Another CAL season has come and gone and compLexity are the new CAL Invite champions. The team defied many people's expectations with their strong showing at the CPL Winter event where they were able to take down mousesports, 4kings, D-Skyline and Titans (now SK Gaming) eventually placing 5th. GotFrag was able to catch up with Danny "fRoD" Montaner of the newly crowned champions to see what it feels like to add a CAL Invite championship title under his belt.

Congratulations on your victory tonight, how does it feel to win the CAL Invite championship?
Thank you, and.. it feels GREAT! CAL-invite is probably the most prestigious league in all of Counter-Strike, and to finally win something that I only dreamed of competing in is a dream come true. I remember being in the lower tier leagues wishing I just had the opportunity to play in Invite, then make it to the playoffs, then win it all. Finally, after 6-7 seasons of being in CAL, I got a title!

Did you expect at the start of the season that you would have such a dominating season?
Coming off a great CPL performance, I felt that we [coL] could do anything we set our minds to. We set our minds to making coL a household name, and getting a lot of exposure. If winning CAL-invite is going to help, we will try and win it. If Cevo/GGL will help, we will also try our best to win those leagues as well.

coL announced that you will be attending the ACON5 qualifier in Chicago before going to CPL Spain. Have you decided between ESWC and CPL?
The question right now isn’t between ESWC and CPL, it is between 1.6 and Source. There are too many events out there to just dump 1.6, dump the name we've worked so hard to build, for a game that clearly isn't ready for CPL, and doesn't even have many tournaments for. We love CS, and we love playing with each other.

You have a busy schedule coming up, are you worried you may get burned out at all? How did you prepare for your matches? Did anything change from when you were in Main?
I don’t think we will get burned out at ALL unless someone starts hating the game itself, until then we will keep on truckn'. Our practice schedule from day 1 was practicing from Sunday-Thursday, 6pm-10pm est. This was implemented during the break between the CAL season coL won CAL-im. We have not changed our schedule, but in fact we will be practicing 1 more day a week in preparation to CPL Spain.

All season long you have personally dominated the competition and you get most of the spotlight. Who would you say is one of the more underrated players on the team?
You clearly saw the extremely clutch play by warden tonight. Everyone knows sunman is an amazing player, most people know that tr1p is a great strat caller and also very clutch, and certainly most people think Storm has excellent rifles and has also had an amazing season stats wise. But, warden is the player people seem to push aside since he took a break from CAL-invite to play with coL back in the CAL-im days. Matt and I have been good friends for over 3 1/2 years now, and it feels great to be on another team with him, and share all these wonderful accomplishments with him. Matt is a great friend and player, and hopefully people get off his case and realize he is a big threat after this match.

Any general comments on how you think this CAL season went? With all the cheaters, move-ups and packeting, it has been quite an interesting season to say the least.
I think this CAL season went great. Now, with the cheaters.. well, it’s life. People begin to start cheating, and they think they are untouchable, but in the end you get what you deserve. The players caught hacking were dealt with and hopefully made an example that no one is untouchable no matter what league you are in. Packeting was a major issue until cPP came out (compLexity Packet Protection). The playoffs were played without any packet issue which is great to see matches aren't decided by immature children.

How did you feel coming 5th at the CPL, you defeated and dominated some impressive teams, what did it feel like for you?
We were a team going through a lot of criticism from the community, so it felt amazing to prove everyone wrong. We got the respect that we deserved, and that was one of the many missions we had set out for that CPL.

What do you think would be coL's weakest and strongest points? Weakest and strongest maps?
I personally think we have two weaknesses. One being the fact that we might become overconfident playing some teams, but that's why we have people like warden and 1 to keep us in check. Two being other teams not scrimming. By this I mean, we play from 6pm-10pm, but most of the time we sit on irc doing nothing because other teams don't play. Currently, I think our dust2 needs some work, but we have been practicing this map to fix our flaws non-stop and we will be ready for any match on this map.

What are your thoughts on CAL deciding to change their decision to keep 1.6 invite rather than forcing teams to switch to source?
I think CAL realized they cant force Source upon all the players. People need to be able to have a choice in what games they want to play.

How do you feel about the competition in CAL-I this season? You beat some pretty top ranked teams by some large margins (3D 25-5, u5 20-10 twice, zEx 16-6, TEC 16-4/21-9). In fact, only zEx and DZ got more than 10 rounds in a match against you guys this season.
We practiced hard for this, and the outcome of the matches showed that we were prepared. We not only wanted to win, but we wanted to make a statement with each and every round/match we played this season.

Now that you have placed well at the CPL and won CAL Invite, you're definitely gaining a lot of exposure and gaining fans in the process. I know you already mentioned that it felt good proving people wrong, do you consider this a sort of sweet justice?
Yea very much so :)

Other than that I think that's about it, thank you for taking the time to do this. Would you like to give any shoutouts to sponsors or buddies?
I would like to thank GameComm, Icemat, Steelpad, HiDef, Comcage, IMG, and especially Subway for making our trip to Spain possible. Also, I want to give a shoutout local buddies: silentzero, gotenks, fish, dookie, roach, alien, big mike, favian, temilo, krupt, ripndip, zycer, chrome, and all the other crazy people I chill with on the weekends!

Thank you to Danny "fRoD" Montaner for taking the time to answer these questions and congratulations to compLexity on their victory.