Zorte Discusses Challenges at BetBoom Team Following S1ren’s Replacement

Alexander “zorte” Zagodyrenko stated that BetBoom Team had planned to play at IEM Cologne with Pavel “s1ren” Ogloblin until the very last moment, hoping that the player would be able to obtain a visa in time.

The player spoke about this in an interview with HLTV.

“It was a difficult situation. I’m not even sure if I can talk about it. I think I can now. We were at bootcamp with the full roster. We expected S1ren to get his visa while we were still at bootcamp, but for some reason that didn’t happen.

The team was supposed to fly to Cologne right after bootcamp ended; we expected S1ren to get his visa on the last day of bootcamp. We waited until the very end and tried to find out from Flamus if he could make it to Cologne. He lives in Russia, and he was having some issues. I don’t know, some business matters—it was all a bit complicated.”

According to a statement by Alexander “zorte” Zagodyrenko, when the team realized that Pavel “s1ren” Ogloblin might not be able to get his visa in time, the players contacted Timur “FL4MUS” Mariev to find out if he could come to the tournament and help the team out. The player admitted that the team was afraid of disqualification due to the situation, so he is happy to have the opportunity to play at IEM Cologne.

"I'm glad we're here now, to be honest. We were afraid we'd be disqualified. Maybe it wouldn't have been a serious blow to the team's reputation, but before this, we'd already failed to get visas on time two or three times.

I think this is very important for BetBoom Team because we need to compete in major tournaments to reach the next level. The organization understands this. For us, participating in a major is truly very important.”

As a reminder, earlier Pavel “S1ren” Ogloblin showed his support for his teammates ahead of the start of the IEM Cologne Major.