HellRaisers guts Dota 2 roster, looks to rebuild around Lil

Fariha Bhatti Published 14/11/2020

CIS organization HellRaisers has decided to part ways with three members of its active Dota 2 roster. After a series of disappointing results, the team has benched mid-laner Arslan “xannii” Shadjanov and offlaner Gleb “Funn1k” Lipatnikov, and released hard support Rinat “KingR” Abdullin.

After a decent start to the season HellRaisers has seemingly hit a wall, posting consistently poor results over the last few months. This is the fourth roster change for the team in the last three months. KingR’s release comes just a little over two weeks into his stint with the organization. On the other hand, Funn1k and xannii were a part of the roster HellRaisers announced in January. Both have been benched and put up for transfer, meaning the organization is actively taking offers for the players from other organizations.

While HellRaisers has bounced in and out of Dota 2 over the years, the team isn’t going away for any length of time. HellRaisers CMO Alex Slabukhin released a statement that the team will be coming back before long.

“What does this mean? Now we will build a roster with Nix and Lil and over the last week there are already different options, now there is a discussion. I hope to present the lineup soon,” Slabukhin said.

The latest iteration of the team has performed very poorly, coming in plast place in both Dota Summit 13 and Epic League Closed Qualifiers. For a relatively prominent organization, these results were unacceptable.

The team will now focus on building its roster around captain Alexander “Nix” Levin and former Virtus.pro star Ilya “Lil” Ilyuk moving forward. Lil himself joined the team a little over a month ago, but his experience on Dota 2’s biggest competitive stages will be invaluable if HellRaisers wants to climb back to the top. Announcements regarding new additions to the team should appear in the near future.

Fariha Bhatti

About Fariha Bhatti

Fariha Bhatti is a long-time gaming writer who loves competitive FPS games and slots with particularly fun themes. She got her start playing classic games developed by SNK, from legendary fighting game series The King of Fighters to challenging platform franchise Metal Slug. She now spends most of her time playing Valorant and Counter-Strike 2 while working her way through new slot releases to find her next favorite. Fariha has been published at PCGamesN, TalkEsport and ONE Esports.

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