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SPOILER: MLG day one spoiler. Still a good read!
Dear 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.
 
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gretorp is the man, any replays/vods? sounds like an awesome experience
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I too want a rep of this awesomeness.
And the "everywhere else is camping out" reminds me of sitting in my parents livingroom with my sister (who lived in aus for a couple of years) when we visited for some random holiday. The TV was on in the background and had some show about dangerous snakes or whatever and she casually goes "oh we had loads of those (some random deadly snake) in our backyard in Australia". Her reaction was like when you see an old classmate on TV calm interest on what the person is doing now, in this case the snakes were just hanging out doing whatever snakes do. Ohwell maybe snakes chilling in your garden is true for Sydney as well.
Sorry for going waaay off topic.
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so did u win the tourney or the entire tournament?
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Hah damn that is pretty awesome. Someone should forward this to Gretorp.
GL in the lower brackets and hopefully you can get your rematch in the finals.
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Thanks for sharing, <3 very interesting read.
Also good to see people like Ace who aren't afraid to head overseas to pick up more tournament wins.
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great blog, grats on your win and (if you're still in) best of luck in the rest of the tournament! Mad props to Ace for coming to all these foreign tournaments and giving everyone a taste of the Korean level of starcraft, he's becoming somewhat of an icon in that he more than any other Korean is willing to travel all over the place instead of staying in Korea.. hope he gets continued success. 
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Gretorp is an inspiration. He's one of the few players I still watch when streaming.
Too bad it's SC2 though...><
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I got 3rd, which was still good enough for 1k cash and a bunch of expensive Razer swag. Ace vs NgenLight is the finals. Ace gonna smash him I reckon! And he'll win 8k if he does, making this trip rather cost efficient. Probably...
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that is awesome! good luck in the lower bracket, hope you get to the final and get another game off him!
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Well done mate, great read
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On April 02 2011 20:21 iaguz wrote:
OWNER OF WHITE DUDES APLENTY
I motion that this becomes Ace's nickname.
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nice blog, nice that you did so well! congratz!
20k dollars :O
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Nice to see someone from Aus taking it to the Koreans (well aside from glade :D)
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Lol confusing. So you didn't win?
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I won one game. I lost the next two though, and thus the Bo3 series.
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This is awesome! Well done. If for nothing else than pure entertainment, Gretorp is one of the best!
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On April 02 2011 20:21 iaguz wrote:
The map, Xel'naga Caverns. A risky map for rax expansion play,
After casting your SEASL games, all I had to do was read this to know exactly what was coming. :p
(gjgj taking a game though, I'd love to get a chance to play someone like that)
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Gretorp and LZ are such awesome.
Your story is awesome, I would be so stoked if I took 1 game from a pro.
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Awesome story! Here's hoping you take down Ace next time around, taking a game off him was a good start!
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Congratz on taking a game off of them quite amazing by you !!!
Gretorp and LZ my favorite Ts in starcraft 2 <3
always rooting for them ^_^
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Awesome story! Congrats on taking a game off of a korean pro.
Be sure to check out the Gretorp Fanclub thread as well, he needs more lovin'.
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Baa?21244 Posts
Nice =]
you played RA3 competitively before, right?
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Uh, sort of. There wasn't much of a scene ><, but yeah, that's why I'm wearing my Soviet hat in that pic.
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Wow, amazing that you took a win off fuckin ace. Awesome! 
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I just waned to say that those hats Russians wear like the one in your pic are awesome (I need to get one...)
and also, Ace is a fuckin handsome dude, just sayin :D
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Wow great story man
I wish gretorp would start streaming more often again.
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Hey iaguz I just got home from MLG.
CongratulationsOMFGHOLYGUACAMOLY!!RJIOWEJF:JEWJ:WEIOFJOI:WEJFIO: :D
That's freaking awesome man. It feels good to win with that build for sure, but definitely thank Lzgamer more than me. I just edited it to be a bit more blind but much stronger for that push :-P
Thanks forr your support along with everyone else :-) Keep smashing face! :D
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This has got to be one of the best blog posts I've read so far, not saying that I've read many so far. I remember hearing how scared everyone was of ST_Ace rocking up, good to hear someone actually got at least one win, AND that Gretorp approves!
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EPT
