Team Astralis has officially moved to sign Jakob “JUGi” Hansen as the seventh player on their CS:GO roster. JUGi will join the team ahead of Patrick “es3tag” Hansen, another significant signing from March that first needs to have his contract expire in at the end of June before making the permanent shift over to Astralis.
The 23 year old player from Denmark is known for his effect role as an AWPer and shows a professional competitive history since 2015, playing for teams like madjicK Gaming, Reason Gaming, Alpha Gaming tRICKED eSport, Heroic, OpTic Gaming, North, and now Astralis.
Speaking about the move was head coach Danny “zonic” Sørensen, who states, “We know JUGi well and we know how well he performs when he’s at his best. He has already participated in a practice session where he adapted and contributed as we expected.”
The move is fascinating form a strategic perspective, because until recently we had assumed that Astralis was going to stick with a six-person roster, which is already a deviation from the norm by going into a deeper pool of players. Now it seems clear that they want to experiment with much more, having two players for each role.
Arguments against this strategy might be that there will be inconsistency in performance as players swap in and out of a match, and that players will need to work harder to form the familiarity between teammates that can lead to strong plays. There is also the obvious economic strain that this puts on an organization, and while Astralis seems able to foot the bill for a larger roster, smaller organizations might not have the option.
On the other hand, creating deep rosters with multiple players per role might pave the way for the future of CS:GO thanks to several potential benefits. For example, the mental and physical strain of competing at the highest levels of play for months at a time can have serious effects on a player, but swapping out one top-level player for another of the same role could help ease that strain and provide a fresh player at crucial times.
In addition, having a deeper roster would make it easier for Astralis to keep their strategies as secrets for longer than normal. This would come from opponents not knowing how to deal with the substation of players who may play the same role but play in distinct ways, since play against those individuals in the past might be limited. The same goes for synergy and strength on certain maps, as some players and their skillsets translate well on some maps, but not others.
We cannot wait to see how Astralis does with this new strategy.
Source: dotesports.com
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