Over a month after Virtus Pro moved its main lineup to the inactive roster in September, the org promoted its youth roster VP.Prodigy to playing under its main banner with the signing of Danil “gpk” Skutin and Illias Ganeev.
That left Alexey “Solo” Berezin sitting on the sidelines with one less player to boot after Igor “iLTW” Filatov left the team to join Live to Win, though he is still technically under contract with VP.
According to datDota developer and analyst Ben “Noxville” Steenhuisen today, several sources have confirmed the main core of VP’s International 2019 roster have reunited. That means previous reports from Metaratings and CYBERSLOVO that pointed to Roman “RAMZES666” Kushnarev joining Solo and Vladimir “No[o]ne” Minenko after leaving Evil Geniuses were correct.
Those sources say the trio are pairing up with Bakyt “Zayac” Emilzhanov, who was on the former VP roster, and Syed “SumaiL” Hassan, who most recently played for OG.
Considering the report correctly predicted the new VP.P roster and VP as an organization replacing its main roster with the youth team, it makes sense that this move would also happen. SumaiL was added into the equation recently when reports that former VP manager Roman Dvoryankin confirmed that he was “representing a group of players” and reached out to legendary Chinese coach Bai “rOtK” Fan about joining them.
Related: ROtk reveals offer to coach potential new lineup with Virtus Pro’s core and RAMZES, SumaiL pickups
That same rOtK report cited Dvoryankin saying that this stack would begin playing together in December or January, but it looks like that timetable was moved up slightly. Noxville says that, allegedly, the team is going to play together in Epic League Season Two and will receive a direct invite to the closed qualifier playoffs.
Those closed qualifiers are ongoing, so if the team does in fact decide to go public and compete, we will likely learn about it in the next few days.
