Kiritych shocked everyone by revealing the real prize money amounts that players receive

Ilya "Kiritych" Ulyanov, a carry for Virtus.pro, pointed out that players never receive the full prize pool amount from Dota 2 tournaments. In fact, he believes that e-sport athletes get less than half the money.

He stated this on a Twitch stream of all places.

“It’s not $90,000. If say a team wins a million dollar, there’s an organization cut, taxes in your country, managers percentage and so on. The money is not divided by five but seven or seven and a half. That’s your percentage. Different organizations as you know, have different percentages but it is around the same. So from a million, you end up getting $130000 ish”

Kiritych further pointed out that prize money is divided by seven or seven and a half, meaning for a player, they are much worse off than they seem to be. To put in simpler terms, as the carry states it means, on average a player shall receive about 13% of the total prize pool. He revealed that officially, he has around $90,000 in prize money but even worse, not all of it is paid out.

"That’s why I don’t have $90,000 in prize money. I have around $60,000 and I still have not been paid everything. A lot of scammers participated and sponsored tier 3 tournaments that did not pay anything at all. Elite League never paid out its prize pool"

He also mentioned that in some countries taxes could go over 40%, meaning less profit for players.

“Let’s just say, there are different tax rates. When we were in the United States during TI12, the tax was 40% while we got our **** scraps for placing top 7-8…and was 80k. So out of that, America takes 40% in taxes. ***** insane. They just gave us pennies. Honestly ***** back in the day players finishing 7th-8th at TI were able to buy apartments after TI"

Kiritych remarked that high withdrawal taxes might make prize money in some countries appealing, but the net profit in the long run could significantly decrease.

A few days ago, fans were shocked when Aleksei “Solo” Berezin made an announcement following his departure from 9Pandas.