By Audissey Hernandez, Mar. 8, 2022
COVID Poly Pomona, Bronco Esports’ varsity Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team, played their fifth round of the season on Feb. 25, against Grand Canyon University, ending that best-of-three map series with another win added to their streak.
This series was the Bronco’s most difficult one yet with map three on Overpass, the decider map pick. CPP won the knife round that allowed them to choose to start on the counter-terrorist side. This map resulted in two overtimes until CPP powered through and earned the final win with a score of 22-18 in round 40.
The Overpass win was all thanks to Calvin Duong, a computer engineering student and player on the team, for his 3v1 clutch and defuse in round 34 for the 18-16 win which kept them alive and helped force the second overtime.
Jason Kison, a computer science and chemical engineering student and captain of the team, felt that their lack of communication was a big reason for the struggle the team faced when they switched to the terrorist side and were trying to close out map three.
“Overpass should not have gone for that long,” said Kison.” “It should’ve been like 16-9, 16-10 or 16-8, something like that. We were up 15-9 at one point, and we let them win seven in a row because we had one player in particular sit for too long on the complete other side of the map. We didn’t group up and gave free kills. We would get the opening kill and then were never able to capitalize on it.”
Although they got the win, Kison felt that they did not deserve it because they were not playing as well as they could have.
Map one was played on Nuke, GCU’s pick, which was a constant back-and-forth of round wins and losses. CPP won the knife round and chose to start on the counter-terrorist side, allowing for a better advantage when it came to rotations. However, they were not able to pull through and lost 16-13 in round 28.
Duong felt that the loss was due to the inexperience of playing that map as a team and he considers this map their worst for this series.
“I’m not sure if we could have prevented that loss because we just don’t practice it enough,” said Duong. “But that would probably be the way that we could have prevented it, just by practicing it more.”
Map two took place on Inferno, CPP’s pick. They won their knife round and chose to start on the counter-terrorist side. This map is one that the Broncos are familiar with; this resulted in better communication between the teammates and greater map knowledge that drove them to a 16-8 win in round 24.
Nathan Bach, a business administration student and player on the team, felt that the amount of practice they have had with Inferno caused the win, but he also believed it was partially because they were aware that they had to take it more seriously since they were a map down and needed to get that win.
“I think for about all of our series, we’ve played Inferno, so we’ve had a lot of time to practice on it and we’ve got pretty good synergy of where we want to position ourselves on the map,” said Bach.
COVID Poly Pomona’s second match of the season was played against Cal Poly San Luis Obispo where CPP won 2-0.
Round three of the season was against Triton Esports from The University of Guam where the Broncos won 2-0.
The fourth map series was CPP’s “bye” week. Since the West Conference only has nine teams, each week one team sits out and does not play. This means no win or loss.
COVID Poly Pomona is also participating in the “FACEIT Collegiate CS:GO NA 2022 League” this season where they are currently at a win-loss ratio of 2-2.
The Broncos play their next NACE Starleague match on March 11 at 7 p.m. and their next FACEIT match on March 12 at 3 p.m. Visit the NACE and FACEIT websites for more information.
Featured image by Audissey Hernandez.
