Byali Talks Virtus.Pro, New B Site League, More – CSGO Recap 12/19/2019

Our first stop today takes us over to a recent stream from former Virtus.Pro entry fragger Byali, who discussed his over five years run with the team.

If you’ve been following the scene for a while, you’ll remember that back in the day VP’s CEO promised to buy their in-game leader TaZ a Mercedes if they won DreamHack Vegas 2017.

As we all know, VP did go on to win the tournament and TaZ got his car, creating one of the craziest stories in the scene at the time.

According to Byali that prize TaZ got contributed to the team’s problems that eventually led to their collapse for the next year. While TaZ did receive the car, no one else on the roster got anything for winning the event. It upset players who felt the win was a team effort, not the efforts of just TaZ.

The story goes to show the importance of treating your players as equals in terms of bonus prizing and bonuses: if you give one player something extra like a new car, it’s best to make sure it’s something you can give everyone else too.

The New B Site League

With rumors swirling for months, we finally got confirmation from Dekay of an upcoming new franchise league in CSGO.

According to his report, the league begins operations in March, starting with 12 teams entering the league for the inaugural season.

Each of these teams will pay a $2 million entry fee to join the league, receiving both their spot and partial ownership of it. The league will also operate two seasons a year, with each lasting a month before being followed by a playoff.

Teams won’t be inhibited from playing in other tournaments while in B Site, but the tight schedule has reportedly already seen several teams drop out of the ESL Pro League system as a result.

No official announcement of the teams participating has been released yet. However, Dekay’s report claims Immortals-owned MIBR and Cloud9 will be participating in it. Astralis was originally reported to be as well. Gla1ve confirmed that the team hasn’t decided whether to join in that or the EPL yet.

We’ll keep you all updated as we learn more about the league over the next couple of months.

Roster Changes

Our last stop of the day takes us to roster changes, and in particular, those for two North American teams.

First up is Gen.G, a team that has been looking for a fifth since signing the core of Cloud9’s lineup earlier this month, and had its eyes set on Tyloo’s BnTeT to fill the final slot.

Rumors have been spreading that the deal wasn’t complete. Dekay confirmed in a tweet that the move is done and that Gen.G was waiting for the right time to announce it.

Elsewhere in NA, Cloud9’s rumored pick-up of ATK seems to be getting closer and closer to reality as the team’s former AWPer Mixwell confirmed on Twitter he is leaving the currently squad-less team, signaling C9’s new squad will be an entire team.

The org has been teasing the pick-up of ATK for a couple of days now, and rumors have been going around we’ll hear something on the 23rd, so C9 fans will have to wait till Monday to see if Christmas came early for them.

That’s all we have for today, thanks for reading. We’ll be back later this week with more exciting CSGO news, so stay tuned!