The iconic mid laner decides to step down from Gambit Gaming.
Being one of the most renowned players in the world, Alexey "Alex Ich" Ichetovkin finally made his decision to leave Gambit Gaming. With a life consisting of a wife and child, the strenuous schedule and responsibilities of balancing that with professional gaming at a world class level was becoming too much for the Russian mid-laner.
While Alex Ich was given options such as creating a "B" teams of sorts for Gambit Gaming as well as the pressure of moving his family to Cologne, he declined both of these and decided to leave Gambit Gaming altogether. Here is an official statement from Alex Ich regarding his decision to drop from the team:
"My time in Gambit Gaming has come to an end. I crave to tell you about the number of reasons that induced me to make this decision.
It all began one and a half years ago, after S2WC. At least, then I noticed the first changes, even though it could have begun much earlier. Suddenly we stopped listening to each other. Everyone considered himself to be grand and mighty, aware of all the in-game nuances. We didn't listen to advices from other lanes, because we considered ourselves kings in our respective roles.
Afterwards we lost our zeal. The exact same youthful zeal that accompanied M5's victories. Crazy dives, risky moves. We started playing like veterans, carefully and tediously. If only it yielded good results... But no, everything was getting even worse. Due to our lack of discipline and the lack of common opinion in our team, we stopped trusting each other in making moves and preferred to avoid taking risks.
Our attempt to hire an analyst yielded minor results: everyone in our team was so used to listening to himself that it was difficult and by no means immediate to embrace his suggestions. His role was important though: he provided an outsider's opinion, paid attention to our problems and tried to solve them with picks, realizing that it's impossible to alter our characters.
We had ignored a lot of his suggestions in our match against Roccat and have consequently paid for it.
In our match against Wolves I did what I could to assist the team in saving their spot at LCS, even though at that point I was already aware that our paths will split. Nevertheless, I did my best in these two games.
Over the past year Gambit has brought me only frustrations. After Katowice in 2013 we haven't showed anything of worth, as we were playing for playing instead of winning.
We have spent the past year in constant flight and travelling. We couldn't practice decently over the course of two days that we had between play days and flights. I have barely seen my family and didn't have a chance to spend time with them, since upon coming home I had to immediately commit to training: time is money. All of it has exhausted me and took away a lot of energy. I could deal with it as a long as we had good results. But since Spring 2013 our play was only getting worse and got worse to the point that we had to prove that we are worthy of an LCS spot.
Of course, it didn't come down only to flights, even though they played a significant role. We lacked motivation. You could easily notice that victories didn't bring joy as much as they used to. As I've said earlier, there was no zeal that is instrumental for winning.
Thanks to all of you who was supporting Gambit and myself. I did in fact wanted to win World Championship with a team that I was a part of for more than two years.
It ended up being like a family for me. It's hard for me to leave my friends, Konstantin and Edward - people who motivated me to play lately. Thanks to them for what they did for myself and Gambit. They are truly great people who deserve a lot of respect.
Sometimes you have to make a choice, a tough choice. I found the strength and the courage to make it now, even though I've been thinking about it for a while.
I might have been the weakest link and my departure may lead to Gambit winning the World Cup, who knows. Whatever happens is for the best, remember it."
Source - Gambit Gaming