OG Confirm That Ceb May Not Be Able to Compete at TI10

Update: OG has confirmed that it is uncertain whether Ceb will be cleared to play The International 10, and that they will wait on his doctor’s verdict before making any final team decision.

Ceb was diagnosed with an eye condition that could permanently endanger his eye and required surgery immediately according to the official statement published by OG on the matter.

Original Story Follows:

A rumor about Ceb potentially missing out on The International 10 (TI10) surfaced in the Dota 2 community on 30th September. According to the unverified rumor, Team Liquid’s Michael "miCKe" Vu was going to be brought in as a stand-in for OG at the upcoming event. Sébastien "Ceb" Debs is widely considered to be the linchpin of OG's Dota 2 team. Interviews, True Sights, and other insightful content have shown us the importance of Ceb’s role in the team's success. So this has most certainly caused concern amongst OG fans who were hoping for the team to secure a third TI championship in a row.

Will Ceb really miss TI10? Is there any substance to these alleged leaks? Well, we reached out to OG for a comment but they didn't respond. So we did the next best thing and dug through some data and looked through some circumstantial evidence to find out.

All that we know about Ceb allegedly missing TI10

The rumor originated from Gorgc’s Dota 2 livestream

During the livestream of Janne "Gorgc" Stefanovski on 30th Sept 2021, a viewer with the username "monkagiga1234" typed "@gorgc ceb not playing , micke stand in."

Gorgc was surprised by this message and asked why the viewer had written it. In addition, he found no posts on OG's Twitter conveying what the user had said. In light of miCKe's role as a carry player, Gorgc intended to dismiss the claim before the user said, "SumaiL's brother told me, bro."

Monkagiga1234 knew that SumaiL would join OG in June 2021 beforehand

The viewer had one more interesting thing to say in his further remarks. In support of his claim, he mentioned that he had already told Gorgc about OG's safelaner, Syed "SumaiL" Sumail Hassan joining the team in June 2021 before any official news was released. Gorgc scrolled through the user's chat history and verified that they had typed, "SUMAIL JOIN OG ANA OUT" on 8th June 2021. During that time, rumors circulated regarding SumaiL returning to OG, however, the organization did not officially announce this change until 15th June 2021.

Following this, he looked through his friend list in the Dota 2 client. He noticed that miCKe and the rest of the OG players (except Ceb) were the only ones in his friend list playing in a private lobby. Perhaps this could indicate that OG were scrimming with miCKe as a stand-in.

To further investigate this, we looked through miCKe and Ceb's pub game history on Dota2protracker - a site that tracks the public match history of pro players over the last 8 days.

MiCKe has played 30 matches on his main account over the past eight days, according to Dota 2 pro tracker. Almost all of these matches have been played in the offlane. MiCKe only began actively playing pubs five days ago. Prior to this, he had been inactive for some time.

Ceb has not played a single match on his main account or smurf account in the past eight days. This is especially surprising that he had been chain queueing pubs (including a stretch in August where he played 119 games in 8 days) prior to this break.

Ceb missed the Artificial Gamer show match against beastcoast

OG and beastcoast competed in a show match on 24th Sept 2021 as a prelude to the screening of OpenAI's Artificial Gamer documentary. Ceb did not participate in this match, to which OG's new head coach, Misha filled in. According to the organization, its offlaner was unavailable due to an inconvenience.

OG’s recent social media activity regarding Ceb has been lacking

There has been little social media activity from OG regarding Ceb in comparison to other members of the team. Here are the number of images of each member of the roster and head coach, Mikhail "Misha" Agatov that OG has posted in the last week on Twitter and Instagram.

Ceb was only a part of one image, which was posted on 28th Sept with N0tail. This image unlike the rest of the images does not seem to be from the bootcamp. Besides that, Ceb's last appearance was on 21st Sept in an image where he, N0tail, and SumaiL were spotted playing games.

As for Ceb's own social media, he last tweeted on 17th Sept, while he last posted on Instagram on 20th Sept.

While none of this is solid evidence of Ceb's absence from the bootcamp, it does make a few OG fans sweat a little.

Despite all these coincidences, we need to keep in mind that all these factors can only be viewed as circumstantial evidence and are not definitive proof of the rumor's authenticity. OG has not confirmed anything about such a change in its roster, so it would be prudent not to jump to any conclusions. As TI10 is just six days from kickoff, it is likely the organization will soon make this information public if it's true.

OG did not respond to AFK Gaming's request for comment. We will update this article if and when a response is received from them.