E-Sport News: Virtus.pro takes over AVANGAR

The Russian eSports organization Virtus.pro sacks its Polish CS:GO team and hires CIS team from AVANGAR.

For the payment of an unknown transfer fee the AVANGAR team now plays for Virtus.pro. The successful eSports organization is thus dismissing its previous team and relying on the promising CIS team. With the help of the new line-up, Virtus.pro finally wants to catch up to the international CS:GO top again.

The new Virtus.pro

AVANGAR’s CS:GO team has been playing in the current constellation since June of this year. With Ali “Jame” Djami, Dauren “AdreN” Kystaubayev, Alexey “qikert” Golubev, Timur “buster” Tulepov, Sanjar “SANJI” Kuliev the team has not only young talents but also a very experienced player in its ranks. Coach is Dastan Akbayev, who has been working with the organization since 2017.

In September they celebrated their biggest success so far when they surprisingly entered the final of the Starladder Major in Berlin. There, they lost to Astralis 0:2 but were promoted to the top-10 in the worldwide CS:GO ranking. They continued their impressive run in the same month and won the final of the BLAST Pro Series in Moscow.

By hiring AVANGAR, Virtus.pro is releasing their current team with immediate effect. Janusz “Snax” Pogorzelski and Co. played their last official tournament at the cs_summit 5, where they barely survived the group stage and finally lost 1:2 against G2 Esports.

A great legacy

With this change, those responsible hope to be able to return to more glorious days. For years, the organization was one of the best teams in the world among the exceptional players Wiktor “TaZ” Wojtas and Filip “NEO” Kubski.

TaZ, NEO, pashaBiceps, Snax and byali played together unchanged for almost four years. Between 2014 and 2018 they won the ELEAGUE, DreamHack and EPICENTER tournaments several times. During this time, they earned more than $1.5 million in prize money.

The future will show whether the new team can finally fill those big footsteps. The line-up will have to prove itself for the first time at EPICENTER 2019. The prestigious tournament will once again feature some of the best teams in the world competing for a $500,000 prize pool.