Dupreeh, The Man Who Did Everything
Among the stars of today, Peter “Dupreeh” Rasmussen may be the most understated. He is one of the best Danish players in the world and since teaming up with Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz early on his career, the two of them have formed a potent force colloquially known as “The Double D”. In recent years he has filled a critical role in the makeup of the Astralis roster as has shifted from role to role depending on the demands of the team and executed to an incredible level. From entry to lurker to AWPer, from pistol to rifle to AWP, from early round to mid round to late round. Dupreeh is the man who has done everything.
The origin of this starts before the current era of Astralis under Lukas “gla1ve’ Rossander. The team was hitting a downward spiral so to save it, they recruited Markus “Kjaerbye” Kjaerbye. The move didn’t quite work as they weren’t able to fit him in with the rest of the team and the calling style of Finn “Karrigan” Andersen clashed with the rest of the Astralis core. Once gla1ve came in, he retooled the entire thing and he teamed up with Kjaerbye to take on the map control/entry roles. This forced Dupreeh into a completely different role than before.
He was once one of the world’s great entry fraggers, but his form had dipped. So the team had decided to shift his roles and he went to a lurking type of role. a new kind of lurker. One that constantly put pressure on his side of the map without over-committing or becoming too passive. The move worked and he revitalized his career in a completely different role and in turn enabled Kjaerbye to work with gla1ve. This change along with the entire team structure working was what powered this team to become the ELeague Atlanta Major 2017 winners.
As the year went on, he grew stronger in his role and slowly become one of the strongest players of the team. He was once a player who was used to break open rounds as an aggressive play maker. Now he was more relied upon to make critical mid round plays and sometimes clutch for the team. He showed exactly this in a round against SK at EPICENTER 2017. In the fourth round on Train, Astralis had called for an A execute, but the hit had been stalled. Dupreeh was then sent off to go on a lurk mission to ivy where he broke open the entire site and round. The role change was an incredible feat to switch from role to role and continue to put up the consistent amount of impact and fragos on the server.
Dupreeh’s growth in skill got to the point that by mid 2017, he was arguably the best player on Astralis. Dev1ce had declined from personal injuries he was trying to deal with and Kjaerbye became erratic after the Major run. When dev1ce had to stop playing at the end, Dupreeh had to change roles again. He took up the AWP to fill out the role dev1ce once had and once again showed his incredible flexibility. It was a revelation as this was to be his third role switch as one of the stars of the team. This in turn freed up Kjaerbye to make more plays as an aggressive rifler and Astralis were able to conjure up great runs at the end of the year despite not having dev1ce in the roster.
One of the more memorable moments from that time came from Dupreeh’s performance at BLAST Copenhagen. Everyone remembers the ridiculous shot through the smoke that killed two players and won the 14th. The follow up round was just as spectacular as Dupreeh won a 1v4. The rest of the team had died to the SK squad and so it was left to Dupreeh to find a way to win. He traded out the B player, then used his smoke to obscure vision of the back of the site from catwalk. He then parlayed that into a maneuver where he was able to ambush the cat player who was trying to figure out where he was. This left him time and space to plant and win the subsequent 1v2.
Dupreeh did so well in fact that when dev1ce came back into the roster, there was an internal clash over roles. Kjaerbye and Dupreeh wanted to play the same type of role where they were the aggressive rifler who went out to create plays for the team. Whether it was to resolve this problem or to ease dev1ce back into the roster, Astralis decided to have Dupreeh switch to the main AWPing role for the Boston ELeague Major and have dev1ce be a rifler.
The experiment failed and the role conflict continued to exist. This eventually forced Kjaerbye to make the first move and he left the squad. In response, Astralis picked up Emil “Magisk” Reif and subsequently became the best team in the world. As for Dupreeh, he has taken up the role that Kjaerbye once played and is now the aggressive rifle player and second priority when Astralis want one of their players to make something happen across the map. This shift back to his original role has seen Dupreeh continue his sterling form as he is now one of the primary assets used for aggressive plays and can take over entire series as he did at ESL Proleague Season 7 Finals. In that tournament, he destroyed the competition with his aggressive and impactful entry frags.
Dupreeh is the second point of the five headed star of Astralis and has proven himself to be incredibly consistent with his frags, impact, and reliability. What is amazing about Dupreeh is how versatile he is. It is something that can also be said of the other core members of Astralis, dev1ce and Andreas “Xyp9x” Hojsleth, in terms of their overall game knowledge, understanding of roles, and rotations. Dupreeh however has been forced to switch roles multiple times within the last year.
To the naive fan, this may seem easy. After all, unlike League of Legends or Dota 2 there is no specified hero you are switching to. The pure mechanics of the game remain the same so there isn’t a visual indicator to show how difficult it is. The best way to show it is by comparison. When we look at teams that have stubbornly stuck to an old core like NiP or Fnatic, one of the problems of the team is that the identities of the players is set. They cannot change how they play in the game and because of that the color of the team can only change so much if you’re only switching out the last 1 or 2 players in the roster.
One of the best examples of this is NiP from 2016-2017. They had Christopher “GeT_RiGhT” Alesund go from lurker to entry fragger. They had Patrik “f0rest” Lindberg go from rifler to AWPer. In both cases, it only worked for a brief moment of time before they both started to slump. The intricacies needed to switch star roles like that is immense as it is an understanding of positioning, rotation, communication, and what you need to do for your team to succeed. Among all of the various stars of today, the ones that are even capable of doing this can be counted on a single hand. Among those only two others have actually done it, Richard “shox” Papillon and Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev.
Even beyond the roles Dupreeh has played at such a high level, Dupreeh has shown great skill in other areas of CS:GO. He has strong pistols, one of the best deagles, has a strong clutch game, and has a specialty shot on overpass that he seems to hit the most of anyone in the world. In the last year and a half he has played entry, lurker, and AWPer. He has shown incredible skill on pistols, rifles, and AWPs. He has consistently shown up game after game, situation after situation, and continues to be one of the most dangerous players in the server regardless of the situation. Dupreeh is the man who did everything and he and his team are now a position where they can win everything.
