This post is to address some of the concerns raised by our former coach Anthony Hodgson. I am going to take excerpts from his post and take this point by point,

About two weeks ago I was fired from Entity Gaming, along with all of my players. The move came entirely out of the blue. We’d had a solid run in the TI8 qualifiers, finishing 4th in the SEA qualifier, but had started off the new season slowly.

While this was our best achievement to date with our dota2 squad, the fact that this was with the older squad has been left out. Only 2/5 of those players were retained.

While making the new roster, while the other 4 positions were successfully filled we faced a big problem in find a position 1. After wasting a lot of time we finally agreed on taking in a pos 3 player dethsama who our coach said would be able to play a good carry. We all had our doubts but having no better option and our coach taking the responsibility we decided to give it a try. Taking nothing away from Dethsama, I think hes an amazing player with godlike mechanical abilities his limitations on his new role were evident. We tried multiple role switches and at times even tried playing 2 offlaners, but it just wasn't working.

To solve this problem it was suggested to us by the coach to put deth on a position 5, kick our longest serving player jobeezy and get an actual carry. Kicking jobeezy was the hardest thing I have ever done and I have literally shed tears when I broke the news to him. I was convinced by the coach that kicking the most loyal and longest serving member of our team was the right way to go and I obliged. I am answerable to the upper management if my team doesn't work and I had to somehow show a glimpse of hope to my bosses with the dota2 squad.

When we started looking for a new carry again I started speaking to black because he was a free agent and our only hope. He had helped the team achieve great heights during the TI qualifiers and I was sure hed do it again. From the get-go, scant was against this. He kept saying how black was a toxic player and that maybe we would get better results but it would be a bad move for us in the long run. After a few days of scrimming, everyone except scant was happy with blacks performance. On the last day of scrims something very unfortunate happened.

After the scrims when the players sat down to discuss if we would go with black, scant started talking shit about black and one of the players had accidentally left his discord mic on voice detection. Black heard all of this and messaged me on facebook. Black told me how he heard him say he was a shitty player and a person. He also added how the rant continued for a good few minutes and that it also got very personal. With this our one and only hope for a good carry was over. He then started suggesting to us some random sea carries which we rejected. This was the final straw. He not only lost us a good carry but also spoiled our relationship with him that we had built in the last few months. This is when we decided we had no other option to let the entire team go rather than stretch it out for a longer period of time.

Bad mouthing a potential recruit over discord in front of all his teammates is enough grounds to get fired for a professional coach.


Somewhere along the line, my employers had become aggressive, and had made it very clear they were not willing to concede any liability.

There was no aggression. Arguments and aggression are 2 very different things. Arguments and disputes happen in any corporate and interpreting it as aggression is a very wrong and defaming thing to say.



Before we left, my players and I were given forms to sign which would explicitly declare that Entity had paid us everything they owed us. This a bizarre thing to do on their part, and the only motivation I can imagine for them doing this is their knowing full well that, in fact, the opposite was true. 

We made them sign this AFTER all their dues were cleared. The forms also included a NDA which is conveniently being broken here.


We wanted to move things along, and make sure we got ourselves safely back home. Nobody wanted to risk a dispute resulting in losing out on a flight home, not to mention compromising our feeling of safety, given that we were still living in Entity’s team house for the time being.

The use of WE instead of I here is very convenient. ALL of our players felt extremely safe and sound under our care until the very last day. So much so that even after releasing the entire team, we still have a player who we allowed to stay behind at our bootcamp and search for a new home. We did this as he is a south african national and couldn't scrim with potential new teams from his home town. He is still under our care as I write this and will be until the 5th of next month which is when he flies to a new region to play for a new team.

Apart from this we also hosted a players wife at our bootcamp for more than a month to make sure the player felt at home. We went out of our way to make sure the food was just like they had back home and living conditions were like any other international org.


TL:DR

  • I let him go because he sabotaged my roster and spoilt our relationship with a potential recruit. 
  • The contract never mentioned a severance package and we still gave him 15 days salary as goodwill. 
  • None of my players ever felt unsafe under my care. My players can attest to this. 



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