Virtus.pro has promoted Dias ‘F0R3VER’ Kutubay and Alexander ‘AquaRS’ Kovalev to its main Counter-Strike roster as the organisation looks to rebuild after a disastrous period that saw the organisation go from Tier-1 relevancy to #123 in the world in the latest VRS snapshot.
The move follows the benching of Petr ‘fame’ Bolyshev, Evgenii ‘FL1T’ Lebedev, and Ilya ‘Perfecto’ Zalutskiy in a roster that showed no signs of potential and delivered zero results despite the roster featuring the three major winners.
Young guns give Virtus.pro a rankings boost
F0R3VER and AquaRS rejoin fellow VP.Prodigy graduates Vadim ‘tO0RO’ Arkov and AWPer Vladimir ‘b1st’ Krasikov in the roster, giving the team both continuity as a roster but also, crucially, continuity as a core in VRS.
Their reunion means that Virtus.pro is no longer operating on the VRS core of the previous roster, but of the academy team, jumping the organisation in the rankings up to #77, according to the live version of the VRS rankings on HLTV.
While the rank is still a million miles from where Virtus.pro, one of Counter-Strike’s most historic organisations, wants to be, it is still a substantial jump from the previous roster.
There will be no loss of chemistry within the roster, due to the recently of the players’ time together. Despite their previous ‘promotion,’ tO0RO and b1st played in VP.Prodigy as recently as Wednesday, where they finished 5th-8th in Russian LAN, MPKBK CIS LAN Season 3.
While the four are match fit, Virtus.pro’s veteran element in Nikolay ‘mir’ Bityukov certainly isn’t. The 30-year-old Russian has not played an HLTV match since April 2024, almost two years ago.
Even with mir’s relatively advanced age, the roster has an average age of just 20. Under mir’s leadership, they will be hoping to develop further.
While VP.Prodigy’s ranking never broke through to high-level competition, the young team did score a notable victory against a struggling Liquid at the RES Showdown last August.
For Virtus.pro, the question of returning to Counter-Strike’s top table may not be measured in weeks, but years, as they bank on their young roster to grow over time.
Virtus.pro are now:
Dias ‘F0R3VER’ Kutubay
Alexander ‘AquaRS’ Kovalev
Nikolay ‘mir’ Bityukov
Vadim ‘tO0RO’ Arkov
Vladimir ‘b1st’ Krasikov
What do you think of the roster moves? Let us know on our community Discord!
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Darragh is an Esports Journalist for Insider Gaming specialising in Counter-Strike. He loves to explore how esports teams work, or why they very often do not.
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