The shuffle has begun

You’ve heard of the Post-Major shuffle. Now get ready for the all-new Pre-Post-Major shuffle!

Or in simpler terms; The roster moves teams not participating in Rio are making. We’ll be covering some of the bigger ones in chronological order.

Kjaerbye: The player who leaves teams in anything but normal circumstances has done it again. Endpoint has made an announcement saying Kjaerbye’s leaving due to personal reasons and there was an amicable agreement with the organisation.

So far so good, but everyone on Twitter has assumed there’s something more sinister at foot here. Some like James Banks even went as far as to suggest he’s returning to Astralis. We can only hope it’s that, and not one of the “things are really shit”-personal reasons.

The French scene has always been quite chaotic. Think back to the “player relationship” chart from 5 years ago. That tradition has carried on to this very day.

Falcons have benched Maka and Apeks have done the same to shox. Maka seemingly just didn’t perform to the level Falcons expected, so they got Kyojin back from the bench… after he was put there for not performing to the level they expected.

In Falcon’s defense, they said it was temporary whilst the org "assesses the AWP role and future roster”, so we guess it’s alright?

As for shox, he has only been on Apeks for 2½ months, but was benched due to a “difference of vision”. Maybe you could create a “dernière danse”. Get SmithZz, Ex6TenZ, NBK, shox, and ScreaM together. Do you hear the music as well?  

As for who’s replacing shox on Apeks? BnTeT’s back. Sort of, he’s on trial. Apeks has announced they’ll trial several IGL’s in the coming weeks and then decide who the long-term choice will be.

Judging by their decision-making so far though, our money is on them somehow bringing in MSL and winning a Tier 1 event.

If you think this was hectic, imagine there’s a Major and a post-Major shuffle around the corner.