The first day of the Call of Duty World League Dallas Open produced four undefeated team—but day two saw that number reduced by one as OpTic Gaming, FaZe Clan, and Splyce are the only remaining unbeaten squads.
Saturday began with the open bracket producing a few surprising teams, as eRa Eternity and SetToDestroyX upset Evil Geniuses and Epsilon Esports respectively. The Gosu Crew and Team Kaliber also qualified for pool play by defeating Supremacy and iGame, sending four North American teams into the group stage.
Gosu Crew was the most impressive out of these four open bracket teams, as they went on to defeat Team EnVyUs, Red Reserve, and Tainted Minds in order to finish second in Group A. Although they lost to OpTic in their final pool play match, Gosu defeated the Green Wall in the first map of the series to end OpTic’s 23-map win streak.
Just like OpTic, FaZe also ran away with their group at 4-0. Although the open bracket team in Group C didn’t qualify for the championship bracket, StDx still played a major role in the outcome of this group. After losing to FaZe and Luminosity Gaming, StDx defeated Fnatic and Elevate to force a three-way tie for second place. Due to map win percentage, Luminosity advanced as the second seed out of Group C.
This set up two extremely exhilarating matchups between the four aforementioned teams, as OpTic faced off against Luminosity, while FaZe played against The Gosu Crew. In a series between two of the strongest slaying teams in North America, OpTic jumped out to an early 2-0 advantage, despite Luminosity holding leads in both maps. Luminosity responded by winning the next two maps to force a decisive game five—but the Green Wall stood strong, taking the 3-2 series victory.
On the other side of the bracket, FaZe’s matchup with The Gosu Crew also went the distance. Both teams traded map wins back and forth, but FaZe eventually came out on top to advance to the winners bracket semifinals against eUnited.
EUnited was undefeated after day one at CWL Dallas, but an early loss to Team Kaliber to start day two tarnished their perfect record. Pierce “Gunless” Hillman and company still earned the top spot from Group B and defeated Enigma6 3-1 to set up their semifinal match against FaZe Sunday morning.
The final unbeaten team left in this tournament is Splyce. The European powerhouse defeated eRa to remain undefeated in pool play, and followed that up with an impressive victory over a reinvigorated Cloud9. By defeating C9, Splyce will play against OpTic Gaming in the other winners bracket semifinal—where one of these teams will unfortunately lose their first series of the weekend.
In the losers bracket, Evil Geniuses went on an insane win streak, defeating Elevate, Rise Nation, and Millenium to set the stage for a matchup against The Gosu Crew Sunday morning, which will be a series with major implications on the final NA spot in the CWL Global LAN League.
While OpTic, FaZe, and Splyce have all certainly looked very strong this weekend, some of these losers bracket teams could have enough momentum behind them to dethrone the remaining unbeaten squads.
Published: Mar 19, 2017 12:57 am