EPT- coolHite - was Gold, now Platinum - 12/5/2010
- VanderLuust - was Gold, now Gold - 12/5/2010
- Codetta - was Bronze, now Bronze - 12/14/2010
- BabyToss - was Bronze, now Bronze - 12/15/2010
New Student: BabyToss
BabyToss is a brand new Starcraft player. She's Bronze, and has just a handful of games under her belt on the ladder. She wins about 50% of them so far.
Initial Impressions:
The Bad:
BabyToss doesn't build probes consistently. She clearly makes an effort to, but she seems to avoid queuing probes to the point where she lets several seconds elapse without one building. Her builds are pretty sloppy, building things in pretty reasonable order, but very late. She doesn't always keep her troops together, allowing them to get be divided and conquered. She is very passive in her games, not knowing when to pressure her opponent. Like other Bronze players, she seems a bit overwhelmed and nervous while playing. Her macro is, of course, not very good.
The Good:
BabyToss has better than average understanding of her matchups. Her openings are solid and she often builds pylons on time. She seems to have reasonable builds for each matchup. She knows how to wall off vs Zerg. She expands at very reasonable times, and she knows how to Maynard her probes. I even saw her blocking a zerg expo with her probe in one of her replays.
BabyToss is an interesting player because she is very self-conciouos and a bit overly critical. In my eyes, she is a typical new player, with maybe a bit more understanding than you're normal bronzie. In her eyes, she is terrible and untalented and she is constantly frustrated, not by the game, but with herself. She learns quickly though, so hopefully it won't be a problem.
Task one for BabyToss will be to get her building probes consistently and macroing better.
Update:
I've had the chance to work with BabyToss now, very briefly last night, and for quite a while tonight. We drilled on making probes for the duration of a game, which helped her economy drastically. Then we did a couple drills to give her the feeling of exhausting her economy with unit production. Next we worked on taking a build order she learned from iNcontrol and macroing properly while executing it. She learned quickly and I set her off to play a couple ladder games, where she was immediately canon rushed. So next I ran through a series of exercises designed to help her learn to smell cheese. Finally I showed her how to respond to a canon rush so that she had some idea what to do when it happens. She's going to ladder a bit tomorrow and we'll get back together soon to go over more fundamentals.
Codetta Update:
Had a chance to work with Codetta again, and he is a real pleasure to teach. He soaks up knowledge like Neo learning Kung-Fu. He had slipped a bit and was losing some games again at the bronze level. After watching his recent replays I could see some real problems. His macro was slipping and probe production was falling off. He had a tendency to make way too many zealots in his armies. He also had some weird quirky things going on like move commanding into the meatgrinder several times and queuing build commands on mining probes so that the buildings never got built.
We quickly corrected the move command problem by explaining when to use attack move. Next I explained what was going wrong when he was building structures, and he quickly corrected that. I introduced the idea of a build order to him so that he wouldn't look as lost and unsure when playing. Last, I drilled him on a basic PvP build order about 10 times over until he had it memorized. He definitely looked better than a bronze player after our 2 hour session, and after handily winning a ladder game he said he felt much better too. I think He'll be winning quite a few games in the near future.
Previous Entries:
Free Newb Coaching
Newb Coaching Status #1
Newb Coaching Status #2
Newb Coaching Status #3
Newb Coaching Status #4
