G2 Esports have confirmed the additions of Justin ‘jks’ Savage and Rasmus ‘HooXi’ Nielsen to their CS:GO team, as reported by Dexerto last month.
The pair will fill the slots left vacated by Audric ‘JACKZ’ Jug’s departure to HEET and Aleksi ‘Aleksib’ Virolainen’s benching following a disappointing season that did not yield any trophies.
jks joins G2 after spending the last eight months on Complexity’s bench after the Texas-based organization pulled the plug on the ‘Juggernaut’ project before eventually signing a North American lineup.
In March, jks played for FaZe as a stand-in and helped the team to win the trophy following a 3-0 sweep of G2 in the final. In doing so, jks, who filled in for two different players in the tournament, became the first Australian to win a tier-one CS:GO competition.
Time to finally win a map in finals pic.twitter.com/Paop0trOSd
— G2 Esports (@G2esports) August 16, 2022
HooXi was part of the Copenhagen Flames roster that attended the recent Majors in Stockholm and Antwerp and that at one point was inside the top 10 in the world rankings. He was the last player from that team to find a new home in the off-season: Jakob ‘jabbi’ Nygaard moved to Heroic, Nico ‘nicoodoz’ Tamjidi and Fredrik ‘roeJ’ Jørgensen joined Fnatic, and Rasmus ‘Zyphon’ Nordfoss signed with Sprout.
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The Danish player, who takes over as in-game leader, was linked with a move to Evil Geniuses earlier in the summer before the organization signed Sanzhar ‘neaLaN’ Iskhakov from K23.
Critics of HooXi’s signing have pointed to his individual struggles and lack of international experience as concerns. The 27-year-old averages a worrying 0.84 HLTV rating against top-10 opposition on LAN (Aleksib, by comparison, averages a 0.93 rating) and has only attended three tournaments classified as ‘Big Events’ — the two PGL Majors and IEM Katowice 2022.
The new G2 lineup will be put to the test in just a few days as it will compete in the BLAST Premier Fall Groups. The team has been placed in Group B alongside NAVI, Complexity and Team Liquid.
G2 CS:GO roster:
- Nemanja ‘huNter-‘ Kovač
- Nikola ‘NiKo’ Kovač
- Ilya ‘m0NESY’ Osipov
- Justin ‘jks’ Savage
- Rasmus ‘HooXi’ Nielsen
- Rémy ‘XTQZZZ’ Quoniam (coach)