Chinese Dota veteran Somnus announces retirement after RNG's TI11 exit

It was a bittersweet last professional match for one of the Chinese Dota 2 scene's established veterans.

Royal Never Give Up midlaner Lu "Somnus" Yao announced that he would be retiring from professional Dota 2, shortly after the Chinese team lost an epic 107-minute best of 1 against Western Europe's Entity in the first round of The International 2022's (TI11) Main Event.

In a post on his Weibo's page on Thursday (20 Oct), Somnus announced his retirement in Chinese, saying that his youth was "ultimately filled with difficulties and regrets".

Calling it "the end of my youth", Somnus thanked fans for the care and support that they had shown him throughout his career.

The midlaner has been to six TIs, coming closest to the Aegis in 2018 with PSG.LGD, only to be defeated by the eventual winners OG in the first of their back-to-back TI wins.

He also placed third twice, including in front of a home crowd at TI9 in Shanghai, only to be thwarted by OG again in their successful and historic title defence.

The 26-year-old is one of the veterans of the Chinese Dota 2 scene, having started out with Vici Gaming (then Greedy) in 2013 before serving six years with PSG.LGD (and their previous iterations).

He moved to Chinese superteam Elephant in 2020, before joining RNG in 2021.

At TI11 in Singapore, RNG had a good showing in the initial two days of the Group Stage, before the team were hit by COVID and forced to forfeit their Group Stage match with PSG.LGD as Somnus had to be taken to the hospital.

He returned later to play, but with more members of RNG also testing positive, the team only managed to secure a lower bracket berth and had to play in the perilous best of 1 first round.

That said, Somnus' last professional match will likely go down in Dota 2 TI history as one of the longest, if not outright the longest, match at the Main Event.

And despite overwhelming odds, Somnus and the rest of RNG, playing from isolation with only Yap "xNova" Jian Wei representing them on stage, managed to hold off Entity for almost two hours.

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