posted by Sun_Tzu,
After nearly half a year of stability, ru Virtus.Pro have decided that they need to make a change by letting veteran player ru Alexander 'Santa' Koltan go, only two days before the Techlabs Cup, nine days before The Defense 3 Grand Finals and two weeks before StarLadder 5 Finals.

This old bear seems to quickly be going extinct
Image from Virtus.Pro website


The timing of this change can certainly be called into question, with so much for VP to play for in the upcoming weeks. In addition to the aforementioned, the team is also on top of The Premier League and engaged in the current season of RaidCall Dota 2 League, and set to play next week in order to try and qualify for the RaidCall EMS One LAN finals. They are also involved in the DreamHack Invitational and are set to play eu QPAD Red Pandas tonight at 20:00 CET, although with a 0-2 record, one being a forfeit for not showing up, this competition is fairly out of reach for the team already.

Given this bad timing, the team stressed that they "had no choice" but to make the change and that they had tried to retain a stable lineup after previous bad experiences with instability. This may indicate that the replacement was highly time sensitive or that there was significant internal strife, which was threatening to cause other players to leave.

Santa is a veteran of the Russian Dota scene, who entered Dota 2 by attending The International 2011 with ru Moscow 5, coming in shared fifth place. He later join ru Darer under ua Ivan 'Artstyle' Antonov, before coming to Virtus.Pro back in May of 2012. While he certainly does not lack experience, he has always been just short of achieving big things, in particular due to his famously limited hero pool, often being only able to play a handful of heroes well at any given time.

The replacement for Santa is as of yet unknown, but popular speculation seems to be that captain ru Yaroslav 'NS' Kuznecov may go back on his word and invite former ua Na`Vi player ru Sergey 'Ars-Art' Revin to join VP. While Ars-Art and NS are good personal friends and have played together in the past, the VP captain made a blogpost shortly after the release of Ars-Art from Na`Vi in response to all the questions about him joining VP, stating that there would be no change to the line-up of VP and that Smile was not joining them. As this statement is no longer entirely accurate, many have surmised it may soon be entirely inaccurate, and that Smile may indeed be the new fifth for VP.

Another player who is receiving a lot of chatter is ru Dmitriy 'LighTofHeaveN' Kupriyanov, who has recently praised VP as the only team in the CIS scene which has been making progress, and who in a recent interview with Dota 2 Magazine called out for a "lion of a leader", which certainly might fit NS well.

The problem with both prospective replacements however is that they have both said clearly that they would not want to return to competitive play quite so hastily. However, Ars-Art is set to be present at both Techlabs Cup and StarLadder, and as such may be easily at hand to just happen to stand in for VP, either as a support while allowing ua Sergey 'KSi' Kuzin to take the offlane, or to return to his old stalking grounds as a solo laner.

ru Yaroslav 'NS' Kuznecov responded to the comments on the news over at VP (Comment #168), clearing up that there were no personal issues involved in the decision:

I have everybody I need (in Dota and life), so I don't know who i need to appreciate me. I have very good feelings towards Santa, he's a good person, but his qualities as a person hardly relate to the overall goal of the team, if you understand what I mean. From an outside perspective (especially if you are fucking (bronze) scum with 40% winrate, who watches games not from tickets, but from streams and listens to every word of the not-so-professional (from the competitive POV) CIS-casters), you see only a little piece of whats going on inside a team's game, what you do see is (almost) always a consequence, and the reasons are being told in Skype, one wrong info - someone's death. You see the death and say "what a lousy feeder!", but this player isn't guilty, he was just given wrong info. Unfortunately, Santa's performance was below the level, that we expected from a player of his experience. This is the main reason, not some personal relations.


Virtus.Pro roster:



ru Yaroslav 'NS' Kuznecov (Captain)
ua Sergey 'KSi' Kuzin
ru Oleg 'Crazy' Kolensichenko
ru Ilya 'Airman Ga Taosenai' Pevcaev (a.k.a. 'Illidan')

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