The secondary roster of Virtus.pro is secondary no more. The players of now-former VP.Prodigy got promoted to the main team yesterday.
Whether it was due to the coronavirus pandemic or simply a lack of results many Dota 2 organizations have either dropped entirely or benched their teams. Such was the case with Virtus.pro. The legendary Russian organization was a major player in the competitive scene just a few years back. Lately the bite of the bears wasn’t as threatening. After a series of disappointing events, Virtus.pro took the hard decision of benching the entire VP team:
- Igor "iLTW" Filatov
- Vladimir "No[o]ne" Minenko
- Roman "Resolut1on" Fominok
- Bakyt "Zayac" Emilzhanov
- Alexey "Solo" Berezin
A move that was quite shocking for CIS fans. With Solo, Reso and Noone VP had some of the most famous players from the region but things just weren’t working out. In the meantime, the secondary VP roster known as VP.Prodigy was getting good results, even reaching grand finals against Team Secret during the OGA Dota PIT Season 3: Europe/CIS.
NEW GENERATION VP.Prodigy players move to the first Dota 2 roster of https://t.co/RghpmPyTHr becoming the main team #GOGOVP pic.twitter.com/n5jzXKHTpa
— Virtus.pro (@virtuspro) November 5, 2020
Ever since the main team got benched people were wondering what changes are on the way. We even heard rumors of SumaiL “SumaiL” Hassan joining the former VP players. Yesterday it all became clear as Virtus.pro announced the promotion of Prodigy.
CEO of Virtus.pro, Sergey Glamazda commented:
We launched VP.Prodigy roster with one main goal — to give young talents a chance for development on the pro-scene. This team had already shown some phenomenal results by this moment: reached grand finals in five out of seven tournaments and won three of them. We had two strong rosters, though at the same time we were limited in tournament options. By the end of September we faced a tough choice: to once again update our first roster or to invest in VP.Prodigy and put our faith in new blood. Today we transfer the VP.Prodigy squad to our first Dota 2 team. I would like to thank ex-VP players. A lot of them are the living legends, their names and victories have been written in the club's history. Today we start a new chapter that will have a lot of trophies and memorable moments.
As Glamazda mentions, having two teams was rather limiting in terms of tournaments (at least Valve-sponsored ones). It remains to be seen whether VP will hire more new talent for the Tier 2/3 Dota 2 scene but for now, VP.Prodigy remains silent. There were no further changes in terms of roster and VP’s Dota 2 team now looks like this:
- Egor "epileptick1d" Grigorenko
- Danil "gpk" Skutin
- Dmitry "DM" Dorokhin
- Vitalie "Save-" Melnic
- Illias "illias" Ganeev
Whether the young talents will continue finding more success than their bigger brothers remains to be seen. Their first challenge is the Epic League which is about to kick off on November 11.
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