SK Gaming: TACO Left, S1mple and Flamie Are Rumored to Join

Epitácio "TACO" de Melo announced that he is no longer a part of SK Gaming. According to various rumours and sources, the management of SK Gaming is negotiating with Natus Vincere to sign their two best-performing players – Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev and Egor "flamie" Vasilyev. If they succeed, it is supposed that Ricardo "boltz" Prass will also leave the team.

SK Gaming, despite being one of the strongest teams in the world and sitting at the 5th place of HLTV rankings, have had a very poor start of 2018 if you compare the results with the previous year. After placing 3rd-4th at ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018 and 3rd at cs_summit 2, the team started to get rusty – they finished 5-8th at StarSeries Season 4 and 7-8th at IEM XII – World Championship, and somehow even failed to make it through the group stage of WESG 2017. In his statement "TACO" mentioned that he left the team because he didn’t feel happy lately, which may be connected to such poor results or to situation inside the team.

At the moment there is no official news from SK Gaming, but according to rumours from various sources the organization is ready to resort to drastic measures – the management is supposedly negotiating with Natus Vincere with the goal to buy out their two best-performing players – Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev and Egor "flamie" Vasilyev. It is reported that each of these two players may cost $1,000,000 for the German organization. If the negotiation will succeed, Ricardo "boltz" Prass will also leave the roster, who is still on loan from Immortals.

Although nothing is final at the moment, it looks like we can expect a big shuffle on the professional CS:GO scene.

SK Gaming:

• Gabriel "FalleN" Toledo (captain)
• Fernando "fer" Alvarenga
• Marcelo "coldzera" David
• Ricardo "boltz" Prass (loan)