EPTDear Gretorp.
Me and my good Terran buddy watch your stream often and it is a continuous source of inspiration; an overflowing oasis in a sea of misery and perceived imbalance and, well, shit. Your builds display such elegance with their lack of gimmicks and subtle timing switches from the perceived norm. Your TvP and TvT builds especially have become part of my standard play and part of my tournament repertoire.
Recently, a major tournament was announced for the Australian Starcraft 2 scene, a barren wasteland for the most part especially without GlaDe, a constant deluge of early game abuse, scrappy mechanics and all over the place builds. Any Australian SC2 event has had, at most, a prize pool of ~500 dollars.
And then the NRG Hardcore Gamer event got announced in my Home city; Sydney. The only place to live in Australia (everywhere else is camping out). The total prize pack of cash and goods was believed to be 20,000. 20 grand! 20 Thousand Dollareedoos! Inconceivable! A kingly sum for any e-sports event and all devoted towards one game, Starcraft 2. Dozens of contenders from across the mighty and spacious outback all flocked towards one locale, all for the joy, dedication, intensity and thrill of E-sports, for Starcraft 2, and for winning a fuckton of money.
And now we segue towards, of all things, Park Sung Joon; ST_July. In an interview after his thrashing of 4 international greats he closed with the statement "my teammate ST_Ace is going to Australia to play in a tournament, I hope he returns with lots of goodies!"
Oh shit.
Oh fucking shit-shit.
Motherfucking KOREAN MEGA GOSU, WINNER OF IEM, OWNER OF WHITE DUDES APLENTY is coming to Australia to wrest away this coveted trophy from the Australians, a land which has produced only one really good, really solid, really worthwhile Starcraft 2 player.
So I went in with a single goal in mind: return home with something shiny! I checked the brackets, no ACE until winners bracket finals. Phew, that's a load off my mind. But first I must destroy my countrymen!
TAnav was the first to fall, 2-0 to solid standard play. imskeptical, my good friend and trusted, wise advisor of all things Terran the second to fall 2-0. aLtPiG, a teammate, fell 2-1. VTAzz, the favoured for our bracket fell 2-0! Then FXOFilthy, the favourite of hist bracket by a longshot, one of strongest Terrans in the land dropped to my might, 2 games to 1.
Which meant only one thing. ST_Ace. The next challenge. He'd dropped only one game, to another teammate, aLtYoonYJ, and the pressure is on. But I felt confident, there was no fear. I'd already achieved my main goal of the event (to win something shiny), why should I feel nervous? Why feel pressured? He is only a man.
But there's another reason why I didn't feel nervous. I had your build. I had your build. I had your build and I knew how to use it, I knew how to destroy this ST_ACE, a mere man.
The map, Xel'naga Caverns. A risky map for rax expansion play, I opted for your mech opening. The first factory went down and I scouted 3 gate expansion. Nothing weird. Perfectly normal. The second factory went down, and then a third. At 9:30, my army of 3 tanks, 8 marines and 12 blue flame hellions crashed into his army. It consisted of 3 stalkers and roughly 20-ish zealot sentries.
Perfect. Perfect! Ace lost everything, every probe, every zealot, every sentry. No amount of forcefields will stop the lances of bluest heat from scouring the filthy protoss from the map.
But that's not the point of this letter. Getting a BO win over a Progamer is nothing to be truly proud of (well, ok, it totally fucking is). I did lose the next 2 rounds and it's down to the losers bracket.
Gretorp, I saw your MLG results today. I saw you go 0-3 in your group. I understand this must be very distressing. So know this Andre Hengshua. Somewhere out there, thousands of miles away, one fellow Terran, one disciple of the Gretorp stream, felt truly inspired by your play. The build you (and LZgamer) had developed and practiced inspired me to win this game. To feel truly confident from the first SCV split to the ST_ACE: GG.
So I want to thank you Gretorp. Thank you for inspiring this:
![[image loading]](http://www.sc2sea.com/images/ww/iaguz.jpg)
to beat this:
![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/images2/c/c9/Aceiemvictory.png)
Koreans might own white dudes, but not all the time. Not today. Not Starcraft.
aLt iaguz.
