After more than a year since Virtus.pro had to adopt the Outsiders tag due to sanctions against the organization, tournament operators BLAST and ESL have announced that the Armenian-Russian organization is free to use the tag once again. Virtus.pro will return to BLAST tournaments starting March 22 and ESL tournaments starting on March 28.<\/p>\n
BLAST had already used Virtus.pro’\u0099s tag on the European RMR schedule for BLAST.tv Paris Major 2023 instead of Outsiders’ logo, signaling the TO was likely to make a change in the near future.<\/p>\n
“We welcome the decision of BLAST and ESL to return Virtus.pro to their tournaments as a result of their in-depth reviews that confirmed the club has met the requirements for reintegration,” Virtus.pro CEO Nikolai Petrossian said<\/em>.<\/p>\n Virtus.pro was previously owned by the Russian Mail.ru Group, which had fallen under sanctions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as such its teams had to participate in tournaments under a neutral flag and not represent the organization.<\/p>\n Subsequently, in September 2022, the organization officially changed ownership<\/a>. Aram Karamanukyan became the new owner and CEO and operations were shifted to Armenia. The organization’\u0099s teams slowly regained the right to use the name Virtus.pro. The Dota 2 team returned to competition under its own name in September last year, while the Rainbow Six Siege team began to use the Virtus.pro banner again in February 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n The sanctions affecting the CS:GO team were not resolved until now. ESL did not allow the organization to take credit for winning the IEM Rio Major<\/a> nor ESL Challenger Rotterdam. The tournament operator instead insisted that Outsiders were the winner<\/a>, with Valve reflecting that decision in game. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After more than a year since Virtus.pro had to adopt the Outsiders tag due to sanctions against the organization, tournament operators BLAST and ESL have announced that the Armenian-Russian organization is free to use the tag once again. Virtus.pro will return to BLAST tournaments starting March 22 and ESL tournaments starting on March 28. BLAST<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":9645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9644","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cs-2"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blix.gg\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}