SK Gaming joined the R6 scene with the acquisition of Flipsid3 Tactics back in February this year, just prior to Season 7 of the Pro League. The team of Mint, Pojoman, Hotancold, Adam and Jarvis narrowly lost to Rogue in the group stage before falling 2-0 against Evil Geniuses in the playoffs finishing the season in joint 3rd in North America.
Following Season 7, Adam left the team to be replaced by EvlWaffle who was in turn replaced by Nyx, Hotan’s cousin, shortly afterwards. This led to a strong run in the first half of the season which fell off after the mid-season break ending in a 7-2-5 win/draw/loss record and the closest margin to make a LAN in Pro League history - a 1v1 between Mint and Ecl9pse - leading to another 3rd place finish for SK in Season 8.
Outside of Pro League, SK Gaming also competed at DreamHack Montreal, the roster’s first LAN event in 16 months. Here they certainly impressed as they knocked out the reigning DreamHack champions of Team Secret, 2-0, before falling in two close maps to Rogue, the eventual runners-up.
This promising roster will now leave their tier-1 organisation and join the brand-new organisation of DarkZero Esports:
DarkZero was completely unknown until their R6 roster acquisition announcement; they had no other rosters in any other games and their Twitter account @darkzero_GG only just became active. They have, however, been planning this pickup for quite a while which you can see clearly as a coaching position at DarkZero was the “non-player role with another organization” which the ex-Evil Geniuses player of Brandon "BC" Carr left the NA-titans for almost three months ago.
The coaches of DarkZero, BKN and BC, meeting up last October after visiting their new team house.
As well as acquiring Evil Geniuses' ex-coach, BKN, and ex-player, BC, DarkZero has also offered their new roster a team house for the roster to move into making them one of a very small number of teams in NA to have one. This shows that there's a very high level of investment being pumped into this already promising team making them a real threat both domestically and internationally going forward.
While this heralds a bright future for DarkZero, it is currently unknown what will happen to SK Gaming as they need to acquire a new Pro League roster if they want to benefit off of the new pilot program uniforms and headgears which will soon be released.
For DarkZero their next game will be in five days time against Rise Nation (previously known as mousesports) as they'll aim to impress their new org straight away in Pro League with the roster of:
Kyle "Mint" Lander
Owen "Pojoman" Mitura
Matthew "Hotancold" Stevens
Sam "Jarvis" Jarvis
Zachary "Nyx" Thomas
Jordan "BKN" Soojian (as coach)
Brandon "BC" Carr (as coach)