Valve have answered the question hanging over Astralis and FUT since Monday: if one player appears on two rosters with a PGL Major Singapore invitation, the team higher in the Regional Standings keeps him and the other team cannot take part. Astralis had already acted. jabbi, benched three weeks ago, replaces cmtry for the rest of Stake Ranked Episode 5 so the Ukrainian never reaches the five matches that would put him on both lists.
The answer came overnight through HLTV journalist Striker, who posted Valve’s reply as a screenshot shortly before 01:00 CET. It covers two situations that no rulebook had spelled out until now: what happens to a roster that is down to four players, and what happens when the same name turns up on two invited teams.
Four players is not a roster, and the higher-ranked team gets the player
Valve’s reply makes three points. A team with four players “could not accept the invitation”, because it would not count as an intact roster. If two teams register with the same player, the tie is “broken in favor of the team with the higher VRS”, and the other team “could not participate”. And a player registered on one roster cannot also be registered as a coach or substitute for another.
Until Tuesday night, the closest thing to a rule was the Major Supplemental Rulebook’s line that invitations go to intact rosters. It never described a player sitting on two of them at once, which is exactly where Astralis were heading.
Mykyta “cmtry” Samolotov joined Astralis from FUT Esports on 13 October. Valve’s model lists only players who have played five of a team’s last ten matches, and FUT have played three matches with SunPayus, the AWPer who replaced cmtry, all of them in their 3-0 Swiss run at PGL Masters Bucharest. The quarter-final will be his fourth. Only a FUT win gives him a fifth before Valve’s snapshot on 2 November, and only then does cmtry leave FUT’s roster.
On the Astralis side, cmtry had played four matches: three at Stake Pulse Beat III in Stockholm and Tuesday’s opener in Barcelona. A fifth would have put him on both lists. FUT are above Astralis in the standings, so under Valve’s answer a FUT defeat in Bucharest would have left Astralis with four players and no Major.
Straight from the airport
Astralis had worked that out before Valve’s reply was public. The plan was not settled on Tuesday afternoon. Coach NEO was first set to stand in for cmtry against fnatic, NarT reported, but cmtry was in the lineup when the match began. fnatic won 2-0, and cmtry’s appearance was his fourth.
fnatic2-0
AstralisCache 13-6, Ancient 13-6At 21:04 CET, Astralis announced the fix. jabbi takes cmtry’s place for the rest of the event, and the club said he was “coming straight from the airport at very little notice”. According to dust2.dk, jabbi had spent the weekend in Barcelona with HooXi and Staehr to watch a football match at Camp Nou, and he had flown home on Monday.
The city is familiar for other reasons. On 4 October, jabbi was part of the Astralis side that won Stake Ranked Episode 4 in Barcelona, the club’s first LAN title since December 2019, with a 2.30 rating on Mirage in the grand final against Nemiga. Five days later, Astralis benched him and HooXi and brought in cmtry and siuhy.
His first match back is an elimination match against magic at , with Staehr, phzy, ryu and siuhy. Astralis’ own Major place is safe on points. Barcelona is now only about keeping cmtry on four.
Udknud: the rule favours the selling team
VRS analyst Jesper “Udknud” Larsen, who had raised the jabbi option on Tuesday morning, thanked Striker for getting the answers and asked why the rules did not already say so. He expects the wording to reach the official rules “soon”, so nobody has to rely on a bookmarked tweet. On the substance, he is not convinced the tiebreak is fair to the team that bought the player.
In this ongoing FUT/Astralis “situation” I will say that it seems a bit strange to me personally, that a rather inactive team that sells a player to an active team can block the player until they decide to play 5 matches and get him off their roster.
In his view, a team that sells a player without freeing him should carry the problem, not the buyer that has used him “plenty”. He closed by saying that the most important thing was to know the rules, “which we now know”.
Two places left for eight teams
Valve’s answer settles Astralis’ route to Singapore, and Udknud’s status from early Wednesday says most of Europe is settled with it. In his count, 16 of the 18 European places are “taken”. FaZe, NAVI and 1win are not mathematically safe, but they would need to lose their remaining matches and get other results against them as well.
The last two places go through three events that all finish before the snapshot. The RLG Tesla Cup in Belgrade ends on 29 October, Stake Ranked Episode 5 in Barcelona on 30 October and the FiReSPORTS Last Chance in Buenos Aires on 1 November.
| Team | Event | What it takes, according to Udknud | Next match |
|---|---|---|---|
 B8 | RLG Tesla Cup | The title is enough. Second or third gives a good chance, but not if 100 Thieves win in Buenos Aires and BIG, Inner Circle or fnatic win Stake Ranked | Alliance, elimination match, |
| HOTU | RLG Tesla Cup | An outside chance with the title, if the other contenders fail | GamerLegion, |
 100 Thieves | FiReSPORTS Last Chance | Must win the event, and above all need B8 not to win in Belgrade | Arena Pro Team, |
 BIG | Stake Ranked Episode 5 | Must win the event | fnatic, |
| Inner Circle | Stake Ranked Episode 5 | Must win the event | MIBR, |
| fnatic | Stake Ranked Episode 5 | Must win the event | BIG, |
 magic | Stake Ranked Episode 5 | Must win the event | Astralis, elimination match, |
 Eternal Fire | Stake Ranked Episode 5 | Must win the event | Nemesis, elimination match, |
B8 lost 2-1 to K27 in their Tesla Cup opener and have no margin left in Belgrade, where GamerLegion stand between HOTU and the semi-finals. 100 Thieves need a title in a 16-team field, and for the Barcelona teams, Udknud says a second place is unlikely to be enough. BIG and fnatic meet in the upper bracket on Wednesday evening, while Eternal Fire and magic have no losses left to give.
Astralis and MIBR are the two teams in Barcelona with nothing to win on the standings. For Astralis, every match jabbi plays this week counts for something else: it is one more match cmtry does not.
