Modern pro-gaming puts major emphasis on solo skill; Keith "Kzu" Hullennar of Pandemic.CoD shares his thoughts on how much a 'team-first' approach has helped the organization win championships. The following is an excerpt from Keith's blog:

"Call of Duty has shifted from being a team game to a game more based on the lone player's ability to outsmart and kill opponents. Of course this statement is very spectral, there have been many times in Call of Duty 4 where I have seen excellent execution of teamwork, but these moments are few and far between.

Most of the time, the team “strategy” involves 1-2 players rushing past grenades in order to get into a favorable spot, eg. mp_Strike statue or Lower A on Mp_Crash, while the rest of the teammates pre-nade the other 1-2 enemies rushing to the same spot. Of course this isn't the only strategy, there are also slow Splits, but they aren't like the Splits of CoD1 fame(anyone remember the all-time popular nade and go's?).

Instead, splits are ran with the most basic of intentions and depend on the players to communicate with their teammate on points of attack(Most of the time teams don't have a strong communication to effectively do this); so its starts as a basic setup, but contains no 2nd step. “Just frag and push the dead guy's spot!”

Today's Split depends on the enemy making a mistake or a player getting a lucky frag or two, but it should be about using strong tactics to severely stress both sides. On Strike, if I have 3 people attacking B and 2 people attacking A, both groups are responsible for making their side as strong as possible; this can be done with nade-n-go's , passive/aggressive plays, and solid play-back spots). If we put so much time to scrim in this game, why can't we put enough time into strategy to evolve the game?

During the last two seasons of CEVO, we have been knocked down to the lower bracket and won the Championship, and it is now completely obvious to me why we were knocked down and why we won in the end. The time we put into things we do ultimately affects our level, in other words practice makes perfect, and this can be reflected by our results in playoffs. In both matches we lost in CEVO playoffs, the importance of strategy was dismal at best; we just scrimmaged everyday and worked on our on-the-fly communication.

The moment we started winning was the moment that we strategized our matches. Creating the strats, individually improving player's roles in those strats, and fixing any problems post-scrim was a winning recipe in both seasons. The day and night difference from when we strategized to when we didn't couldn't be more obvious if it hit us in the face.

The article can be read in its entirity at http://kayzu.livejournal.com/tag/teamwork