Press: Astralis signed es3tag

According to a joint report by HLTV.org and 1pv.fr, Astralis intends to expand its roster to six people and has signed a contract with Patrick "es3tag" Hansen. It is not known when the player will join his new team, as he is now in Los Angeles and together with FunPlus Phoenix and is participating in the first season of Flashpoint league.

The situation with the departure of es3tag casts doubt on the future of FunPlus Phoenix in CS:GO, which recently acquired the entire Heroic line-up to paricipate in Flashpoint as the founder team. It is reported that the Chinese organization may still cancel the transfer deal and partnership agreement with the league.

According to insider Guillaume "neL" Canelo, Astralis players themselves asked the club management to invite es3tag. The team hopes to successfully implement an innovative system with six players, which is widely used in traditional sports, but has not previously been used in CS:GO due to restrictions of tournament operators.

es3tag joined Heroic in the summer of 2017 and has since averaged 1.06. Since then he has won three tournaments with the Danish team: Games Clash Masters 2018, Toyota Master Bangkok 2018 and DreamHack Open Atlanta 2019.

As for Astralis, after the successful 2019, their results have slightly deteriorated. The four-time winners of the majors failed at the first BLAST tournament of the year and also lost to Natus Vincere in the semi-finals of the IEM Katowice 2020.

If the information is confirmed, the  Astralis line-up will look like this:

Nicholas "device" Reedtz
Peter "dupreeh" Rasmussen
Andreas "Xyp9x" Højsleth
Lucas "gla1ve" Rossander
Emile "Magisk" Reif
Patrick "es3tag" Hansen

Danny "zonic" Sorensen (Coach)