Pandemic.CoD4 will be kicking off CEVO’s first season of Call of Duty 4 competition this Thursday in what looks to be a tough start to a great season. Pandemic.CoD4 had originally won the Xfire First Strike CoD4 tournament, which started roughly a week after CoD4 was released, and established themselves as the top competitor early. Following the First Strike tournament, Pandemic entered into CEVO’s free Finish the Fight Tournament in what many would be another repeat victory for championship Pandemic team. Although Pandemic managed to breeze by their groupstage competition fairly easily, and dominated Feature Gaming 13-0 in the first round of the tournament single elimination playoffs, they would be dealt a disappointing 7-13 loss to Bloodline Gaming in round two of the tournament playoffs due to the inability to field five starting players.

Team captain Joe “nabore” Amorosa comments, “Due to the nature of the CEVO Placement Tournament, teams were not able to reschedule matches. This created problems for some teams, ours included. We were scheduled to play Bloodline on mp_crash, and the Gods of the internet were not happy with us that day. Miller's connection was completely out, and my connection only allowed me to play 10 seconds of every round, forcing me into a connection interrupted the rest.”

“This meant a 3v5 scenario until half-time. Once half-time came around Miller's connection came back, but the score was already 9-3 in favor of bloodline who capitalized nicely on our disadvantage. Still being at the mercy of my own connection, the team basically played 4v5 the next half. We came close but not close enough and the match was 13-7 Bloodline,” explains Amorosa. “ This has been our only loss in CoD4 as we currently have an overall 17-1 record since the game was released.”

Unfortunately this early exit meant that Pandemic would not receive an auto berth into the CEVO’s Season 1 Professional division following the tournament, but rather, Pandemic would compete against thirty two other teams in the double elimination pro placement tournament. After receiving a bye the first round of the tournament, Pandemic faced off against a tough Dirty Birds team who placed extraordinarily well in the Xfire tournament, narrowly winning the match in overtime 16-14.

“District is one of those maps that I think we got off on the wrong foot. We got very complicated with our strats and did not play a shooters game for a shooters map. I think Dirty Birds played very well. They took parts of the map they needed to when they predicted what we were doing and it payed off for them. As for what we did in reflection on that match, we basically turned our vision inside out and started from scratch. This is what is going to happen with a new game; basically it's a trial and error process until we figure out the most effective routes and strats to pull off,” says Amorosa about the match.

A win in their next match in the upper bracket, against all star gamer Jacob “NightFaLL” Stanton’s team Phoenix, would advance them to the professional division where a loss would send them to the lower bracket to play two more matches before possibly making the cut. Again, Pandemic seemed come through, bringing in 9 rounds in the first half to narrowly win the match 13-11 over an impressive Phoenix team.

“Phoenix was an interesting match because it was one of their first matches as a team. The map was pipeline, which I think is one of our better maps. We took defense first and came out of the gate strong. Towards the middle of the match though we had a lot of rounds in our favor that we let go, an example is one of the 4v2s we lost. When I look back at that match I kick myself for playing the B side so poorly. I think that scrimming Jacob's Team a few weeks before that match on that map gave them a decent insight as to how aggressive we play the B side and it helped them a bit going in,” explains Amorosa.

He continues, “We started sending miller close to the B warehouse to apply pressure on the Phoenix members who were using long range guns on that side. I was actually very impressed with how we managed to pull out the victory since the score was 10-10 towards the end. If you would have told me we would have won at that point I probably would have laughed. Aside from that and superb defensive play by Jason (crzg), we managed to squeeze out the win.”

In the wait for the season to start, however, Pandemic made a silent change to their roster by bringing in former CoD1 Locked on Target star, Khiem "lesauce" Le. Le will be acting as the team’s 6th man rotating in and out when needed. “Le is a friend of mine that traces back to my early CoD1 days. I first met him when he was admining a tournament over at web2zone. I knew that he actively played CoD1 and at the time was on a top team when I just started to get into the mix. Unfortunately, as my career started to progress, his started to minimize. He took more of an administrative role, admining big CS events etc. Once CoD4 came out I noticed he became more active again,” says Amorosa.

“His timing to PM me could not have been any more perfect about recruitment. It was like the day after our Bloodline 3v5 loss and recruiting a backup was something we were actively talking about. We started playing with Le whenever we didn't have our normal 5 guys on, which was good for us because it meant we can play for longer periods of time. The way things turned out, Miller's schedule was so rough that it forced us to use him as a backup.”

Amorosa concludes, “As things stand right now, Miller's schedule is him working from 5pm-midnight nearly every day. He is trying to fix that but requested that he would need some time to find an employee to cover his shifts. In the meantime Le has moved to a starting role and will be competing with us at the NERV LAN in PA.”

With all eyes fixed ahead, Pandemic gears up to face CEVO’s Finish the Fight tournament champions, Guardians, who recently acquired CPL CoD1 champion and WSVG CoD2 3rd place winner
Chris "-47-!" Maglio from Phoenix. Led by
Mike “havax” Davis, also formally of the 20ID CoD2 team that took 3rd at WSVG Dallas, Guardians look to put a stop to Pandemic’s winning streak and dethrone Pandemic as the widely considered best team in North America.

“With Miller going inactive for a bit we have been trying to pick up the pace to get Le up to speed. We feel confident enough to take down Guardians with our mix of aggressive and passive play. I would look for Nabore and Keith to put up huge numbers seeing as they have been dominating scrims,” says Pandemic’s Justin “prank`” DeMara.