Sources close to the situation have informed Rush B Media that the North American organization Extra Salt is planning to enter CS:GO in the days to come by signing the ex-Cloud9 core. The South African roster shrunk to four after Ricky “floppy” Kemery decided to stick with Cloud9 in their pursuit of building a colossus. In his place, Gage “Infinite” Green had been playing with the team, where together they bested YeaH Gaming to win Mustache Masters Season 2. While they were able to find successes with Infinite, sources have informed Rush B Media that he will not be joining the core on Extra Salt. The new North American organization has recently been founded and is looking to make its entrance into the esports scene with the signing of the former Cloud9 roster. Led by Daniel van Flymen, the new organization is backed by successful businessmen who have a long-held passion for the esports scene and are reportedly close with coach, Tiaan Coertzen.
The North American, South African hybrid have been playing together since the end of 2019, where they met on ATK. Together, the team bulldozed their way through North American qualifiers to land themselves in ECS Season 8, ESL Pro League Season 10, and WESG 2019’s North American qualifier final before withdrawing due to visa issues. Seeing the potential of this roster, then-struggling Cloud9 bought the roster out, where they played for most of this year.
After a rocky start to 2020 with the transition into the pandemic era, the squad fought their way to a 3rd place finish at North America’s first RMR event as well as a fourth place finish in Flashpoint’s inaugural season. Unfortunately, their performances waned as the year went on, and in September, Cloud9 announced that they would be placing the core on the transfer list, and shortly thereafter, due to violations of the COVID-19 policy in their player handbook, the team (minus Josh “oSee” Ohm) were allegedly orgless.
We have learned from our sources that Extra Salt has discussed exploring a six-man roster, for which they are exclusively looking at North American players at this time, but no decisions have been made on who will complete the team.
At the time of publishing, Rush B Media reached out to representatives from Cloud9 and Extra Salt for comment. Extra Salt, in response, said “We’ve been watching CS for the last 20 years. We love it, and we think the future is bright.”.
Cloud9 responded to RBM on Saturday with CEO Jack Etienne relaying “I was happy to make this transfer for them… It was way below market but I wanted the players to find a soft landing with another organization.”
With the signing of these four members, Extra Salt’s lineup will be:
- Josh “oSee” Ohm
- Ian “motm” Hardy
- Johnny “JT” Theodosiou
- Aran “Sonic” Groesbeek
- Tiaan “T.c” Coertzen
You can follow Extra Salt on twitter, here.