Cloud9 has reportedly tapped Fabien “kioShiMa” Fiey for their next international CS:GO event.
KioShiMa will be C9’s new temporary fifth player at BLAST Pro Series, according to VP Esports. He’ll be filling the spot on the active roster that Tyler “skadoodle” Latham left, after he announced his retirement from competition several weeks ago.
Related: Cloud9 AWPer Skadoodle retires from competitive CS:GO indefinitely
The Major-winning support player has been out of commission in offline play for quite some time now, after Team Envy released its French CS:GO teams—both its main and Academy team. Since his last event with Envy at the CS:GO Asia Championship, he’s played as a stand-in for a few French teams, like 3DMAX and the unsigned LeftOut roster, which played at the last European Minor of the FACEIT Major in September.
Skadoodle’s retirement left a huge hole in the C9 roster, both strategically and emotionally, because of his monumental impact of the roster as a teammate and main AWPer. He’s temporarily playing with the team in online matches for the ECS and ESL Pro League, but the team’s first official tournament without Skadoodle will be BLAST Pro Series Copenhagen in November.
Tim “autimatic” Ta is expected picked up the AWP role for now, since he’s been testing it out in the team’s online league matches. Autimatic, however, has been a rifler for C9 ever since he joined the team, so it’ll be interesting to see how his experimenting pans out under Maikil “golden” Selim’s leadership. It’s unclear whether the team intends on picking up a dedicated AWPer that can take on the role in the near future.
Update Oct. 26 1:42am CT: Cloud9 officially announced that kioShiMa will be standing in at BLAST Pro Series Copenhagen.
