In a story by HLTV.org, it has been confirmed that Baljit “zE-” Lal from TCM-Gaming and Roman “roman” Ausserdorfer from Mousesports were both harassed by Ukrainian police yesterday as they were in town for the IEM European Championship.

According to the story, Baljit did not have his passport with him when approached by police outside of a club. Because of this, he was asked to pay an undisclosed amount (under the table) to the police in order to avoid arrest and detainment. When the police found out that Baljit did not have any additional money with him, he was punched and brought to the ground. 30 minutes later, he was released by the authorities.

In a related incident, Mousesports star Roman “roman” Ausserdorfer was also asked for his passport which he did not have at the time, however, in this instance, he was able to pay the men and was not given any additional trouble.

Roman had this to say to HLTV.org:

Because my passport was at the hotel, I had to pay the police (“money under the table”) if I did not want to be placed in a small “prison room” overnight,” he said on his Facebook wall.

They did not accept driver’s licence or any other personal documents.

More information about this story can be found by clicking here.

In a poll done by GosuGamers, Jonathan “Jinro” Walsh has been voted the best non-Korean of the year. As one of the crowd favorites in 2011, Jinro beat out Tarson and White-Ra by a wide margin.

The results can be found below:

When interviewed by GosuGamers, Jinro had this to say:

Would you call yourself the best foreigner now? I mean, 4-1 against IdrA, two Korean progaming league semi final placings in a row, and MLG Dallas win. If you set Korea aside, what other trophies do want to win?

– I think its still too early, I dont think Im ahead of the pack to the the degree where Id want to call myself #1, if Im even ahead at all. I just think I have really good support from my team so Im able to overcome really strong opponents who might be lacking some of that support (such as IdrA, and this isnt a diss towards EG, since they are putting together a house in Korea as far as I understand it) I hope WCG has SC2 for 2011, and I wanna do good in there.

The official announcement by GosuGamers can be found by clicking here.

In a post by ESEA, the format for the new Starcraft II league has been detailed. According to the post, 50 teams have signed up for the chance to compete for one of the 36 slots that are available.

Below is an official explanation of the format:

The format for the brand new Starcraft 2 league will be as follows. All matches will pit teams of four or more players against each other in a best of 5 series with each match in that series consisting of a best of 3. Although it may sound confusing, I assure you it is not. It is simpler to think of this in broad terms. The first team to win three best of threes will win the match. The way it works is each team sends out a player to play against a player from their opponents team and whoever wins that three game series will have earned their team a point, first to 3 points wins. This will repeat with a different player from each team playing in all the matches until a team has either accumulated the necessary 3 points or a tiebreak is required to decide the winner. Up to this point, no player has played in more than one game. But wait, There’s more!

The tiebreak match, also referred to as the ACE match, is the same format as the previous four best of three series with the exception that the teams can send any of their players even if they have played in a previous match leading up to this. As you might have guessed, the ACE match features the team’s best players going at it head-to-head to determine who will take home the W. Teams will be playing twice a week with the first map of each match predetermined well in advance. However, every map after the first is up to the discretion of the loser of the previous match. If you lose the first game, you are given the opportunity to choose the second map and so on and so on until a winner is determined. Also worth noting, a player must use the same race for every map in each match. So if you start out playing Zerg, you have to play all the games of your best of three series as Zerg. That is unless you have the cojones to roll the dice and play as random, but few dare.

More information about ESEA’s SC2 league can be found by clicking here.

Yesterday a video was posted on YouTube about the Call of Duty: Black Ops Ultimate Combat 4v4 Open Domination Ladder in GGL. The video consisted of one of the players in the ladder explaining how he felt the tournament spots were fixed, and that the admin (GGL-DonKing) did next to nothing to prevent, or mediate the situation.

The ladder, which started early December, was set up so that the top eight teams at January 17, 2011 would compete in the tournament and the top four teams would attend a LAN tournament to compete for the grand prize of $13,000. As the ladder progressed, one of the teams called Average Gamers decided to kick up their play a notch as they decided to challenge a higher ranked team, Scary Kids Scaring Kids (SKSK). SKSK did not show up until 8 minutes after scheduled match time, and there were only three of the four members of the team ready to play. By 14 minutes after scheduled match time, the members of Average Gamers could not wait any longer and had to call a Forfeit Win. This was an acceptable action because of the rules posted for the tournament:

Failure to show up to compete within 10 minutes of a scheduled match time will result in a forfeit loss (with point penalty) for the squad that does not show up, and a forfeit win for the squad that does.

After posting the forfeit, the team captain of Average Gamers XIplayaXI received a message from the team captain of SKSK, stating that he contacted DonKing and he had said the match should be played. XIplayaXI then responded saying that is not that big of a deal, and they should just get over it because they are still in the top four. SKSK then sent a message saying that the match had been deleted by the admin and that a match can be rescheduled whenever is best. The major flaw in this is that the admin did not listen to both sides of the story. He only listened to SKSK and acted on their behalf. XIplayaXI then messaged DonKing on AIM and requested a party chat to hear both sides of the story and he refused.

XIplayaXI then received several messages from the top ranking teams saying that they will help Average Gamers win and advance into the top 8 where they will be safely entered in the tournament. In doing so, they revealed their plans to fix the tournament slots. The plan was to help Average Gamers advance into the tournament, ensuring the victory for the top tier teams without any extra effort.

We contacted GGL-DonKing, but he refused to comment on the subject.

Below is the original video regarding the matter: