Going into the fist year of VALORANT partnership, Jaccob “yay” Whiteaker was one of the hottest free agent commodities after a prolific year on OpTic. But over the last 365 days, yay has not won a single professional match.
Yay has lost his last 10 straight matches: the second round loss to DRX at LOCK//IN 2023 while he was on Cloud9, the disastrous seven-match NA Challengers run with Disguised, and now both opening matches at the VCT Pacific Kickoff with his latest team, Bleed. His last win was C9’s victory over eventual Champions grand finalist Paper Rex in the first round of LOCK//IN.
Bleed’s opening loss was also the opening match for the Kickoff event, but it was marred by an hours-long technical delay that drastically pushed back the start time, and after narrowly losing Breeze in multiple overtimes, a seemingly exhausted Bleed rolled over on Lotus. Against Global Esports, the series was decided on Split, but there yay had one of his worst statistical performances of his career, going 6-19 on Viper as Bleed’s second half comeback effort fell short.
Yay’s struggles on non-duelist/non-Chamber roles have been present for some time, and they’re more glaring when you see other players synonymous with duelist agents play well on other roles. TenZ has performed at a high level on Omen and KAY/O on the current Sentinels roster. Demon1, who almost exclusively played Chamber in 2022, had a number of great games on Astra and Brimstone during EG’s championship run.
It would be unfair to place all of the blame for yay’s winless streak on the player himself, though. Yay was exceptionally critical of the Disguised team on his way out, and Bleed wasn’t able to play with yay in any of their official offseason matches. Still, both yay and Bleed have lots of work to do in order to get back on track when their season resumes in the first VCT Pacific split.
Published: Feb 19, 2024 11:37 am