SPUNJ blasts Skyesports as "a f*cking dog" after Souvenir cancelation fiasco
On the most recent episode of HLTV Confirmed, caster and co-host extraordinaire Chad "SPUNJ" Burchill had some less than kind words for Skyesports while the desk were discussing the recent cancelation of the Skyesports Souvenir 2025 event, calling the TO "a f*ucking dog" in the wake of the news.
The troubled Indian TO recently canceled their first event of the year, Skyesports Souvenir 2025, which was slated to start on February 27th, due to an alleged lack of communication from Valve over requests to reschedule the Bangalore LAN and change its format.
With Valve recently reiterating their "Tournament Operating Requirements" for 2025, any changes to the Souvenir event at this late stage would have required an exception from Valve, something CS2's publisher was seemingly unwilling to grant. As such, the Souvenir event would have very likely have lost its ranked status and thus its prestige, making it unlikely top teams would trek out to India to attend the $250,000 event.
While Skyesports paints Valve as the villain in this situation for their lack of communication, it is worth noting that Valve's tournament requirements have been publicly available for many months, something SPUNJ noted in his lambasting of Skyesports. His full quote reads:
"If you are scheduling events in advance and then cancelling within a couple of months of the event being announced, you’re a f*cking dog. That's what I call people on FACEIT, and that's what I am going to call the TOs that do this."
Burchill's main criticism focuses on Skyesports essentially wasting everyone's time by announcing this event, taking up valuable space on the tier-one calendar, and then suddenly canceling it when things did not go their way. As speculated on by Milan "Striker" Švejda, there is a possibility that Skyesports failed to attract top teams to the event and that their efforts to change the format was a "hail Mary" to try and host a viable tournament at the last minute.
Whatever the case, as Burchill pointed out, this is another black eye for the tournament organizer after Skyesports Championship 2024 was plagued with technical and accommodation issues during its first day last year.
