The Los Angeles Thieves pulled off one of the most unlikely wins the Call of Duty League will see all season, coming down from a 2-0 deficit against OpTic Chicago to win 3-2 today and break OpTic’s four-match winning streak.
Chicago looked untouchable in the first two maps of the series, winning Moscow Hardpoint 250-72 and Express Search and Destroy 6-1. But from that point on, the series was all Thieves.
L.A. flipped a switch and started to pop off on every map. Kenny had himself a series, posting a 1.13 K/D over the series’ five games, including a dominant performance in map three. Kenny went 31-19 on Checkmate Control leading the Thieves to a 3-1 win in a map that L.A. had to have.
“We knew that map three would be the swing map to at least get back in the series and make it close,” Kenny said after the series. “They were just dominating us one and two, so going into map three, like I said, we just went in confident, just played our game, and just said ‘play like we play in practice.'”
For OpTic, there’s no sugarcoating that this was a brutal collapse. Chicago were on the precipice of finishing Stage Five group play undefeated with a 5-0 record and heading into the final two events of the CDL season with a ton of momentum. Instead, they let a shaky Thieves team reverse sweep them to end their win streak.
This loss isn’t the end of the world for OpTic, but they’ll need to regain heading into next week’s Stage Five Major. Chicago is a team that feeds on positive momentum, so they’ll need to ensure that this loss doesn’t carry over to their next set of matches. But not all is lost for OpTic. The team locked up the first seed in Group A for the Stage Five Major and will begin the event in the winners bracket.
Both Chicago and L.A. will be back in action at the CDL Stage Five Major in Arlington, Texas starting on July 29.
