Solo to take a vacation for the remaining of 2017, coach ArtStyle steps in for Virtus.pro

Shortly after their elimination from the DreamLeague Major, Virtus.pro announces a temporary break for Aleksey 'Solo' Berezin.

The announcement was made by Virtus.pro on their twitter account vk page and includes a short video featuring General Manager Roman Dvoryankin who speaks about the sudden decision.

The last few months have been quite eventful for our team. After the end of The International 2017 our team had a two-week vacation. Then they moved to a bootcamp where they lived for 3 months if we leave tournament dates out. A lot of official and practice matches were played throughout this period and it couldn't but take a toll on physical and emotional state of the players.

So, after the end of this major Alexei "Solo" Berezin and I decided that it's in the best interest of the team to play with ArtStyle instead of Alexei in Macau and LA”

Ivan 'ArtStyle' Antonov joined Virtus.pro as their coach in March 2017, ahead of the Kiev Major where the team finished in the second place. Since he retired from the competitive scene, Artstyle has played only occasionally, the most recent appearance of his being at WESG European and CIS regional qualifiers LAN finals where he, along with Vladimir 'No[o]ne' Minenko and Ilya 'Lil' Ilyuk, was part of Team Ukraine. Solo traveled at WESG last week as well, playing for the national Russian team AntyHype and GosuGamers had the chance to talk to him. In our interview with Solo he spoke about the extremely busy schedule of VP for the end of the year and January 2017, also mentioning that although he loves to travel and play with his team, the many tournaments he has to attend are hard for his family.

“Personally, I like to play Dota. I don’t care, I’m not picky what tournament should I play in or not. I like my teammates a lot and I love spending time with them, I like to travel, to see the world. Of course, all these are hard for my wife who is always waiting for me to return home but for these WESG qualifiers, she was able to come with me so it’s all good. I really like to play Dota, and to be honest I’m not that young anymore, I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to play, one year, maybe two years?  I don’t know, so I want to make the best out of the time I have left before retiring” said Solo to us a week ago while he was in Barcelona, Spain. You can read the full interview here.

Virtus.pro are for now at the top of the Dota pro Circuit rankings, with maximum points secured from their Major victory at ESL One Hamburg and the fourth place from AMD SAPPHIRE DotaPit Minor. However, their early exit from the ongoing DreamLeague Major will surely have them dropping in rankings as Team Secret, second in the rankings right now, have already secured a spot in the grand finals.

According to Valve’s rule regarding the qualifying points distribution in case a team chooses to play with a stand-in at one of the minors or majors, the VP players will be awarded 75% of the points while the stand-in will receive only 50% of the points at MDL Macau and Dota Summit 8.