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United States Cup 2025 Experience

It's time for the tournament i've been waiting to play again for a year.

Quick Backstory

The first major tournament that I ever played in was funnily enough 5 Digit United States Cup. I preformed pretty well and was told that I may have a chance to qualify for the Pennsylvania team for the regular United States Cup.

So in 2024 I decided to give it a try and I managed to qualify. I managed to perform really well in the whole tournament and we managed to land in the top 6 for the first time.

Tryouts

Tryouts are usually the same state to state. You have a few days to a week to play through a pool of maps at around semi-finals level (or higher depending on the state) and the best performances overall or of certain skill sets get considered for the team.

Luckily I qualified i got into the team again and got this lovely acceptance letter from ArmaniDilbo.

Our team consists of: Solar, Sunwraith, BunnyLikeMoney, Danini, Ryunic, and me!

Since most of our team arent PATHETIC derankers (aka me) we seeded pretty high at #8. I should have ranked up a lot more to get our seeding higher but uhhhhhhhh FUCK FARMING.

Ro32 and the First Match

For the first match we were up against Hawaii who seeded pretty low so I was getting very cocky but that ended up bitting me in the ass because rank based seeding sucks and they were actually very good just not high ranked.

Round of 32 is pretty scary as the star rating of the pool is very easy and pretty much everyone can consistently full combo. Which turns matches into a battle of who has better nerve control and consistency.

The match was fairly close at 3-5. I didn't really practice the pool much and it was pretty late at night for me so that didn't help my nerves nor my consistency. The first pick was FM1 which was a generic jump map and I managed to get some pretty nasty misses but lucky Hawaii did as well so we pulled through.

Ro16 vs Nevada

The pool is now slighty harder but I was feeling pretty good about this match now that I have practiced the pool. Luckily we managed to sweep them and I managed to get first and only FC in the tournament on the no-mod precision pick. The only scary thing that happened in this match was my keypad randomly disconnecting on their warmup pick which really scared me.

With my FC and the good scores from my teammates it got PA to have the best score on the map across all matches. :3

And with that we ended the match with a 5-1 sweep.

First Loss Vs. North California

And we were now up against the #1 seed in the entire tournament. This team features many tournament veterans.

They are a pretty scary team in each USC having many veteran tournament players. The match wasn't very eventful and we almost got sweeped at 5-2.

We managed to get a point on the best map in the game by TheShadowofDark, the one and only CHICKEN FUNNY.

We also got another point on the DT2 map but no one cares about that.

Final Match Vs. Connecticut

Quite the unfortunate match for me looking back since it could have went so much better and if I just played a little bit better and practiced more we could have won.

We won our first pick on a high CS map that we pretty much all played EZ with since it was easy to learn to read didnt mean I had to play cs10. Solar (a.k.a Leggings) decided to play with HR only instead of EZFL like he practiced so that, if we won, our next match against Oregon they would be clueless that we could easily gap them.

I managed to get a pretty cracked score on this stream + aim map that I didnt expect to do so well on but I managed to top score it against the whole lobby.

And somehow I could even play the HR pick and didnt bottom score. :O The acc is still really shit though.

Unfortunately for the rest of the picks they were really close but they managed to get ahead. Quite unfortunate and I kinda mental boomed after but it is what it is.

Conclusion

So we managed to place 12th overall. Last year we placed 6th so it was a bit of a downgrade but it isn't too bad. I am very excited for next year since we will have an even more cracked roster and maybe I will have learned how to play hardrock by then.

Hopefully the next progress log will come out a bit faster. I have a few that are like half written but I keep putting off finishing them.