EPTWhat happened? Well ...
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Since I got placed Gold in the retail version placement, I was afraid to lose this middle-of-the-road status but then got demoted to Silver because I did not improve my play at all while the rest of the ladder players did. In Silver, I resorted to 7RR and at least stabilized somewhat, but played very poor at the end of Season 1 so I got demoted to Bronze for Season 2.
This concerned me. Well I am really not a good player, but Bronze? There is no excuse like "I am actually on Silver level, but I also have a real life and cannot play as much as the kids out there" or "I have an understanding of the game at least for Gold level, but lack of practice so I get outplayed by kids who just act faster".
No, I got placed Bronze. That means, I am on Bronze level, in the worst 20% of the active players. I don't just have some holes in my place or a bit to little practice. I do suck big time. I began to copy the 15H15P but had not much success.
I paid a well-known European zerg an hourly wage to get an hour of coaching and he identified veeery big mistakes in my play and told me with no suger-coating at all. My build order executen: Very poor. My strategies: Junk. For example why did I tech to mutalisks, a harass unit, versus a 1-base terran? As my Baneling-bust did not work, what was the follow-up in my game plan?
After the coaching, I changed my style of play. What then happened is the best experience so far in my SC2 career: I began to notice why I lost or won a game. Before that, my strategy either worked or it did not work. But now I began to play to stack any little gain I could get until I was quite sure that I really can go kill him. Or I don't kill him at all, but let him bleed out so he actually kills himself.
I have more control over the game flow as I could imagine. Of course I still make many mistakes. My old habits of doing a baneling-bust with no proper follow-up, or to forget scouting after early game, or teching wildly with no much reason are still in place. BUT! I also have games where I predicted his strategy based on incomplete information, defended it and won. I have games where I can use map control to such an advantage that just the notice that he is trying to expand there was key to push his main and win.
Even better, my new habit to alway take an early expo versus T and P pays off. In the most recently game I played, I executed my BO very sloppily but still got my expo. Then the Terran had hellions to get control over the watch towers on Xel'Naga caverns. He then pushed with rines, tanks with siege and bunkers. Even with poor micro and the loss of many lings, two queens and a spine crawler – I managed to hold my expansion. He reinforced his contain but I already made roaches, built an inbase-hatch and evolved roach speed. Because I had an expo – not fully saturated, but still – I could afford a lot of units.
This enabled me to break his contain and go on a victory march to his base as he was just trying to expand. My army killed his army, I broke his wall-in on his main and killed his last defenses. He typed "noob" and left the game.
And I got promoted back to Silver.
