Bravado Gaming, one of South Africa’s best professional gaming organisations, has sent its Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team to the United States.

The team aims to improve their level of gameplay by competing against the world’s best players on an international stage.

This initiative is named Project Destiny and is supported by Bravado Gaming, Intel, and Alienware.

So far, the Bravado CS:GO team is living up to expectations – recently claiming a victory in the ESEA Mountain Dew League.

To find out more about how the team’s training regime and performance has changed since playing in the US, MyBroadband spoke to Bravado Gaming CS:GO manager Tiaan Coertzen.

Training

Coertzen said the team’s training schedule and lifestyle have changed substantially since moving to the United States.

“It’s changed a lot for us since being in the US. On average, we practise six days a week,” he said.

This training comprises everything from friendlies against other teams to strategy meetings and watching demos of opponents’ games.

“We usually start our day around 13:00 with team practise, where we will work on new strategies or go over game footage of the team or opponents,” Coertzen said.

“From about 16:00 we start playing scrims against other teams, until 22:00. On days where we participate in qualifiers or have official games, our schedule will differ a bit to allow more down time.”

This schedule is far more stringent than the one the team followed when playing in South Africa, mostly due to the frequency of events.

“We try to take at least one day off per week, but it’s not always possible with the amount of events that we are able to participate in on this side of the world,” Coertzen said.

“Back in South Africa, we used to practise about four days a week from 18:00-22:00 and we would be lucky if we have an event every month.”

“Now we practise more than double that and we have an event every week,” he said.

Next level

Coertzen noted that the training and international matches have allowed the team to improve greatly in skill.

“You can’t compare the game we were playing in February to the game we are playing now,” he said.

“Sure, maybe we were making upsets against good teams back in February as well, but we wouldn’t necessarily know why we were winning or exactly why our strategies were working.”

However, this has changed as the team acquired more experience playing on the international stage.

“Because we play against so many different play styles every day, our understanding of the game has evolved so much in such a short time span,” Coertzen said.

“I think everyone on the team has already improved their game by 50% and we’re pushing hard to keep on improving every day.”

When it comes to the future plans for Bravado’s CS:GO team, Coertzen said a LAN event was the next milestone for the team.

“Our goals for the future are to make it into ESL Pro league and to qualify for an offline event, so we don’t intend on heading back to South Africa soon.”

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