Dark side of professional video gaming

The stadium seating is full, the 500-strong audience lit fire red and ice blue. Gamescom, held annually in Cologne, Germany, is Europe's largest video game fair. The game of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a popular first-person shooter, is its big draw.
A sound system broadcasting play-by-play commentary is almost drowned out by the noise of on-screen gunshots and grenade blasts.A successful play brings gasps and whoops. There are whispers of a darker side to "eSports", though: admissions of performance-enhancing drug use and, now, allegations of unregulated and underage gambling.
Professional eSports is growing exponentially. It's worth an estimated $612 million a year, according to research provider Superdata, and is full of committed players and obsessive fans. In July, though, Kory Friesen, a Counter-Strike player known as "Semphis", told an interviewer that he and team-mates "were all on Adderall", a stimulant typically used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, during a competition in Poland. He then told the New York Times that did not necessarily make his team win: "You don't just take Adderall and instantly become better," Friesen said.
Shortly afterwards the Electronic Sports League, one of the main tournament organizers, said it would create a formal drug policy with help from Germany's anti-doping agency .It conducted its first doping tests at a tournament in Cologne in August, and said in a statement the random screening "returned negative results for all tested players". A spokeswoman declined to disclose how many tests were conducted, and for which substances.
Though eSports organizers are beginning to grapple with drug use, gambling presents a new set of challenges. Betting on competitions is growing rapidly on mainstream sites; UK bookmaker William Hill has taken 14,000 bets on games so far this year, spokesman Joe Crilly said, of about £250,000 ($395,000) in total. Four times that much will likely be bet over the next year, he said.
This kind of gambling -licensed, regulated, and by adults, is generally accepted in eSports.
There is growing concern, though, that teenagers are being attracted to different forms of betting facilitated by third-party providers.
One such platform is CSGO Lounge (an independent site not affiliated with Valve Software, which develops the game itself). The site allows spectators to bet in-game add-ons known as skins -weapons, tools and the like -on the results of matches.
Not all skins are created equal, and the rarity of some means they can cost hundreds of real dollars on marketplace sites like SkinXchange.com. The temptation is just too much for some.
"Underage gambling is a huge problem," SkinXchange lead developer Justin Carlson said in an e-mail. The UK Gambling Commission, which regulates betting, declined to comment on individual providers but said any site offering gambling services to British residents must be registered.