of the sponsors we spoke to said that we would be getting graphics cards. There’s two possibilities now. It’s either A) that Vince took the graphics cards and sold them or B) that we never received them. We finished the event in 2nd place which meant for future events we would be getting travel paid for. When speaking to Vince afterwards he mentioned a potential salary but we saw nothing in return after that. We, as a team, felt heavily de-motivated at this point as we were seeing no return from Choke after gaining various sponsors such as SkinArena and GTOmega. According to Vince, our deal with SkinArena was that we would get $1,000 worth of skins every month but we received around $700 in total across the 4 months that we were partnered with them. According to Vince, he was using them for giveaways on Twitter and selling them on OPSkins to get funds for the organisation. This made us wonder, where was the money gained from selling skins going? This sponsor was earned solely by us and we had received next to nothing from it.
Due to having free tickets for the following EpicLAN, we felt obliged to return and defend our title. At this point, we are meant to be getting tickets, hotel, travel and computers to play on at events. I think he had given up on saying that we would have GT Omega chairs for events at this point. For once, our hotel was actually booked more than a week in advance and was located near the event. We arrived at the event on the Thursday, checked in, setup our PCs and played the following day. After completing the group stages, we stayed around to watch some of the round of 16 games and then headed back to the hotel at around midnight. However, at around 4:30 in the morning, we (me and Max) were greeted by a loud knock at our door which was then followed up by a very drunk Vince putting the light on and saying “Sorry guys, wrong room”. He proceeded to do that to all of our rooms until he found the correct room. This meant we all had an interrupted night of sleep. We finished in 3rd place at the event after losing to Reason in the Consolation final. We asked Vince about petrol money as Powell had picked 2 of us up and then driven to the event. Vince said that he wouldn’t be able to pay it. He put £40 towards Max’s travel and complained that he had to pay for it despite promising that we’d have it paid for at the previous event. This meant that Powell had to pay £120 out of his own pocket to pay for the travel. At this point, everybody in the team wanted to leave the organisation. However, due to our involvement in the ESL UK Premiership, we were unable to leave without losing our spot. On the Monday after EpicSIXTEEN, we qualified for the ESL UK Premiership LAN Finals which would take place 3 weeks later. Only Shorty from the organisation spoke to us after qualifying as Vince, THE OWNER, was streaming and getting drunk as he does many times a week. He claimed that he could do whatever he wants in his free time. That’s fine but when an organisation owner is getting drunk on stream and taking the piss I don’t think it gives out a very professional vibe. There was a distinct lack of involvement from the management. We spoke to them and said that due to us getting tickets for free, we would NEED travel paid for along with hotels.
With less than a week to go until the event, we contacted ESL as we were concerned with our organisation. If we didn’t go to the event, we would be banned from all ESL competitions for a year. We asked ESL if we would be able to drop Choke and acquire another organisation who would be able to pay for our hotels and travel. We did this through Skype where Vince accused us of being rude, claiming that we “never went to him” about our concerns. The truth of the matter is that whenever we went to him with all of our concerns, he would either A) ignore us, B) say that he only wants to speak to Immi (he did this to Powell), C) be streaming. We attempted to contact Shorty, who is another staff member, and he said that he would organise a meeting during the weekend. However, this meeting never happened as Vince decided to stream for the entirety of the weekend. He also claimed that we refused to use Skype to communicate. Never once in our time in Choke has he said that we should use Skype. Why should we use Skype when we have Steam, Facebook or even Teamspeak where we are always around..
Within this conversation, he mentioned that due to some sponsors, they had been struggling financially. Instead of simply saying that to us, he carried on using his trademark lines “keep popping heads”. He said he would get things sorted by Wednesday (October 21st). We ask ESL about this as it clearly isn’t fully cleared up and they say that it’s clearly an internal conflict and that they would love for us to stay as Choke Gaming as they are a solid brand that they have worked with for a year. We trusted Vince and left everything until Wednesday where Vince said that XFX, a sponsor, will be booking us into a “great apartment”. Powell decided that, in order to help Choke, he would take the bus. Max also decides to pay for his own travel. On the Thursday (October 22nd) we are told that a flat has been booked for us. He then gives us an address and we find out that it’s a council flat located in Lewisham. By simply loading up AirBnB, we were able to find the flat that he had booked had 2 beds and, according to reviews, didn’t have enough room for three people. This is a 2 bedroom council flat in Lewisham for 5 people to stay in. We ask Jacky about it as he’s from London and he goes on about how Lewisham isn’t a safe place to stay in and that it will take well over an hour to get to the event and that it will cost a hell of a lot each day for us to get there. Below is a picture of the council flat that we were meant to be staying in.
Below is a photo from Google Maps showing the minimum time it would take to get to the venue each day.
We outright refused to stay at this flat after reading up on the area some more and decided to find a place ourselves. Vince had claimed that he spent £550 on this place so we were looking for a place that would cost less than that and it isn’t that far away. After searching for less than 5 minutes, we were able to find a place which would take 10-15 minutes each morning which, in our situation, was probably the best possible. It was also only going to cost £300 for the 3 nights and would accommodate us all. Vince then claimed that a sponsor had “screwed him over” – we believe he was on about XFX, we spoke to Will Gask at the event (works for XFX) and he said that they had done everything possible – Vince claimed that he had lost £250 off booking the other place and that he had to take a personal loan out to book this new place. According to his statement, he also attempted to get some of the prize money early in order to pay for accommodation. If he did attempt to do this, he tried to do it without consulting us. Due to this being the day before the event, we were just happy that we would have a place to sleep and we just assumed that everything was paid for and got ready to leave the next day.
Everybody starts heading to the event on the Friday. We were all set to arrive at Euston at around 8pm. Just to get our weekend off to a good start, Powell’s bus broke down and he said he would be delayed by around 4 hours. Due to his extensive delay, the rest of us decided that we should just go to the hotel and check-in as this “hotel” would only let us check-in until midnight. We arrived to what appeared to be a half built building that had 2 front doors that were both unlocked and allowed us to clearly see that there is a lot of construction work currently underway inside the building.
When we got into the building, it had no electricity, stunk of weed and appeared to be completely empty. Our first thought was that we had been scammed. We investigated further and we went through all of the floors finding no beds, nothing. We felt like we’d just walked into some sort of crack house as there was literally no furniture anywhere, the walls were incredibly thin and it genuinely looked like an abandoned building. It took around 30 minutes for any contact between us and the owner of the place. The owner then took another 30 minutes to then fix the electricity – during this time, we phoned Jacky as we knew that he was already in London and could potentially help us. We told him about the situation and he said that we should get out of there as soon as possible and that him, Kyanite and Gumpster would help us find somewhere new so that we wouldn’t have to be worried about in a place like that. After telling them fully about the situation, they were in contact with ESL who were able to send some of our group stage prize money a bit early so that we would be able to book a new place as they were clearly concerned as well. Shortly after receiving the prize money, we were told by Assad, the hotel owner, that Vince hadn’t paid for the place yet and that he needed Vince to be there in person to pay. We stayed in contact with Jacky who carried on saying that we should get out of there. However, we felt bad leaving this place as the owner quite clearly was a genuine guy who just needed cash – he even offered to let us stay the 1 night as the booking was done through booking.com which meant that if no transaction was done, he would be able to charge Vince for the single night without him there in person. At this point, we finally received contact from Choke (through Twitter) where Vince was asking us to phone him on his landline. We phoned him and told him the entire situation. About 30 minutes later, the place was paid for. As the place was now paid for, we felt like we were forced to stay there, despite the condition of the place. Jacky and the others strongly felt that we should have left the place but we would have felt very bad if we did. At this point it is 1am. Powell had finally arrived at Euston and had just ordered an Uber which arrived at the incorrect destination – located 2 miles away from the venue. Due to Powell having next to no battery, we told him to stay there and that we’d go and find him. Max and I headed out to find him. Within the next hour we were able to find him and then we headed back to the hotel. We got back to the hotel at 3am to find out that we had been locked out of the place.
Due to the lack of a fire escape within this establishment, this meant that the entire thing was illegal. If there was a fire, nobody would be able to get out without damaging the property. It took Assad, the owner, 20 minutes to arrive at the hotel and let us back in where we raised our concerns regarding it being a fire hazard and he simply laughed at us. We were required to be at the venue by 9:35am and had to be ready to play at 10am. Due to us only getting ready for bed at 4am, we were always going to be hit by a lack of sleep – this was enhanced when the room next door to one of ours was currently hosting what appeared to be some domestic abuse. Everybody heard this as the walls within the place were thin. This meant that some of us were unable to get to sleep at all.
We arrived at the venue at around 8:45am, got setup and decided to sleep a bit to relax in the backstage area temporarily as some of us were so tired. Vince arrived halfway through the series with no team clothing of any kind for us (he had promised a Choke hoodie for Joee as one of the rules stated that the team had to wear matching team clothing – we would have been fined). Lucky for us, we were allowed to wear variations of hoodies and shirts. We dropped all of our gear and stuff off at Jacky’s hotel room as we didn’t feel like our stuff was safe inside that place. After dropping our stuff off, we went to the ESL Party and the night was going fine until we received contact from Assad who said that our hotel rooms had been moved and that we’ll be staying in 2 of the newly renovated rooms upstairs. He then asked us when we will be arriving back at the hotel as he needed to lock the door. After speaking to him for ages, Max was able to convince him to leave the door unlocked. However, he also included some vital information about our new rooms. He mentioned that we had no power, heating or plumbing in our new rooms and that he would provide us with a single extension. About an hour later, he messaged us again saying that the checkout was at 10am and that we would be required to leave by then as Vince had only paid for 2 nights. Despite Vince saying that he tried to contact us about us staying the third night, he 100% didn’t. He is simply lying, as he has done an enormous amount in his statement. From our point of view, we had been completely screwed over and we believe that Choke (Vince) had cancelled our third night out of spite.
Because of this new discovery, we needed to find new accommodation which we would have to pay out of our own pockets. It is lucky that we had received the group stage prize money from ESL as it meant we wouldn’t be homeless for a night in London. Without those funds, we would have had to contact family/friends to get funds to help.
SummaryTo summarise, we have been incredibly disappointed by our time in Choke Gaming. We believe that they are an incredibly unprofessional organisation who lack the management skills to run an organisation. Two months ago, we suggested that the organisation make changes in the backroom as the amount of communication between our team and the staff had been poor. He said that there will be changes happening. Two months later, nothing had changed. If Choke is to survive as an org, they will need to make sure that they get new staff members as their current staff don’t know what they’re doing.
The amount of lies that have come out of the statement that Vince submitted to UKCSGO is outrageous and just shows how much the organisation is trying to save face. He claimed that he gave us all contact information before the event, he did not. He claimed that we had Shorty’s contact information, we did not. He claims that they have provided everything that they’ve said they will provide, they did not. He says that we all refused to compromise on our travel – 2 of us did – Powell took a bus, Max paid for his own travel. He asked us if we had open returns, we did – he then assumed we would leave on Sunday. He didn’t think about asking us, he decided to instantly assume we are 100% going home and left us with nowhere to stay. Even if we didn’t like the accommodation, we 100% knew that we had beds to sleep in. But no, Choke cancelled our hotel out of spite.
It is also worth noting that according to the AirBnB website, the flat that Vince booked uses a Flexible cancellation policy. A flexible cancellation policy is the following: https://www.airbnb.co.uk/home/cancellation_policies#flexible – On the flat that he booked, it says that the cancellation policy used is Flexible. https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/3483383?checkin=23-10-2015&checkout=26-10-2015&guests=6&s=7ZqMkKqE – We spoke to Vince about cancelling the hotel on Wednesday – according to the cancellation policies on booking.com, this means that Vince has once again lied. All of this event’s situations could have been avoided if they had simply done what all of the other organisations had done: reserved rooms and cancelled if we had not made it to the LAN final. It is also worth noting that to stay in this “luxury inn”, we would have had to pay £40 per person to stay that extra night. Also, we never agreed to Choke Gaming taking a 15% cut of our ONLINE winnings. We agreed to 15% of all LAN winnings. The money he tried to take from ESL early in order to pay for our accommodation was a part of our online winnings. Therefore, he is in the complete wrong regarding that prize money.
Vince constantly talks about the world being against him/Choke as him and the organisation have only just come back to the scene. However, we have spoken to a number of organisations who have all agreed that this is because he constantly acts unprofessional and acts like a fool when compared to others. As soon as he understands that this isn’t the case, only then will the organisation potentially grow.
We wish the organisation luck in the future.
