Gosucoaching, EG.Machine and MLG Raleigh Invite.

A little background info. I am a software engineer and an ASU Alumni. I'm 25 and live in arizona. I grew up playing video games and aspired to be a game developer.

I was lost on what to do after graduation, i had a job in my career field. I finished a huge milestone in my life. I found my self bored and searching for another milestone to hit. I didn't know what was going to happen the following months.

Life doesn't always play out to your dreams, but as I learned from playing zerg in starcraft 2, you must adapt, react and evolve.

For the record I did not play Broodwars past 2002, if memory serves, for school and other aspects of life took over, but i did love the game. I loved everything about the game and i was the best in my group of friends. I played all the races back then, I was fickle and wanted to try them all. I stop playing because i wasn't getting better and frustrated. Back then i also didn't know about iccup or the other elite leagues, without those I got bored always winning with my friends. Well not always, but 75% on the regular games, not the ladder mind you. I was never competitive with anything in my life. Well not to the level i would find myself latter in the year of 2010, the level of an actual live tournament. Sure i always wanted to be better than my friends or whoever i played, but i didn't know what football players, hockey, or even actual pro gamers felt or knew about competition until this year, until Starcraft 2 and MLG.

When i heard starcraft 2 was going to come out so many years ago i became ecstatic. Since blizzard's history of game announce and releasing, i knew i was in for a long wait. Then i started to hear about beta and beta releases. I had no intentions of going to Blizzcon but I did go to PAX 2009. Not knowing about beta keys there though. I wasn't annoyed with that, because i didn't know beta keys were being released until December of 09.

I got a new job March of 09 with a custom software company, where they asked me to move to the city of Tucson. My house is in Phoenix, roughly 2 hours from the town of tucson. During the week i'd be in Tucson in a tiny apartment and on the weekends I went back to my house in Phoenix. I didn't know to many people in tucson aside from my co-workers. So i stayed in during the week watching my movies/tvshows, since i didn't have a beta key. And then Gamestop started handing out keys to reservers, i was fucking ecstatic once again. So obviously i got a key and started to play every night.

Let me tell you now, I fucking sucked. I was horrible. What's worse, i choose the weakest race, zerg. I didn't know how to play, 8 years of no RTS, all FPS, sucked me dry of any strategic play. Real strategic play that is. I started to win only because i saw this video of someone proxy hatching and building spine crawlers in the enemy's base. This was before the nerf that blizzard put in to make spine crawlers reburrow take FUCKING FOREVER.

The place i found the video was a site i had never heard of, and knew nothing about it, Teamliquid.net. Yea if thats any indication of how much of a SC n00b i was. TL.net is an amazing site, admins who keep topics on topic and stop pointless flaming when necessary. TL.net is not an off topic, e-penis measuring forum. Well...maybe the second part. It is a professional starcraft site. Anyone who is anyone goes to here for starcraft. Desperate to get better, i found a thread for gosucoaching.com. I thought it was lame and stupid. Who would pay someone to learn a video game? How embarassing is that to tell your friends how you spend your money?

*side note* Let me tell you this, if you want to be anyone of worth in this world in any profession or career, you must, MUST, surround yourself around people who are smarter and better than you in that field or profession. Most famous people stood on the shoulder of many to get to where they are. Humanity is not a one man show. Day9 later would reinforce this belief.

I decided around april that i want to give sc2 a go, Professionally and competitively, at least for a year after its release. I knew i had to get better. So i browsed gosucoaching.com and realized that some of them lived in arizona, Queen creek to be exact. Queen Creek is about an hour and a half drive southeast of me. Its some what on the way to Tucson( my weekly commute at this point in time). I took this as a sign. I emailed Bryce "Machine" Bates for a lesson, well i wrote the email. I sent it a week later fighting myself the whole time. Do i want to sink so low to pay someone to teach me how to play a game? No it wasn't sinking low, it was me wanting to improve myself to play with the big leagues. We pay for schools, Personal trainers and tutors to improve ourselves, whats the difference here? The difference is social acceptance. And damn will i let that stop me from doing what i want.

I never understood why people did softball leagues, hockey leagues or bookclubs as adults. Then i became one, and sometimes working 40-60 hour weeks, you need an outlet. Starcraft 2 became mine.

I was 25,graduated,home owner, single, and had nothing to do during the week nights except watch tv and work out(which ended on july 27th). I had some extra money and the love of the game. Hell, its about time i start to do something with that combination.

Let see where did I leave off last time… Ah yes. I just accepted the fact that i was horrible, but if I wanted to get better before release i’d have to get someone to help me, and i did.

Bryce “Machine” Bates was a gosucoach that i found on gosucoaching.com where i was referred to from TeamLiquid.net. He is also a member of Team Evil Genuises(EG). At the time he charged 20 an hour, 30 for two. Not to expensive for a guy like me with some extra income. I recorded the first session using audacity, but i did not save the replay. What i didn't know then, was that Machine would become a good friend and my guide through the world of e-Sports.

Bryce gave me the vent(chat program) info via email and i signed on once our session started. I was quite nervous since it was an official Team’s ventrillo server. I was new to the scene so i wasn’t aware of where i was. For some background, Team EG is a professional gaming team. They have teams for many different games such as counter strike, street fighter and starcraft broodwar.

So our session started with introductions and what i wanted to work on. We did ZvP(Zerg Vs Protoss) and he gave me what i needed the most, a build order. Now a build order is the steps one takes to open up their game play. Sort of a recipe for a meal. I have the audio file, but the one thing that i remember most out of that 2 hour session is him saying ” you are 1000 times better than you were 2 hours ago”, and he was right. I was in gold(or silver) league at the time. The middle tier of the 5 division ladder system blizzard has put in place. I say gold or silver because they removed a bottom tier and also added a top tier(used to be platnium), diamond. I jumped to the top tier a day later. So i had a few other sessions with him during beta, and little did i know i was jumping in the world of competitive gaming with new friends who were the top starcraft players in the nation.

One of my games i played during the session was with Geoff ‘InControl’ Robinson. He was the 2nd person i met from the show “WGC Ultimate gamer”, the first was 2nd place guy at PAX 09. I didn’t know who it was at the time, because i had forgotten who he was(he got knocked out pretty early on the show). He said he was kind of the pioneer of starcraft coaching, and from what i know now..he was telling the truth.

As I got better and eventually got ballsy enough to go on their vent just to hang out. I also went to their house to hang out and watch them play. I became good friends with bryce and his Pro Gamer house roommates. They were Dan ‘Nyoken’, Kelby ‘InkA’ and Brent ‘Pysonic Reaver’. The first time i met up with them was a bit awkard. I got their address after talking to bryce that i also lived in arizona about an hour away from him, and said we should hang out. I was nervous and for some reason go paranoid at the last minute. I almost didn’t go, because i got lost and thought they were gonna be creepy. I was so wrong. These guys were friendly, cool and kind to me. Hell, i forgot i’m a gamer like them.

*side note: APM, actions per minute, is something i never understood or knew how people had such high APM. Then I watched bryce and kelby play once when i went over to their gamer house and i saw how they did it. They were spaming keystrokes and mouse clicks super fast. I’m like ooooh. But then i watched Day9 Daily / HD casts and they kinda explained why players do it.

As the game release, i played in tournaments and ladder to improve myself. I never got anywhere far in tournaments, but i got to play with some of the best. One was QXC.

QXC, or Kevin Riley, is a computer science student like myself( cept i’m graduated). I met him during one of the Coaching camps gosucoaching put up, well the only one at this point in time. He was a super nice guy despite being recently popular in the SC2 community. He had high APM, but he did something i hadn’t noticed before…he was clicking in between keystrokes purposefully and accurately. I asked him how he did that, he said with practice. Nothing special, just practice. This left me with something to think about.

Also at that coaching camp, i met the famous(in sc2 and WGC community) Geoff Incontrol. He’s a huge guy and could probably bench me. Funny and kind, Geoff was fun to be around. I also met the future owner of gosucoaching at that camp and Alex 'Shew', or now LGShew.

Around that time MLG announced that they will have SC2 in their events for the remainder of the year. Three large scale in North america tournaments with prize pool and glory. I had no idea what those were like. The EG guys know what to expect and do to get in them. There were 32 invites and 32 first-to-buy tickets. I had no interest at first, mostly due to me not at pro-level.

I’ve been hitting a skill slump and was stuck at rank 16 at the time in my division, but then i started to get the hang of it more and beat through the bubble of suck i was stuck in. I hit rank 5 or 6. At the same time itmeJP posted on TL.net that he said he had some left over invites. It was first pm first serve and you must be rank 8 in diamond at least. It was great timing for me. I sent him a PM and got my first invite to my first competition ever. It was fucking awesome and life changing. Bryce was happy. Kelby was like cool. Geoff was like “you’ll win” in his sarcastic ways.

MLG was a month or so away and I was on my way to being pro.