Alliance completes roster by adding Gambit Esports’ fng

After standing in Alliance for the past month, Belarusian support and Gambit Esports captain Artsiom “fng” Barshak has officially joined the Swedish team on a 2-month loan.

Artsiom will be playing his usual hard support role for Alliance, but it still remains unclear if he will be taking over captaining duties from current in-game leader Gustav “s4” Magnusson.

fng has been one of the CIS region’s most successful captains in Dota 2, starting his career with Power Rangers and later on playing for teams such as Natus Vincere, Virtus.pro, and Vega Squadron over the years. This will be his first foray outside of the CIS region in his Dota 2 career.

Alliance’s roster started the year very strong, winning DreamLeague Season 12, placing fourth in the DreamLeague Season 13 major, and taking second in StarLadder ImbaTV Dota 2 Minor Season 3. But since abruptly dropping Neta “33” Shapira and Adrian “Fata” Trinks in March Alliance have looked fairly shaky, failing to secure a top-four finish in any competition besides the Gamers Without Borders 2020 charity tournament. Although the addition of s4 looked good on paper, Alliance have struggled to replace Fata in the hard support role. Fng seems to have clicked well with the squad as their form has been improving drastically as of late, but the question arises can they improve fast enough?

Despite a strong start to the year, Gambit bombed out of ESL One Los Angeles 2020 group stage with a 2-5 score. In addition to losing fng, Gambit Esports benched offlaner Maxim “Shachlo” Abramovskikh. Shachlo is a veteran of the CIS scene, having played competitive Dota 2 for the last 8 years, recently playing for Cyber Legacy. They have been replaced by inactive Natus Vincere offlaner Evgeniy “Blizzy” Ree and Russian veteran support Vladimir “yol” Basov in Gambit’s starting line-up.