DaZeD Reunites With Brax, AZK, And Skadoodle On T1 VALORANT
Long time no see, Mr Marine. The worst kept secret and simultaneous excitingly polarising move in the VALORANT trade market has finally been announced. Sam "DaZeD" Marine has joined esports organisation T1 and will be rejoining his former teammates of notorious iBUYPOWER fame Braxton "brax" Pierce, Keven "AZK" Larivière, and Tyler "Skadoodle" Latham.
T1 will be DaZeD's first venture into VALORANT, having stayed inactive after he had quit active professional play in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and mostly focusing on streaming in the meantime. Starting in 2012 with Area51 Gaming, DaZeD became one of North America's most well-known in-game leader talents, eventually landing with iBUYPOWER.
The esports organisation T1 had started into VALORANT esports with initially very promising results, dominating the North American region for the first couple of weeks. Eventually falling from grace, the team had parted ways with Austin "crashies" Roberts and Victor "food" Wong who have since been picked up by Team Envy. At this point in time, T1 can barely be considered a top 5 North American team and they haven't competed in officials since the end of August. The team is expected to sign one more player soon to fill up their starting roster for the beginning of the First Strike in early December.
What's the iBUYPOWER controversy?
After having shown great promise as one of North America's best teams and establishing themselves as a force to be reckoned with, the team signed by the PC gaming brand iBUYPOWER met team NetCodeGuides in August 21, 2014 during a match in the CEVO Professional Season 5 with IBP already having qualified for the next stage of the tournament. As later uncovered by esports Richard Lewis, iBUYPOWER fixed the match, throwing in order to play the betting market and receive indirect monetary compensation in the form of CS:GO skins as payment. Subsequently, Valve banned all the iBUYPOWER members except Skadoodle (who could not be proven to have received a skin) from Valve sanctioned tournaments indefinitely, a punishment that still persists to this day and has come under heavy criticism on several occasions since then.
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Image via T1
