Optic Gaming Win The CWL Championship 2017

Yesterday evening, the 13^th of August, saw the end of the Infinite Warfare season in dramatic fashion with the biggest event of the year; CWL Championship. Ever since day 1, it’s been a battle for each team to establish dominance which made more than a few teams favourites while going into this event. Let’s break down how the event went.

The first couple days of hectic group stages happened as expected with the only real surprises were the fall of Evil Geniuses to Str8 Rippin and perhaps Red Reserve’s failure to make it through in a tiebreaker.  After group stage, of course, came the brackets.  Again, with so many games being played we can only discussed the more interesting ones. Examples include Rise Nation’s upset to Team Infused and the young blood of eUnited taking down LG this early in the event. LG, one of the more favoured teams, would fall very early into the loser’s bracket; but from there they’ll make it to a top 4 spot along with Rise Nation. 

Moving on to the second round of bracket play, only one EU team remained to challenge all the other NA teams.  Splyce would face off against OG to perhaps play out the most intense series we’ve seen in a long time of Call of Duty. Ulitmately, however, OG took it in the game 5.  Alongside OG in victory were Faze, eUnited and nV- three other teams who were primed to win the whole thing.  On the other side of things, LG and Rise were dispatching team after team in the loser bracket.  The final round of the winners bracket saw a famous OG/Faze match which was over in less than an hour thanks to a 3-0 from Optic Gaming. The other match in the bracket was eUnited vs nV, where the boys in blue crushed the hopes of the Clayster-led youngsters of eUnited.  Those who fell from the winners bracket quickly went home after facing LG or Rise, certainly due to the dropping in morale after failing in the winners bracket. To see how every match in the bracket went; check out this link: http://cod.esportswikis.com/wiki/2017_Call_of_Duty_World_League_Championship#Results

Sooner than ever, we were in the final bracket and four teams were left standing; OG, nV, Rise and LG. The names of NV and Rise were not always there in many people’s opinions since both of them have had a terrible season, but a top 4 in champs absolutely changed that.  Rise and LG faced off alongside OG and nV. Rise were sent home, as LG took revenge from a prior 3-0 which they suffered early by returning the favour. OG lost to nV on the Alpha Stage and were drained; they’d now have to beat Team EnVyUs twice on the mainstage to be able to call themselves champions. In their way, however, was LG who didn’t put up much of a fight as this was OG’s year evidently.

The grand final would be an epic match based on the deep rivalry between two of the oldest organisations in Call of Duty esports; Optic Gaming and Team EnVyUs. The Greenwall was fired up after a hot performance against LG and the veterans in blue were calm and composed as in all their other games.  Infinite Warfare would boil down on these two teams. OG gained first blood with the first map of hardpoint, but then lost the SnD to take the next two maps for the victory in the first series. After that 3-1, nV fans and players looked shaken and panicked- a recurring nightmare was about to be actuated. Just a couple weeks ago, they faced the exact same situation against the same team who beat them after two series. It was all dejavu, but in the biggest tournament of the year. The second series went out of hand for nV who submitted three maps in less than 50 minutes to Optic Gaming.

Obviously, OG have managed to break their looming curse of not showing up at Champs and what a time to show up. Heading into this year, the shear amount of story lines was incredible along with the ambiguity of a pure favourite.  Scump, Formal, Crimsix and Karma will walk home with a new ring each; making it 3 for Karma and 2 for Crimsix.  The team walks away with the coveted trophy, $600,000 of prize and the right to call themselves the best. Most viewers shut off the stream after that because MLG created a terribly obnoxious after-show which dissuaded around 50,000 viewers as the site displays amount of viewers at the top right. 

Although the community may have shut out Infinite Warfare, for competitive Call of Duty we haven’t seen such amazing competition since BO2.