E-Sports @ OnRPG: May 4th Report – End of Broodwar; Beginning of SC2
By Umar Farooq (Kluey), OnRPG Journalist
End of Broodwar; Beginning of SC2
The Starcraft Broodwar scene in Korea has been renowned as the benchmark of a successful E-Sport around the world. Starcraft II, League of Legends and now DotA 2 have come somewhat close but haven’t matched it. The Broodwar scene in Korea was considered to be a sport by all Koreans. It was considered normal to go to school or work, come home after a long day, crack open a beer and watch some Starcraft on TV. The top players in the field could walk down the street and attract a huge crowd. Now that the Starcraft I scene is transitioning to Starcraft II, the logical prediction would be that all this will happen for Starcraft II. Is that a reasonable prediction? It’s hard to call as now there is a lot more money in the scene which can cause a huge failure or a miraculous achievement.
GSL Code S Round of 8
Naniwa against MVP has brought up some weird discussion. To sum up the Bo.5 they had quickly, Naniwa played well in a macro game against MVP in the first set. MVP noted that Naniwa liked to play ever so greedy and punished him for that in game two. Later in game three, MVP fell back to a macro game using a marine tank build. Naniwa literally had the perfect response. He attacked into MVP right before he was in siege mode. Into game four, MVP proxied two barracks and got an easy win with a bunker rush.
The discussion that was brought up was: Is cheesing Naniwa a lame move by MVP? What I think is that MVP had a good reason to cheese. Had MVP done that double proxy barracks play in the first game, I would’ve unsubscribed from his fan base and up-voted all the threads on reddit bashing him. But, that didn’t happen. MVP showed us why he’s the ‘genie’ Terran. He saw Naniwa playing super greedy and lacking good scouting skills and responded perfectly. What counters greedy play? Aggressive, cheesy play does. In the end, MVP was the better player in those 5 games and deserved that win.
Later in the day we witnessed PartinG just demolish FXOz 3 – 0 and showed us why PartinG is actually the best Protoss in the world right now. Against Oz, he did one of the most brilliant strategic moves I have ever seen. To zone out Oz’s blink stalkers, he left two immortals to basically tank the blink stalkers for a while. Oz fell for the trap and started to micro against the two immortals. While he was doing that, PartinG walked up into the natural of Oz, killed the sentries and won the game. While many people blamed that on Oz, even if he had force fielded that PartinG would’ve won. Force fields don’t stop units from walking up a ramp, they delay them. PartinG’s army was simply larger and any amount of delay wouldn’t have mattered.
The next day, it was time for Liquid to shine. Unfortunately, only one of their players made it to the Ro4, LiquidHerO. HerO played amazing even though he was ill! Throughout the games he showed us why he is the Bisu of Starcraft II. He used only micro intensive units, never the colossus or archon as his core unit. In one game specifically, HerO showed us why he’s such a badass. SuperNoVa used a Thor with SCV repair strategy and HerO demolished it with storm on the SCV’s and Immortals for DPS. That’s not the impressive part though. The impressive part was that he figured out it was a Thor build without getting an observer in his opponents base and to make a prediction like that takes quite some skill and knowledge about the game.
In the end, here is our Round of 4:
Predictions from me:
As for the upper end of the bracket, I think PartinG will slice through MVP like a hot knife through butter. The more interesting match will be HerO against Squirtle. HerO’s PvP is his weakest match up in my opinion while Squirtle’s PvP is statistically his best match up at a 76% winning percentage. I think that if HerO can prepare specific builds for this match, he is the better player at executing strategies. If he goes into this match like any other PvP, he will most likely lose.
Regardless of the outcome, I think PartinG will win later on in the finals.
TSL 4 is here!
So far, not much has been said about TSL4. What we do know is that the production value will be top notch and there will be a prize pool of 34,500 USD. We also know that the casters are: Day9, Chill, Husky, djWheat, and Apollo.
Because many people are new to Starcraft, I’d like to share a video of TSL3 and a little story. You know the best foreign Terran player ThorZain? He’s a byproduct of TSL 3. ThorZain beat FruitDealer(he was pretty good at the time), LiquidTyler, MC, Kas and then NaNiwa in the finals. Before this, absolutely no one knew who ThorZain was.
