The Toronto Ultra punched their ticket to the winner’s bracket of next week’s Call of Duty League Major I Tournament with a 3-1 victory over the Seattle Surge earlier today, heading into the event with a three-match winning streak.
Toronto started their 2023 season off with a 3-1 loss at the hands of the Minnesota ROKKR, but since then have been unbeaten and will head to Raleigh, North Carolina with a 3-1 record in the season’s first set of online qualifiers.
The theme across this first part of the CDL season has been back-and-forth Hardpoints, and this match was no different. The series’ first map, Embassy Hardpoint, was extremely tight the entire way, with Seattle pulling out in the slimmest of margins, 250-239. Accuracy and Pred led the way for the side of Seattle, posting 1.25 and 1.33 K/Ds, respectively.
From that moment on, however, it was all Toronto.
The Ultra, led by third-year AR player, Insight, were methodical in the Fortress Search and Destroy. He posted a 9-3 stat line in the 6-3 Toronto victory, good for a 3.0 K/D in the game mode in which he always seems to excel. Standy and Scrappy were also standouts on the map, posting 1.6 and 2.0 K/Ds, respectively.
The series went to Hotel Control for its third map and Insight was putting on an impressive performance yet again, this time putting up 31 kills to only 16 deaths while dealing more than 3,400 worth of damage in his team’s 3-2 victory which gave Toronto a 2-1 lead.
The series stayed at Hotel as it went to another Hardpoint. This was another back-and-forth affair, with each CDL team trading blow after blow. But, thanks to superstar performances from Scrappy and Standy, who posted 1.40 and 1.47 K/Ds in the map respectively, the Ultra clinched the CoD map by a score of 250-232, giving the team a 3-1 victory.
Toronto now heads into next week’s major tournament with a ton of momentum, thanks to their three-match win streak, and excellent play by their superstars. Seattle, on the other hand, will head to the season’s first premier event with a 1-3 record, though that doesn’t tell the entire story for the Surge.
The team has been extremely close in their matches but has not yet put it together. Seattle will need a complete performance if they want to bring home another chip.
