Nick “LS” De Cesare is currently known as the English commentator for the LCK tournament in South Korea, but he previously showcased his exceptional coaching skills, having led various teams. In his latest stream, while chatting with Doublelift about the AD carry Forg1ven, LS unexpectedly revealed an interesting story about how Dopa almost entered professional play.
Doublelift: “What do you think about Forg1ven? Will he return?”
Commentator LS: “I used to talk a lot and was very familiar with Forg1ven. In fact, I even considered cutting my salary twice to have him come to Korea to play. Back then, there was a team, Alpha Draft, that offered Dopa to join the team with a salary of $50,000 a month (over 1.1 billion VND) along with me as the coach, Forg1ven as AD Carry, Cepted, and Morong – who had two accounts in the top 10 Challenger in 2016, but I forgot who the Support was.”
“Forg1ven was also approached to join Ever8 Winners, back then Kiin was there too, and he said he respected the offer but would not join because he didn’t know how to play with a team full of Koreans.”
What made Dopa most famous was perhaps the fact that he was banned for 1,000 years and prohibited from professional play for 2 years starting in 2014 due to account boosting. By 2016, that ban had expired, and a few teams, like Alpha Draft that commentator LS mentioned above, wanted to recruit Dopa with a sky-high salary, but that lineup could not come to fruition for various reasons.
In 2014, Dopa successfully reached the top rank in Challenger on the Chinese server and received a huge cash prize, alongside his fame skyrocketing in this billion-population country, earning him a lot of money from streaming activities. Perhaps for this guy, making money was more important than playing professionally, so even with an offer of $50,000 a month, he still declined.
Dopa is a player with extremely high skill and a unique thought process that fits well in solo queue, which is why the matchups between Faker and Dopa in solo queue always attract the attention of League of Legends fans. If he had agreed to the professional playing offer back then, who knows, we might have witnessed Faker vs Dopa at the highest level of League of Legends.
