The first day of Black Ops 6 at EWC was long, and for the most part, stuck to the script.
The Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 tournament has begun at the Esports World Cup (EWC), and the first day was one of the longest days of COD we've seen in quite some time. The entire day took roughly 12 hours to get through and consisted of over a dozen matches between the four pools.
In these matches, we saw a few teams advance to bracket play, while others will have to fight for their tournament lives at the start of day two. Day one mostly played out as fans expected, but there were a couple of shocking upsets that make the rest of the tournament extremely intriguing in terms of the potential matchups we could see.
Below, we'll recap the first day of Black Ops 6 at EWC and look ahead to what day two has in store.
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First day of Black Ops 6 at EWC goes mostly according to plan
The first day of the Black Ops 6 tournament began at 8:00 a.m. ET and ended 12 hours later with the final match between Movistar KOI (Toronto Ultra) and Boston Breach. The extra long day was mainly due to constant technical delays that caused match restarts and pauses in just about every match. Hopefully, the tech issues are sorted out for the remainder of the event.
Also, before the tournament began, EWC officials had to clarify a map problem. The map pool indicated that Protocol Hardpoint was in the map pool in place of Rewind, which was not communicated to the competing teams. Protocol HP hasn't been in the map pool for months, so this decision was likely a mistake on the part of EWC. It was rectified quickly, but some pros had some funny reactions to the snafu on social media.
Throughout the course of the long day, every team in the bracket played at least two matches to determine if they would advance straight through to bracket play or have to keep fighting on day two to stave off elimination.
The tournament began with OpTic Gaming playing their first match since winning CDL Champs a few weeks ago. OpTic faced off against amateur team Five Fears, who are only in the tournament due to the Carolina Royal Ravens being disqualified, and Cloud9 on day one. The Champs winners swept both teams, winning 3-0 in the two matches. OpTic had a couple of shaky maps but mostly looked dominant across all three game modes.
One top squad that didn't look dominant was FaZe Clan. FaZe struggled mightily on day one, barely scraping out a map five, round 11 win against amateur team OMiT after they came back from a 5-2 deficit in the second S&D. They followed that up by getting crushed by Team Heretics, 3-1. FaZe has continued to look poor since their surprise top six performance at Champs, and now the reigning EWC winners need to win their first match on day two to advance to bracket play.
The other team that placed top six at Champs, 100 Thieves, also didn't have the best start to EWC. 100 Thieves won their first match against Gentlemates, but it was by extremely slim margins, and then lost in a convincing 3-1 fashion to the Vancouver Surge. Dylan "Envoy" Hannon especially struggled, with Thomas "Scrap" Ernst also not putting forward an MVP-like performance.
The rest of the bracket played out as fans expected, with every amateur team losing their matchups against professional CDL squads. So far, OpTic, Movistar KOI, Vancouver Surge, and Team Heretics have punched their tickets to bracket play at EWC. The remaining teams will have to duke it out with each other at the beginning of day two to see who advances and who goes home with an early exit.
You can watch day two of Black Ops 6 at EWC starting at 8 a.m. ET (check out the full schedule in our previous guide). We'll post a day two recap after the tournament wraps up on Friday here at EsportsGG.
