IAM just announced that they are having sudden roster change, announcing tomorrow.
Maybe Zest got an offer from another team?

This venue is only for kickoff
They are doing it on different venue on regular split

He's joining FPX

Not sure since he didn't post anything but he is likely to move as assistant coach like people said in the previous rumors. He's 27 and thought moving on as a coach later in his career so it would be a good opportunity for him to start and gain experience under competitive team and coaching staff.

People are saying this in tieba/weibo. Rumors are saying that JDG won RA's buyout yesterday afternoon so stew headed to China. Not sure who's sticking together or not but their sub spitfire is rumored to be going to AG.

It's rumored to be JDG according to chinese sources.
Since their coach got signed as well, RA's core seems to be moving together.

There is a speculation that iZu is likely to sign with T1.

According to Japanese community, people thought he signed with Crazy Raccoon being spotted with their members ingame and staying in Japan.

He was going to participate in all star event Rage Valorant in but 4 days ago he posted that he could not go due to urgent issues and went back to Korea.

Today, iZu was spotted playing custom mode in Xdll's scrim without any related japanese pros. Apparently, T1 also had scrims today.

T1 had many chances to play in scrims against JDT during this season, so they might have considered iZu as the best option since then.

They do have saya and Ban as duelists but saya and most of the T1 members need to go to military in the next 2 years so they need to get upcoming talent for roster change and role swaps.

Recently T1 was confirmed to play against KC in 9/16 in Europe, and this seems to be the reason why he can't get to japanese event held in 17th.

Although this is just a speculation as of now, hopefully we'll get the news soon and see him play on the event next month.

DRX don't scrim with Korean teams ever since one of Korean team leaked the result. Not sure about GENG but DK is also known to be really conservative team. The reason why t3xture got to GE was because DK were not willing to give their ace player to other Korean teams.

T1's coach autumn had Q&A session on the stream after they qualified and there were some interesting takes. He's the content of the whole stream:

He was flamed by the viewers for calling timeouts and not talking, but this is a misunderstanding because he actually does talk but the camera catches him after 40 seconds, after he's done talking.

There be more 3rd party tornaments later this year and next year.

I usally call timeout to block opponent's momentum and talking about leading during timeout.

T1 had lots of option when getting into franchaise and they decided to pick up players who's used to Korea.

Carpe's really professional on his mindset.

Our playstyle's rolemodel is PRX

Xeta's igling is exceptional

We had NA bootcamp to before this season to gain fundamentals

At lockin all region had different read on the meta; Asia had the best understanding and NA had the worst. (But result says otherwise: fundamental issues...)

We changed our read after having scrim with loud.

We had long term view this season to qualify into masters.

At lockin since we didn't have much experience, we tried to play considering every possibility so it was difficult to gain results.

Joe Marsh (T1 CEO) is really good with us

We want to play with every teams in master

We played against almost every team in the pacific region in scrims but we never get to scrims
with DRX, GENG and Dplus. We tried to but we got rejected.

All pacific teams are really good on scrim but the most impressive teams were EDG, PRX and JDT(Japan Challengers)

EDG is really a strong contender

JDT had better result against us in scrims. We improved alot by having lots of scrims with them and they are almost like our partner team. I think JDT is the strongest team in challengers.

When ASE's ace player is on their high's, we cannot stop them

It is sad to see Zeta picking mostly ascent&haven. (Maybe they had better result on other maps against T1?)

If PRX ban away maps properly, they are No.1 in the pacific

Playing split against DRX is giving away the map. Also I don't think DRX is hiding strats last match.

Mako's No.1 controller

RRQ is a good team

I think chamber can be used in lotus

Munchkin's aim was so good in NA bootcamp that people thought that he was cheating

Leaf is the best player in NA