OG Bench Taiga From Active Dota 2 Roster

On Tuesday, Taiga was officially moved to OG's inactive roster, leaving the European Dota 2 team looking for a new support player to join its lineup. In the announcement, OG has unveiled that the 25-year-old is free to explore his options and is allowed to join another team for TI 2023 qualifiers, suggesting that OG are prepared to loan out Taiga to any interested team.

OG has yet to unveil whether the team has already found a replacement, but there is still over one week for OG to find a new player to join the roster. OG has until August 10 to find a fifth player and lock in its roster for The International 2023 qualifiers, set to kick off on August 17.

Taiga has been with OG since November 2021, when OG replaced its entire core and initiated a complete rebuild process. The new project has achieved some success early, winning ESL One Stockholm Major 2022 and ESL One Malaysia 2022, but in 2023, OG have failed to find much success.

The team kicked off the DPC 2023 season with fifth place in Tour 1: Division I and placed fourth in the second tour. Even in international events, OG failed to reach top spots, with a fifth-place finish at DreamLeague Season 19 and a fifth-sixth at ESL One Berlin Major 2023.

Yet OG's disappointing results throughout the season reached new heights in June when OG finished DreamLeague Season 20 in 13th-14th place and last week added a 13th-14th place finish at Riyadh Masters 2023.

The rough stretch of underwhelming results eventually ushered in some much-needed changes, and OG seemingly felt like the change in the support role is the solution. Still, much of OG's lack of success can also be attributed to a lack of roster stability, with rumours suggesting that things aren't perfect behind the scenes either.

Throughout the season, OG have made several roster changes and were even forced to field coach Mikhail "Misha" Agatov and drag Sébastien "Ceb" Debs out of retirement to help fill in the gaps in the roster. In several events, OG also had to field stand-ins due to visa issues which didn't help the situation.

With Taiga's benching, OG now field a four-man roster of Artem "Yuragi" Golubiev, Bozhidar "bzm" Bogdanov, Dmitry "DM" Dorokhin, and Sébastien "Ceb" Debs, missing just one more players to finalise its lineup. It's currently unclear who will step in to fill the gap Taiga left behind, but OG have some options.

Misha could again step back into the roster, with the former Old G player Kartik "Kitrak" Rathi presenting another alternative if OG decides to take that path. Either way, we won't have to wait too long for OG to announce its fifth member, which should be revealed by the TI 2023 roster lock on August 10.