The recently signed player Sean “seang@res” Gares and his current team, TSM, are to part ways after the player and TSM’s owner Andy “Reginald” Dinh had a disagreement over the handling of the recently released letter from 25 North American players to PEA team owners. Sean “seang@res” Gares, who had been announced officially as a TSM player barely a week ago is to be released due to the fallout from the players’ rights movement which started with a message signed by 25 North American players, including the ones in TSM, released by Scott “SirScoots” Smith—acting as their representative—regarding the PEA’s attempt to stop players from its teams competing in ESL’s upcoming Pro League season. After seang@res leaked the conversation logs with Reginald, TSM’s owner released a twitlonger of his own accusing the aforementioned player of manipulating the rest of the team into signing something they hadn’t read or agreed to. SirScoots, however, clarified that players had approved of the letter, in this tweet, and that none have asked to have their endorsements removed since. seang@res will be back on the free agent market The remaining players in the team then released a statement of their own in which they assure all of them understood what they were doing in signing the letter and that they were in no way manipulated by seang@res.

To address some of the statements made in Andy’s post, in no way were we manipulated by Sean. Some of us may have had more information than others or been more involved in this endeavor, but we all understood what we were doing when we gave the okay to put our names on the letter. Also, the conversation logs with ShahZaM were before Sean was ‘released’. We just want to make it clear that we weren’t throwing him under the bus. How Andy felt blindsided by the letter once it was published on Reddit, we felt the same way upon learning of the PEA’s plans. We felt pressured to take action and make a response, which we did in uniting in the player letter. We just wanted to write this to clarify any misconceptions and bring everything into the light. There are two sides to every story, and we just wanted to make sure our narrative wasn’t skewed and was clear.

To read the full statement, go here. The drama continues with seang@res responding to Reginald’s twitlonger with his own.

It seems like some people who have followed the situation think that I didn’t speak with Andy at all during this process, or that I unfairly cut off contact with him. He basically implies it in his text to me and his community response, but this is just not the case. On December 9th, Andy and I went to lunch together and talked about our new team and different esports industry issues. He asked me questions about different kinds of league structures in esports and traditional sports, and I gave him my opinions. This lunch, which came two days after Scott sent our first letter to the PEA, was very friendly. We specifically discussed how the players had selected Scott to represent us, and Andy said he was well aware of it. He even made a joke about how angry Jack (Cloud9’s owner) was that the players had picked Scott.

You can find the rest of seang@res’ clarification here. TSM’s current lineup:

Skyler “Relyks” Weaver Hunter “SicK” Mims Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken Shahzeb “ShahZaM” Khan