Under Valve’s rule for players listed on two Major rosters, Nemiga’s quarter-final win over FUT should keep cmtry on FUT’s list and out of Astralis’ lineup in Singapore, although none of the parties have confirmed it.
FUT Esports went out of PGL Masters Bucharest on Thursday morning, beaten 2-0 by Nemiga in the first quarter-final. The result matters as much in Barcelona as in Bucharest: it means SunPayus stays on four FUT matches, one short of the five that would have taken Mykyta “cmtry” Samolotov off FUT’s roster before Valve’s snapshot on 2 November.
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NemigaNuke 11-13, Dust2 9-13FUT’s next match is against Spirit at BLAST Rivals on 11 November, nine days after the snapshot. Unless something changes in the registration, cmtry will still count as a FUT player when the Major invitations go out.
What Valve’s answer means for Astralis
Valve explained the situation earlier this week in a reply that HLTV journalist Striker posted on X, and we went through it on Wednesday. If the same player appears on two invited rosters, the team with the higher VRS keeps him and the other team cannot take part. A player registered on one roster also cannot be registered as a coach or substitute for another.
FUT are above Astralis in the standings. Read together with Thursday’s result, the rule leaves Astralis without cmtry at the Major, not even as a substitute. Their lineup in Singapore should be the one that has played in Barcelona since Wednesday: jabbi, Staehr, phzy, ryu and siuhy, with NEO as coach.
James Banks was among the first to point this out after the quarter-final, writing on X that Astralis will play the Major with jabbi and not cmtry, and that SunPayus will likely play for FUT as a substitute but without a sticker.
Astralis, FUT and Valve had not commented on the roster question at the time of writing, and PGL have not published the Major rosters. Liquipedia’s invite list is still empty until the snapshot, and HLTV had raised on Tuesday whether FUT could still register SunPayus in time to free cmtry.
A lineup that already knows how to win
The call-up was built for this outcome. Astralis brought jabbi back from the bench on Tuesday night so that cmtry would stay on four matches for them and never appear on both lists. One more Astralis appearance for the Ukrainian before the snapshot would still change that, and Astralis have named jabbi for the rest of Stake Ranked Episode 5, which ends on 30 October.
For Astralis, the lineup is not a step into the unknown. jabbi was part of the team that won Stake Ranked Episode 4 on 4 October, beating FaZe, BIG, fnatic, Luminosity and Nemiga, the last of them 3-1 in the grand final. It was the club’s first LAN title since December 2019. With cmtry and siuhy, Astralis went 2-2 in series: wins over Sashi and HOTU, defeats by MIBR and fnatic.
On jabbi’s return, Astralis beat magic 2-1 in an elimination match on Wednesday. They face Inner Circle in the lower bracket at .
The open question is cmtry himself. Signed as a rifler after years with the AWP, he has played four series in an Astralis shirt and, if the reading of Valve’s rule holds, his first Major with the club will have to wait.
coolio: “Rules should never punish players for doing the right thing”
FUT’s coach, András ‘coolio’ Fercsák appealed FUT and Astralis’s case to Valve via social media, asking that SunPayus be allowed to have stickers and that cmtry be allowed to compete with Astralis.
The coach added that they could have “manipulated the outcome” of their group stage match against Team Vitality at PGL Masters Bucharest, presumably meaning forfeiting the match, to reach five series played.
If Valve do step in to assist SunPayus and Astralis’s cases, it would not be the first time they make adjustments to the VRS rules for niche cases this season. Earlier this month, they already made an unprecedented exception to allow BC.Game to compete in the Asian region, despite their ban of region-switching mid-season coming into effect immediately.
