Forester: "ICY was not banned from testing in Cloud9"

AMKAL player Igor "Forester" Bezotechesky provided details about Kaisar "ICY" Faiznurov's transfer to Cloud9 in Counter-Strike 2. In a comment to Metaratings, Bezotechesky explained that ICY's behaviour put the team in an awkward position.

"Firstly, he wasn’t prohibited from trialling with Cloud9. Secondly, no one was against his move. But what turned out badly was that our coach was trying to reach him, and ICY was ignoring him. Svyat wanted to understand how the trials were going and figure out if we needed to look for a new sniper. This put us in a very awkward situation.

When I wanted to leave teams in the past, I would gather everyone and directly express my intentions. I never tried to hide it and explained everything clearly to avoid misunderstandings and ensure the team wasn’t harmed because of me. In ICY’s case, I was on holiday and got all the information from news reports. Svyat didn’t understand anything at the time. Insiders were already reporting that we were testing players, even though we were actually on break and not practising. When we resumed work, we had only four days before the LAN tournament in India, so we took shady with us. Meanwhile, the player we had planned to trial hadn’t even played with us yet."

To recap, AMKAL benched ICY on 22 June and began an investigation for "potential misconduct." On 2 July, ICY officially left the organisation, and on 11 July, Cloud9 announced their new CS2 roster, which included Faiznurov. The 19-year-old ICY had been with AMKAL since December of the previous year and had previously spent over two years with AVANGAR.