Bravado Rebirthed

One of South Africa's best and most well known clans, Bravado Gaming, has returned to the scene after a shaky 2009.

Last year Bravado's Counter-Strike (CS) team, arguably one of the best in the country, saw three of its members leave to join Pantheon's CS team, leaving the future of Bravado in question.

However, Bravado has now launched a new website and announced that it not only has a new CS team, but also now has a Call of Duty 4 (CoD4) team, in the form of the CoD4 2009 Telkom Do Gaming League Champions, Brazen. Read more on that here.

Bravado has been on the scene for several years, enjoying some significant highlights – such as beating one of the best all-female CS teams in the world, PMS Clan, and facing an SK-Gaming team on CS at Africon 2008, which was hosted by Mind Sports South Africa (MSSA).

However, 2009 brought on significant challenges. First Bravado's DotA team, who made up most of the South African DotA Protea team, decided to stop playing competitively, forming a casual team called “Just Juking”. Then Bravado's CS team broke up.

It was then only the Hadjipaschali brothers who remained – Andreas “Cent” Hadjipaschali and Dimitri “Detrony” Hadjipaschali – and Andrew “Chay” Cowley, who joined Bravado to take up a management role.

During this shaky period, however, members of Bravado were still involved in the scene and a number of competitions, for example in the Incredible Connection 2009 MSSA LAN Championships in August last year, Dimitri Hadjipaschali was awarded national colours for winning the Quake 3 competition; and Andreas Hadjipaschali for winning the Starcraft competition.

New CS Team

The new Bravado CS team consists of the following members, in addition to the Hadjipaschali brothers, as per the Bravado website:

• Harry “incin” Apostoleris – formerly of Damage Control (DC), Apostoleris, as the Bravado website says, has competed in numerous international events such as the World Cyber Games (WCG), the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) and Kode5.
  
  
• Dane “racno” Friedman – Friedman was a player in Bravado some years ago and, according to Bravado's website, gained a great deal of experience through playing for the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) in the US.
  
  
• Giovanni “VamoozE” Bazaan – Bazaan has played for Pantheon Gaming and Bravado appear confident that he will add a great deal to the team.

The new Bravado CS team looks great on paper but it remains to be seen how well they will gel as a team. Either way, most of the community is surely happy to see Bravado return to the scene again.