The CPP Esports Club’s Valorant teams competed in week one of the Collegiate Esports Association’s fall Valorant tournament on Friday, Sept. 18. For Bronco Esports, week one had its ups and downs.
The three teams, CPP Aqua, CPP Blue and CPP Cyan played the standard plant and diffuse mode where one team plants a bomb known as the “spike” and the other team diffuses it.
CPP Aqua was supposed to play against Ryerson A from Ryerson University but had to forfeit due to not having enough players for their team. A forfeit automatically awards the opposing team three points for the match.
CPP Blue played against GMU Blue from George Mason University and won both maps 13-5 and 13-5. CPP Blue earned a higher average rank than their opponent so they went in expecting to win.
“I feel like our games went really well,” said Zackary Johnson, a second-year electromechanical systems engineering technology student and member of the CPP Blue team. “We were playing effectively together, executing on sites and all of our strategies were working out in our favor, so we just had two pretty good matches.”
CPP Cyan was not as lucky and was pitted against a team with a much higher average rank than they had. This put them at a disadvantage and eventually lost both of their games with a score of 4-13 for both maps.
“It truly went as expected,” said Jason Kison a second-year chemical engineering student and captain of the team. “We didn’t go in thinking we would win, and we didn’t think we would pose a close match considering we already knew the ranking was so vastly skewed between the teams,” said Kison.
While two of the teams might not have performed as well as they had strived for, other members of the club hope that CPP will end up in the playoffs.
“I think our main team will do pretty well,” said Jakob DeMonaco, a third-year economics student and the director of competitions for Bronco Esports. “This past summer we entered in UCLA Esports Summer Invitational and I believe we got fourth overall, so I feel pretty confident in our teams; we have some pretty good players.”
This was just week one, and the CPP teams are not out of the tournament yet. The team will have other opportunities to improve and redeem themselves.
The tournament consists of a five-week group stage leading up to playoffs with divisions one to three consisting of 13 teams and division four consisting of 14 teams. The 53 teams represent 33 schools with allowed a maximum of three teams. Some competing universities include UCLA, UC Riverside and Arizona State University. The teams play their respective opponent at the same default time at 6 p.m. every Friday, unless rescheduled.
Matches are a best of two series which means that each team plays their opponent for two games regardless of the result. The tournament standings are evaluated by a point system granting teams a specific amount scaled off wins, ties and losses with wins granting the most points and losses the least.
At the end of the group stage, all points are calculated and the top eight teams from each division move on to playoffs. The current minimum for the combined prize pool is $1,500.
Week two began on Sept. 25. Week three is scheduled for Oct. 2 at 6 p.m. The last week of the group stage is on Oct. 16, meaning CPP teams will have to play against one new team each for every remaining week in order to secure a position in playoffs. More information can be found at the CEA League website.