Fuckin’ A right!! All of our hard work and effort has paid off with Hardfought defeating Kill With Honor 16-11 on de_nuke during the second round of playoffs in the CAL-Open Central Division, season four. Moving on to the third round of playoffs means that we have secured a spot to move up to CAL-Main for season five ;-) The team has been workin’ their asses off since season two, improving their record every season since. And this time we fuckin’ earned the right to play in CAL-Main, instead of it being handed to us just because of someone’s misplaced reputation (read: Fontana). Needless to say, I am extremely proud of everyone on the team, and applaud their teamwork and dedication. I also want to thank all of the many teams who have scrimmed with us, and given us pointers and advice along the way… I’d love to mention everyone, but there’s too many for me to remember. If ya read this, you know who you are ;-) And last but not least, everyone in the community who’s supported us from day one.

Alright, let’s move on from that ‘Mochaccino Moment’ there, shall we? Focusing on the first half – Hardfought starts off as CT on de_nuke. It’s critical to dominate the CT side of this map, because playing terrorist is very difficult. Fortunately we locked ’em down, finishing the first half 10-5. Predator dominated this half by scoring an impressive 23 kills, with bl0wn and Sandbox not too far behind. A very solid half overall. FYI – click on the thumbnail pic to see the full-sized picture it represents.

Coming into the second half, things became… interesting. During intermission, our team manager Burzum called on a couple CAL admins to sit in on the match to observe. Kill With Honor wasn’t exactly thrilled about this, which caused some delay between sets. Once the second set went underway, Kill With Honor came out aggressive, winning the first two rounds, then with Hardfought answering back. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Predator, because of a brief outage from his ISP, timed out and disconnected. So for two round, we were down a man. We lost the first round where Pred timed out, but actually won a save round, with glocks only, before Pred could reconnect. Muahahah! :-P Hardfought then went on to win the second set and match 6-6, or 16-11 overall. Everyone had their moments during the second half (bl0wn with a end-round clutch to defend the bomb, Shade with three kills in the save round when we were down a man, etc).

And that’s that. We move on to the third round of the playoffs – against who I have no idea yet. I’ll edit this post when I find out… it’ll either be System Error or Clan ]Xe[, this next match should be later on in the week, map will be de_cpl_mill.

gg hf Hardfought ;-)