After somewhat of a resurgence and a far more convincing performance at the CDL Stage 3 Major, Seth ‘Scump’ Abner has revealed the key reason behind their drastic improvement.
Throughout Stage 3, OpTic looked to be seriously struggling. Their losses were against top teams, but they just didn’t look like they were competing at the right level, especially in their quick loss against Atlanta FaZe.
While expectations were low headed into the Major, with the team starting in the Loser’s Bracket, they came out and made a decent run, sweeping Florida Mutineers and Dallas Empire and even taking Toronto Ultra to a game five, round 11.
They came fourth, and looked almost like the OpTic of old during their run, especially thanks to Dashy’s Team of the Week-caliber performance. But Scump says it boiled down to one key difference.
Appearing on the OpTic podcast, Scump and Matthew ‘FormaL’ Piper spoke about their Major performance, and what went wrong or right for the team throughout Stage 3.
“We literally just needed confidence again,” Scump said, after owner Hector ‘H3CZ’ Rodriguez brought up the changes in their play. “We know we’re good, it’s just we go into a match with no confidence and the result would speak for itself. And then we would lose more confidence.”
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He goes on to add that the team “needed one good day” to get into their stride, and that came in the form of their wins over Florida and Dallas. That has been huge for Scump, who says that he would now “be confident against any team again.”
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Of course, with that confidence came vast improvements in individual gameplay. Scump himself was great, and Dashy was absolutely lights-out, pulling off incredible plays and notching up the highest KD of the Major.
So, a confident OpTic is clearly one to fear, with each player firing on all cylinders and putting up a fight against the very best teams.
Now, looking ahead to Stage 4 and the return of LAN tournaments, many CDL teams will be increasingly wary of OpTic.