SearchlightThat post was sort of tongue-in-cheek. However, I do think that a major can never be 100% competitive - if you wanted to provide perfect conditions, you'd let the teams play in a hotel room somewhere in a multi-day round-robin format without playoffs. The majors are as much a celebration of the game and an opportunity to interact with fans as they are a pure sporting contest.
Of course, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do all in your power to put teams on equal standing, like provide soundproof booths. But excessiveky lamenting some team's results misses the point of the major imo, and the other dozens of random things that influence who wins.
Here's a quote from Michal Blicharz, the man running IEM for 7 years, on soundproof booths:
Soundproof booths are not entirely soundproof. All of the booths I have seen or been inside of dampen 70-80% of the noise. If you add a soundproof headset on top, you will only be aware that there's a level of noise in the background. No booth will protect you from knowing that the crowd is roaring.
From my experience, the headset alone does more than enough to prevent players from hearing anything crucial. At most IEM stages we have the sound set up in such a way that you cannot understand speech if it's coming out of the speakers.
To me, the biggest benefit of having a booth is that you have a clean studio environment for the cameras and they look good on stage. More of the TV broadcast than anything else.