About

322 refers to a series of jokes and memes about Russian Defense of the Ancients 2 player Alexei "Solo" Berezin, who purposely lost a match to win $322. For the infraction, Berezin was banned from Valve events for life, a sentence which was later shortened to one year. Since the event, people have used the number 322 to express the belief that a player had purposely lost.

Origin

On June 14th, 2013, Solo and several other DotA players, including others from Solo's team, RoX.KIS, played the team zRAGE in SLTV StarSeries Season 6 (clip below). That match featured Solo and members of his team performing a series of questionable maneuvers that contributed to their loss.

Following the match, Solo and his teammates were accused of "throwing" the match, which Solo had bet $100 on. According to the DotA gamepedia,^[1] "Alexei "Solo" Berezin placed a bet against his own team on a real-currency gambling site, and the StarLadder organization ruled that his teammates in the game were complicit. The RoX.KIS organization was banned from participating in StarLadder for one year."

Spread

On June 21st, 2013, the RoX.KIS team banned Solo from competing with them. They released a statement^[2] confirming that Solo had confessed to throwing the match. They wrote:

Unfortunately, all accusations regarding Solo were confirmed, and he confessed to the crime. Alexey used the tournament situation (that the match did not mean anything in terms of points), kept it from the other team members that he had bet money on their opponent, and then did his everything in order to make sure that the team lost the game (choice of heroes, in-game leadership). Despite the motives (whatever they are) and the fact that Solo had a great reputation and a great level of play, such an act by Alex has dashed all past achievements, and he has no place any longer among the players of ROX.KIS.

On July 6th, YouTuber Dota 2 – Солеварня published a reaction to the match. The post received more than 549,000 views (shown below).

On December 13th, 2018, Urban Dictionary ^[3] user 3dots defined "322" as "a term used to describe a winning team in a multiplayer online games intentionally losing or throwing the match. The cause for losing might be because of personal gain (i.e. winning a bet)." The post received more than 40 upvotes in less than one year (shown below).

On May 30th, 2019, YouTuber Dota Watafak posted a video on the meme. The post received more than 2.4 million views in less than one year (shown below).

Search Interest

External References