American professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player Braxton “swag” Pierce has announced his retirement from competitive CS:GO. The 23-year-old has his eyes set on Project A – Riot’s first-person shooter in development.
Swag ends a career of untapped CS:GO potential
Once upon a time, swag was the great North American CS:GO hope. He was by far the hottest thing around on the other side of the Atlantic in 2013-2014 while playing for Quantic Gaming, Complexity Gaming and perhaps most famously – for iBUYPOWER.
The then 18-year-old broke into the hltv top 20 list of 2014, further proving his undoubted talent and unlimited potential. Then the infamous iBUYPOWER match-fixing scandal robbed young swag of all that as he, alongside three of his iBP teammates, got permanently banned from competitive CS:GO by Valve in January 2015.
Tournament organizers slowly started to lift the ban for their tournaments, but Valve’s decision still stood for CS:GO Majors, which in practice meant that swag could never make it to the top again. No serious organization would take on a player that cannot attend a Major.
This forced swag to play for lesser teams like Torqued, Swole Patrol and Lazarus Esports since his return in 2017.
Today, the now 23-year-old revealed that he no longer desires to play CS:GO competitively. He would instead focus on Project A – the upcoming Riot Games FPS that has stirred a lot of excitement following the latest info around it. Swag is still open to occasional CS:GO streaming, but at least for now, his professional career is over.
What could have been one of the greatest to ever touch CS:GO has been reduced to an early retirement because of a dumb scheme that got him some skins, which he later lost anyway. What a waste. Let’s hope Project A will treat swag better than CS:GO did.
