Out of nowhere, Astralis announced they’ve signed Danish player Jakob ‘JUGi’ Hansen as their CSGO squad’s seventh player, effective immediately.
JUGi had been playing with North since signing in May 2019, but things never really clicked and he was benched in January of 2020.
After not playing competitive CSGO for several months, the AWPer has now found a new home at Astralis, according to TV 2 Sport, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be replacing any of their starters.
JUGi was one of the hottest new names in CSGO in 2015 and 2016, in part because of his raw skill on the AWP, which you can see a clip of above.
He spent time on Optic in 2018 before being picked up by North in 2019, but for whatever reason, he’s never become the star that he seemed destined to be all those years ago.
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It’s a bit of a strange move by Astralis, who typically sign high-profile, marketable players, while JUGi has remained fairly low-profile throughout his career.
Astralis recently signed Patrick ‘es3tag’ Hansen from Heroic as a sixth player to fill out their roster, so as the team’s seventh player, JUGi will probably spend most of his time on the bench in a backup role.
The organization already has veteran AWP legend Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz in their starting squad, so the chances of JUGi seeing playtime while he’s available are slim, but we’ve seen stranger things happen.
CSGO is a 5v5 game, and teams typically don’t mess with their starting five for a variety of reasons, the main one being team cohesion and how comfortable players are with one another, which means it could be some time before JUGi sees the spotlight.
Neither Astralis or JUGi has commented on the reported pickup yet, but it will be very interesting to see what the Danish esports org ends up doing with their newly expanded roster.