Hi, forgive me for coming here from /r/globaloffensive and for having not played SC2 in several years, but a bot posted this in the other thread. Some things to note:
1) flex was a complete nonamer, he was playing ESEA-O or ESEA-IM (which is three tiers below the professional level). He was intentionally banned on the livestream by an ESEA admin as a publicity stunt. It was not a VAC ban. This isn't a new phenomenon, during a ban wave in 2013 players were banned one by one until the very last one was an Invite player.
2) No one thought KQLY was cheating during that 1v1, that's your hindsight bias. Additionally KQLY was not VAC'd on livestream. To be honest, this is irrelevant but I have an autistic knowledge of CS players and I was slightly skeptical of KQLY. I told myself "oh, he may have been a nonamer in Source, but he's just a talented AWPer in GO". That really doesn't matter, though.
3) Emilio was indeed VAC banned on livestream, but he wasn't playing at the highest level - he was playing on a semi-pro team. People were actually skeptical of him, as he had been such a mediocre player in the past. That one Swedish guy who's permabanned from HLTV (i.e. singled out by the mods whenever he makes a new account) who cheated and extorted pro players in an IRC channel to play with him back in the day or whatever (his name has slipped my mind) made a thread calling him out for cheating vs k1ck before he got banned, but because of the person who made the thread I personally disregarded it. I thought he just was displaying talent by being the best player on a bad team, instead of being the worst player on a good team (e.g. his old SK team, which upset fnatic in a great series at Dreamhack Summer). Whoops.
Anyway, there have been some other semi-pro players VAC banned for cheating. cLy, smn & sF notably. sF and smn used the same cheat as KQLY and cLy used a really shitty private cheat (i.e. something he paid 20 dollars for). sF played for Epsilon, which was a top20 team but never had any serious reuslts. smn played for Alternate aTTaX, a semi-pro team, and made himself full blatant. That is, I think upon watching POV demos of smn, he was using really blatant settings for his pistols (the cheat had specific settings for each weapon). At the time I thought smn could have been an upcoming talent, but I was skeptical and a lot of people definitely thought he was cheating. I personally don't think cLy was definitely cheating in the game vs HSBG as people generally believe. The only unexplainable thing was the nade dodge, which could have been pure luck. But he quite clearly cheated at some point, and was banned for it.
There's no real serious cheating problem in CSGO, though. If anyone is cheating now, it isn't the established players. And I don't think there's the technology to cheat at LAN at this moment, as the workshop cheat of KQLY and sF was quite peculiar (i.e. a one-off thing). Enjoy the game, everyone!