Team Pandemic - News - Pandemic vs EG for CEVO-P Finals

It has finally come to this, the CEVO-Professional CoD4 Season 1 Championship. For three months Pandemic has competed against the top teams in North America week after week for their share of the $4250 professional prize purse. With the winner receiving $2125, the pressure will be on to perform.

Pandemic will be facing Evil Geniuses in the finals this Thursday at 10:15PM EST. These two teams have a storied history against one another that began at NERV LAN in January where EG defeated Pandemic on mp_vacant. In the weeks after NERV, however, Pandemic met EG in CEVO-P on mp_strike and was able to steal the victory from that meeting.

Widely considered the top two teams in North America, this match is sure to be an intense battle with the match being played on a best of three map format.

For Pandemic’s map choice, they have chosen mp_strike, one of the team’s strongest maps as well as the map the team had previously beaten EG on during the regular season. For EG’s map choice, they have chosen, mp_backlot, which is a surprise to many as a number of people thought EG would select mp_vacant, the map they had also previously beaten Pandemic on as well as being one of their stronger maps.

With arguably the two most popular maps already chosen to be played, mp_citystreets has been selected as the third tie breaker map if needed. Both teams played Citystreets during week one, where both teams received both a win and loss.

One thing is for certain, however, and that is things have certainly changed since week one both in a sense of the teams’ rosters as well as the game’s playing style.

For the all three maps, it is very hard to predict who will win, even on the maps each team has chosen. Making the immediate assumption that each team will win their chosen map and the match will go to Citystreets might seem easy, but that is hardly the case. In maps like Strike and Backlot, a number of factors can make or break a match.

Frag Grenades, flashes, and smokes are particularly important as their timing can mean the difference of an offense getting into a bombsite to pant and a defense keeping them out. In both maps, there is a limited number of positions to defend the bombsites from, and therefore it is imperative that the defense does not become repetitive as well as the offense.

“We picked Strike, they picked Backlot and overtime is Citystreets. EG is going to come out hard at us since they are just as hungry as we are. We have our preparation and scrimming schedule back to normal since Jason has his internet back, so I expect us to take this but it won't be easy," says Pandemic’s Justin “prank” DeMara about the match.

Match coverage will be provided by several shoutcasting companies, namely Gamefire and E-REV TV. As well as shoutcasting, CEVO will also be running a scorebot for the match in their CoD4 channel, #cevo-cod4 on the Gamesurge IRC network.

In addition, Team Pandemic’s very own Ted “sang” Ottey has been invited back by E-REV TV for a special guest shoutcasting commentary of the second map (Backlot) following his stand-in at NERV LAN as well as previous guest casts this past week of CEVO playoff matches. Ted will also be joining E-REV broadcasters Erick “wantsome” Pauley and Micheal “anger” Sweedberg this June bringing you live commentary from NERV LAN 2.

Be sure to tune in as Pandemic gears up to potentially win themselves their first CEVO CoD4 championship!