Soham “⁠valens⁠” Chowdhury, the coach who’s most notably known for winning the ELEAGUE Boston Major in 2019 with Cloud9, has left his position as head of data science at Evil Geniuses to become the organization’s director of athletics for Counter-Strike.

The 32-year-old had already been doing work with EG’s CS:GO team for the past two and a half years, but now, he’s going to be the one calling the shots on anything involving Counter-Strike in the North American organization.

The decision to promote valens from the background to the forefront of the CS:GO division comes a mere two weeks after EG unveiled the project known as the Blueprint, which consisted of signing the Carpe Diem and Party Astronauts squads to form a “fluid” 15-man roster in the near future, combining these new players with those who are already there, such as Jake “Stewie2K” Yip and Timothy “autimatic” Ta.

What EG aims to accomplish in CS:GO has never been done by any other team before. Most organizations usually have only five players signed and just a few organizations experimented with expanded rosters up to this date. Moving forward, valens will act as a general manager of some sort but will combine the traditional GM role with what he learned as a data scientist.

“I think it’s a pretty fancy name for basically a general manager combined with someone who has that experience to bring in the data side of things,” valens told HLTV about his new position. “I’ll be working very closely with the data science team that I was leading, and also do typical GM duties as well, so things like scouting for new players and evaluating our current players properly.”

All that said, valens will be the one who ultimately decides which players will play in a certain tournament and be the one in charge of roster changes, even though the staff and players will also have a say in the decisions. Each one of EG’s three CS:GO teams will have a full coaching staff, according to valens, so it’s not expected that the ELEAGUE Boston Major winner will return to coaching activities any time soon.

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