SCL Teamplay January 2022: Results

Congrats to lagout and 1989 of w00p for winning the grand finals against tBMC!

First place: w00p| lagout & 1989
Second place: [tBMC] swatllama & firefly
Third place: w00p| tenshi & Benkei

Demos: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YX3sDSNvHQabgRoR94chR7Ln9SluWqSx/view?usp=sharing
Streams: swatllama pov, notas’s brilliant casting

Event Recap
Eight teams signed up for this event, and for a decent number, this was their first teamplay event, yet they performed very well despite that. The exciting action first happened in the all-v-all, where tenshi went godmode and easily surpassed the next closest fragger, paying homage to years of playing PSL all-v-all’s. The 2nd w00p team was also wildly successful, securing both w00p teams the highest two seeds.

Winner’s Bracket
The first round’s results didn’t surprise anyone. Mostly, the higher seeds won their game, with the one exception being tBMC having a large margin over the higher seeding DK team. Avior and hamon came to a surprising 42-46 conclusion against w00p’s top seed in what must’ve been an exciting horus match, but unable to finally clutch things out in a 2nd game, both DK teams were relegated to the lower bracket.

After the first round finished, tenshi and Benkei went against wollmilch and Neko, defeating them easily, while lagout and 1989 beat tBMC on hades and then horus. This led to a w00p finals, first on waltz, then on gorge. Waltz was a new map, kind of a fucking weird but fun one too — but I’m not sure tenshi and Benkei got to practice it much, as they were tripled by their clanmates. Gorge was closer, but they still lost after a slow start. Tenshi and Benkei had nearly tied it up by halfway into the game, but missing out on quads after that proved unrecoverable. Nevertheless, both w00p teams at this point were guaranteed podium finishes.

Loser’s Bracket
In the first round of the loser’s bracket, the two brave DK teams faced eachother, yet only one could advance, and the other would face a premature elimination. Hamon and Avior, who got a bronze in teamplay last January, prevailed and continued on in their teamplay journey. They went on to even stronger performances, nearly tripling their next lower bracket game. They were effectively a duo of terminators, eliminating any who were in their path in the lower bracket.

Halb and Pix, a hastily thrown together mix team, defeated Akari and benzomatic (an even more hastily thrown together mix team) in the first round of the loser’s bracket. After that, they faced the recently defeated tBMC team on hator, which led to a tBMC victory.

Then, it came down to a classic tBMC-DK teamplay clanwar. It had a rough start for tBMC as we struggled to lock down control of either yellow and missed early quads, but the yellow cycles were secured in the midgame, and those led to winning quads, and winning the map.

Loser’s Bracket Final
I think the loser’s bracket final was the most exciting and interesting match in the whole tournament.  The first 2.5 minutes were close, with the lead swapping back and forth constantly, along with control of the yellow armour. Around 7:40, tenshi got onto a quad with low health, but restacked on a yellow armour and health bubbles, picking up quite a few kills along the way to get more of a lead (cause we bumrushed like fucking idiots). He even survived to pick up the next quad with a large stack, only finally succumbing once firefly landed a strong opening shotgun on him. But, by this point, w00p had a 19-13 lead a bit over 3 minutes in. Another minute and a half in, and the lead had grown to an 8-10 point lead in favour of w00p.

Things turned around once tBMC secured a yellow leading up to the quad around 4 minutes remaining. That sequence of events alone took us from a 13 point deficit to only 5 within the next 40 or so seconds. One of the main things I can attribute this to was repeatedly offsetting the yellow timing to be “off cycle” — that is, it wasn’t spawning at a “usual” or even around a “usual” time like around 30s, or 0s, or even 20s, and w00p started missing yellows, causing them to lose map and item control which let us recover the score. The next two minutes were contested control over the whole map, with the frag differential going between 2-5 quite a bit. At one minute remaining, the score was 41-41, making the last yellow and quad key. We got onto both of these items, ending with a 46-43 victory at the end.

Grand Finals
Going into this finals, w00p had a 1 map advantage due to beating us and their clanmates earlier. Inspired by the comeback, I injected 500mg of tren acetate and became tren’d out of my mind while lagout and 1989 were getting ready. Throughout this grand finals, w00p was having issues with their ISP being unreliable, probably leading them to break their focus and momentum.

Crypta ended with a close 59-55 advantage to w00p at the end. The end game situation was nearly identical to the end-game on horus, with tBMC having a small deficit but the ability to overcome it by getting last quad. While we did get the last quad, it was immediately neutralized, along with our chances at winning crypta. To pull out all the stops to win the next map, I snorted 25mg of dianabol to help me for the next match, which w00p picked to be on hades. Firefly and I presumed this would be our last match since w00p had crushed us 93-66 there earlier, and we wanted it to be epic.

While it was difficult to get onto major items at the start, we did enough damage to w00p where they couldn’t effectively use the items they were picking up. This combined with either some other spectacular decision making from us, or lagout’s frequent lagouts destroying any chance of w00p momentum, led to a back and forth series of which teams had control. tBMC had a commanding lead towards the midgame, but that lead was turned around when lagout got on two very nice quadruns in a row. At one minute remaining, w00p turned it into a 1 frag lead. A very fortunate dive onto the last quad from tBMC netted us a 1 frag victory, 73-72.

After a series of both w00ps lagging out at the start of hator, they did a fantastic job of securing most of the yellows and most of the quads to win the final map 80-53. Fraggingfucker summed up the final game quite succinctly.

 

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