Steven R. November 5, 2020
The VP.Prodigy team is no more, but there's a good reason why.
The Virtus.pro organization has announced that the developmental squad has been promoted to being the main Virtus.pro Dota 2 team. This follows VP.Prodigy finalizing a new roster, made up of the following players:
- Egor "epileptick1d" Grigorenko
- Danil "gpk" Skutin
- Dmitry "DM" Dorokhin
- Vitalie "Save-" Melnic
- Illias "illias" Ganeev
“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...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,” Virtus.pro CEO Sergey Glamazda said in a statement.
This is the second time Virtus.pro has made such a move, with the first coming in 2015 with the Virtus.pro Polar roster. The former Polar team helped establish VP as a top Dota 2 organization, finishing fifth at The International 2015.
With this, the previous Virtus.pro roster is officially disbanded. Former carry player Igor "iLTW" Filatov has begun competing with new team Live To Win. It is unclear whether the other members of the team are still contractually attached to Virtus.pro, or if they are now free agents. The previous Virtus.pro roster included the following players:
- Igor "iLTW" Filatov
- Vladimir "No[o]ne" Minenko
- Roman "Resolut1on" Fominok
- Bakyt "Zayac" Emilzhanov
- Alexey "Solo" Berezin
This is great news for the VP.Prodigy roster, as the team was one of the bigger surprises of the online league era. VP.Prodigy posted a number of strong placements during this time, winning the Epic Prime League and reaching the grand finals of the WePlay! Pushka League.
The team suffered from being a secondary squad for Virtus.pro, as it was unable to compete in a number of events due to rules that prevented organizations from sending multiple teams to the same tournament. This saw the team play sparingly after May, competing in just a few tournaments while VP prioritized its primary roster. Now recognized as the true Virtus.pro roster, the team should be in line to become much more active.