Ninjas in Pyjamas Bench es3tag ahead of the 2023 CSGO season

The Swedish Esports organisation Ninjas in Pyjamas have decided to bench the Danish Rifler and support player Erik “es3tag” Hansen ahead of the 2023 CSGO season. Ninjas in Pyjamas will be looking for an AWPer to strengthen the roster. He will be a restricted F/A ahead of the 2023 season.

Es3tag and Ninjas in Pyjamas:

Es3tag is a Danish rifler and support who started playing CSGO professionally with KappaKappa. Tricked was es3tag’s first Tier-2 team, where he played alongside Jugi and niko. Eventually, Tricked transferred all three of them to Heroic. On Heroic, es3tag and his Danish teammates won the Dreamhack Open Atlanta 2019 and had a top 4 finish at the Epicentre 2019. Impressed by his talent, Astralis, arguably the biggest and the most successful Danish roster, picked up es3tag. With the Astralis roster, es3tag won the ESL Pro League S12 Europe beating S1mple-led Natus Vincere.

Es3tag then switched to C9 and then complexity but did not find results. Towards the end of the 2021 year, he joined his Dev1ce at Ninjas in Pyjamas. With the roster, Nip placed second at IEM Winter and a podium finish at the ESL Pro League S15. The team won B-tier and C-tier events in 2022 but could not close S-Tier tournaments. At the Blast Premier Fall Finals 2022, Ninjas in Pyjamas had a great showing when they eliminated Natus Vincere. But the team lost to Faze clan in the semi-finals resulting in a 3rd-4th finish at the last LAN event for the team in 2022.

With the future in mind, Ninjas in Pyjamas have decided to bench es3tag and field an Awper instead. Since the departure of Dev1ce earlier this year, the team hasn’t found a strong Awper, and multiple players have filled the role. Es3tag will enter 2023 as a restricted F/A and will be looking for new opportunities.

[twitter url="https://twitter.com/NIPCS/status/1605566003341103106"]

With es3tag’s departure, the current Ninjas in Pyjamas roster looks as follows:

• Fredrik “REZ” Sterner
• Hampus “Hampus” Poser
• Ludvig “Brollan” Brolin
• Aleksi “Aleksib” Virolainen (IGL)
• Daniel “djL” Narancic (Coach)