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In a wide open region like the CIS, most teams would be doubling down on their rosters and trying to make things work with the core players. Winstrike Team went the other way, though. They completely disbanded its roster due to poor results.
Winstrike was not a top-tier team, so roster moves are pretty common thing to see. However, it is rare to see a team completely part ways with all five players, the coach, and the manager in the middle of a season.
After bringing in a new roster built around former Virtus.pro support Vladimir “RodjER” Nikogosyan and Ilya “ALOHADANCE” Korobki, the team failed to qualify for any Dota Pro Circuit events and did not place well at other events. It appears missing out on the ESL One Los Angeles Major closed qualifiers was the last straw for the organization’s management.
“First of all, I do want to apologize to those people who were supporting our Dota 2 roster,” sporting director for Winstrike Andrej Kvasnevskij said. “There is only one word to describe our recent performance – awful. The path we chose in November did not bring results. Consequently, we decided to make a complete break with our current lineup, from now on all the players are free agents.”
Though it is rare to see an established organization completely drop a roster and management team like this, but considering the team’s coach Arsenij “ArsZeeqq” Usov helped build the entire roster, it looks like the organization just wanted to start its next chapter with a clean slate.
“For the time being, we are not turning our backs on the activity of Dota 2 division,” Kvasnevskij said. “We will try a new approach to forming a line-up.”
Nikita “Daxak” Kuzmin and Maxim “mellojul” Pnyov were the first players to go as the team benched them in December and were using stand-ins up until this point. Now the remainder of the roster and both ArsZeeqq and team manager Maria “Inverno” Gunina are free agents again.
