JUGi announced free agency
Jakob "JUGi" Hansen has officially left North and is now a free agent, as announced by the Danish AWPer earlier this Sunday on his official Twitter page.
The 23-year-old has been an inactive member of North ever since mid-January when the Danish CS:GO team moved him to the bench to make space for the returning In-game leader Mathias "MSL" Lauridsen. JUGi's benching and the arrival of MSL was also one of only two roster moves North made since the turn of the year, with the other being the departure of coach Torbjørn "mithR" Nyborg and arrival of Jimmy "Jumpy" Berndtsson as his replacement.
In his Twitter post, JUGi thanked North for the opportunity to play for the team, while announcing his free agency and the desire to return to the competitive play as soon as possible.
"I would like to thank North for the time and for the opportunity they gave me. Lot's of ups and downs, but also good memories and acquaintances," said JUGi.
"I'm a free agent now and I'm really hungry to compete on the highest level again – I hope to get a chance and prove it to everybody and most importantly myself, because I'm not done with CS at all!"
JUGi began his CS:GO career in early 2015, when he joined madjicK Gaming and later teamed up with Reason Gaming, Revival Gaming, Alpha Gaming, tRICKED eSports and in February 2017 joined Heroic, which proved to be a huge stepping stone in his career.
With Heroic, JUGi saw immense success on the international stage, including a third-fourth place finish at Intel Extreme Masters XI – World Championship, DreamHack Open Austin 2017, and DreamHack Open Valencia 2017, as well as a silver medal from DreamHack Open Atlanta 2017, top-eight finish at ELEAGUE CS:GO Premier 2017, gold from World Cyber Arena 2017 – Europe Main Stage and a fourth-place finish at cs_summit 2.
In March 2018, JUGi got benched by Heroic in favour of Patrick "es3tag" Hansen due to undisclosed personal reasons and ended up leaving the team to join OpTic in April. While playing under OpTic's banner JUGi added a few more accolades to his cabinet including a top-eight finish at ESL Pro League Season 7 – Finals, silver medal from DreamHack Open Summer 2018, Europe Minor Championship – London 2018 and cs_summit 3, as well as top-four finish at StarSeries & i-League CS:GO Season 6.
During his time at OpTic JUGi averaged 1.09 rating and 54.6% map win rate, which caught the attention of North, who decided to sign the promising AWPer at the start fo May 2019. With North, JUGi went on to continue his illustrious career, by finishing top-four at Esports Championship Series Season 7 – Finals, third at Europe Minor Championship – Berlin 2019 and even made an appearance at StarLadder Berlin Major 2019. Despite a promising start with his new team, which saw him average 1.15 rating at ECS Season 7 Finals, JUGi struggled to make much of an impact in the months that followed, ending his eight-month stint with North with an average LAN rating of only 1.01.
Since JUGi is no longer tied with North, the young Danish AWPer is now up for grabs for any organisation, however, it seems very unlikely he will get picked up by any top Danish CS:GO team, considering Astralis, MAD Lions, Copenhagen Flames and Heroic all recently made roster changes and are currently not looking to add more players to their ranks.
Astralis recently signed es3tag, MAD Lions acquired Asger "AcilioN" Grunnet Larsen earlier in March and Copenhagen Flames added Jonas "Queenix" Dideriksen to their team at the start of April as a replacement for René "TeSeS" Madsen who left for Heroic. That could mean JUGi will look for his options outside of Denmark for the first time in his four-year-long career, yet it remains to be seen how difficult it will be to do so since the COVID-19 pandemic heavily restricted international travel.
