Infamous Dota 2 streamer is back to terrorizing ranked matches after escaping smurf jail

Mason, one of Dota 2’s most controversial streamers, is finally back to the main matchmaking pool after spending almost half a year in smurf jail.

Mason was on his usual livestream schedule on May 30 and queued into a matchmaking lobby where, after looking at the other players in the Immortal Draft screen, he realized his sentence had served at last. It was a grueling grind of 1,400+ matches after the pro-turned-streamer got his previous account permabanned.

The ex-Evil Geniuses player has been one of the most controversial figures among the otherwise bland crop of Dota 2 streamers. Previously, he has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, including being banned by Twitch multiple times before Valve handed him a Coal-shaped permaban for using boosting service in December last year.

This got Mason started with a fresh new account—but, of course, as you might have expected, he got flagged as a smurf and placed into the infamous smurf pool. For the uninitiated, this is part of the matchmaking system that places smurfs with other smurfs so as not to hamper actual new players and also to dissuade pro players from running multiple accounts, which was the case before the 2023 Frostivus ban wave.

The Dota 2 community is more or less pleased with the whole development. “I’ve got to hand it to him. He kept his head down and served his punishment, and what a punishment it was. That’s a deserved main pool,” one player said in a May 31 Reddit thread.

“What a remarkable journey and fascinating look at the absolute dregs of Dota society!”, one Mason stream enjoyer pointed out the new perspectives we got exposed to as a community through his smurf pool streams for the last six months. “[We] got to see buyers, win traders, and boosters yell at each other in Russian as they duked it out round after round for ultimate degeneracy.”