Tonight, we faced off against the San Francisco Optx on de_contra for our first match of the CEVO-p season. Coming off some productive practices the team felt focused and confident going into the match.

After we won the knife fight with some impressive shanking from nickn0it we were able to start off the match on defense. The match started out great with 5 straight round wins in a row. Spirits were high and we were really rolling along like an unstoppable train. Like most top level CS matches go, however, the Optx were able to start adapting and mount a comeback.

The Optx would go on to win three straight rounds and narrow the score to a more nailbiting 5-3. Going into the last round of the CT half the team kept it’s cool and we were able to pull out a victory to cap off the half with a pretty comfortable 6-3 lead. However, things took a turn for the worse at the start of the offensive half when we dropped 4 more consecutive rounds after some nice rush stops by the Optx. Going into the fifth round we decided to put our heads together and totally change our style of play.

Learning from our mistakes in practices we were able to adapt to Optx’s defense and tie up the game going into the final round. Paradox is never a player that you want to lose early in the round but he wasn’t able to get past the AWP posted up in middle. That left it all up to the remaining four members of the Pandemic crew. Walking up the mud I turned my crosshair to Kyle “Mustang” Cummings remembering all of the CS:S Deathmatch and aim_map work we had put in the days before gave me a boost of confidence. Even though we were down a man I was still confident we had the round. We were able to take the A bombsite from the Optx and secure a plant. In a 1vs3 situation it was all up to Pham from the Optx. I was taken down in the bombsite by his AWP after planting and he was sneaky enough to get up close on nickn0it and eliminate him as well leaving it all up to our fearless leader Juan to win the match for us. I knew we had the match at this point because Juan was no sucker to the defuse fakes Pham was throwing out. Juan was able to take down Pham and secure the first match of the CEVO-p season for Pandemic.

Statistical Breakdown: GotFrag.com's Gamesense Box Score