London-based esports organisation Tundra has today revealed their new Dota 2 player: North Macedonian Martin ‘Saksa’ Sazdov (pictured).
Saksa’s arrival completes Tundra’s finalised Dota 2 roster following the departure of Adrian ‘Fata’ Trinks. The German player was kicked from the team last week due to Tundra wanting to ensure “the best possible chemistry to improve our performance this year”.
As Fata was team captain, Tundra has now moved Jingjun ‘Sneyking’ Wu to position five and given him the mantle of team captain going forwards.
Prior to joining Tundra, Saksa competed with Ninjas in Pyjamas and OG. He also held a coaching role for Ukrainian organisation, HellRaisers, in 2017.
The complete Tundra Dota 2 roster is now as follows:
- Oliver ‘Skiter’ Lepko
- Leon ‘Nine’ Kirilin
- Neta ’33’ Shapira
- Martin ‘Saksa’ Sazdov
- Jingjun ‘Sneyking’ Wu – (captain)
- Kurtis ‘Aui_2000’ Ling (coach)
Anthony Graham, Tundra’s co-founder and esports and operations director, said: “We are very excited to welcome Saksa. He has already made a strong connection with the team which we believe is vital for performance.
“Ultimately our goal is to make it to The International and that will only happen with team synergy. Saksa brings a wealth of experience to the team and we’re hoping he can take us to the next level.
“We are very aware of the community’s response, especially in regards to the long-term contracts we have in place. We still believe that this offers more consistency and stability for our players that isn’t the norm in esports. And as we grow as an organisation, we will continue to refine how we work with our players to try and ensure they feel supported while also looking at how we can achieve better results.”
Saksa added: “All of my teammates are really amazing and I think we can achieve great things together. In the short term I will be trying to understand how everything works in the team and getting used to how everyone communicates. I’m hoping to see all the practice we put in achieve good results and hopefully maybe one day win TI.”
Over the past year, Tundra’s Dota team have played in the DPC, DreamLeague, the OGA Pit Dota 2 tournament after winning ESL One Fall 2021 and more.
Tundra have been busy lately in other games too. Tundra recently moved into Fortnite with the signing of UK player Veno and Tundra also entered Valorant after signing former Guild, Vitality and Alliance players.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
