The Call of Duty scene was shocked when OpTic Gaming were ousted so early from CWL Fort Worth, and star young gun Brandon ‘Dashy’ Otell gave some insight on what it was like during their run and what they team’s working on moving forward.
The Greenwall had gone into Texas as the favorites for the CWL’s first event in 2019. Coming hot off a dominating run in Las Vegas, the all-star lineup had everything going for them until a messy day of pool play led into brief Loser’s Bracket run.
In the latest episode of the CWL’s Hot Mic, host Clint ‘Maven’ Evans and Dashy went through how the team was feeling at the start of the tourney as going into a strong pool and the quality of play that led to unfortunate results.
What went wrong in Fort Worth
In looking at what went wrong for OpTic during their tournament, Dashy pointed to the hyped Group of Death in tandem with a slow ramp up to their form which eventually landed them in a tough situation.
“A couple things went wrong,” Dashy explained. “Obviously we got the hard pool, and we had a slow Friday. Obviously you play all your pool matches on Friday, you can’t start slow especially in a hard group like that. You just add so much pressure on yourself to win.”
The pressure definitely amounted since the team quickly dug a hole for themselves with back-to-back losses against Envy and Team Reciprocity. They were able to pick themselves up a bit by winning out against eUnited with an emphatic 3-0 fashion, but it still left the team in a precarious spot.
(Timestamp at 2:48 for mobile viewers)
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Dashy even recalled the funny calculations the team took into consideration in regards to the map wins, hoping they could get a lift out of Team Envy who had to win out against Reciprocity to avoid the Loser’s Bracket.
“We went 0-2 in our pool,” Dashy said. “We’re like ‘damn, we’re probably not going to make it out’ but then we thought about it ‘If [Reciprocity] lose to Envy, and we 3-0 eUnited [we have a chance].”
Getting Better
Dashy hilariously remembered rooting for Envy in the waning moments of pool play, knowing that they needed some help to avoid losers. That help didn’t come, and the rest of the event served as a worthwhile “reality check” for the OpTic team.
“[Since Fort Worth] we took our practice a lot more serious,” Dashy said. “Not to say we weren’t, but we just understood like ‘hey, we just got Top 12 our practices need to be serious.’ We got a reality check. We got smoked, basically.”
Though Fort Worth didn’t turn out results that OpTic would’ve wanted, Dashy is using the experience as motivation to “go hard and… prove why [they’re] one of the best teams in the world.”