EPTTo start the night we decided to play one game on our masters account to warm up. http://drop.sc/29197
An easy victory which we thought would be a good omen for things to come. My teammate said he didnt want to play many warmup games so we entered the chat channel for the tourney to scope out the opponents. Immediatly my eyes were drawn to the names of EGaxslav and EGstrifeco. I was torn between really wanting to play them to avoiding them at all costs. I thought it would be cool to play them but on the other hand didnt want an early exit. We had now delusions that we had a chance at winning but we had hoped to at least win one match and maybe take a pro by suprise and pull an upset.
A lot of random people entered the chat took one look at the player list and made comments like "lol guess im not entering" which i thought was ridicoulous. I dont really get why people care if they get smashed or not i cant think of anything better going against pros since i would normally have no chance to play them.
Players continued to stream in with some infamous players like ratzdeezer combatex, and sorcery. Other names i recognized such as spanishwa some vVv guys and others i vaguely remeber from playing on ladder. Finally the check in process completes and the brackets get released and our opponents are SCDfox and SCDPyre. I had never heard of the SCD clan but looking at their profiles they were top master players in 1v1 and appeared to not have much 2v2 experience. We also got a bye from the first round so we were immediatly in the rd of 32 and with one win we would be in the round of 16. Team eg was on the other side of the bracket as well as combatex and deezer. However if we did advance and spanishwa won his first two games we would play him.
Cant look ahead though got to conentrate on the game at hand
Game 1
of best of three
warning spoilers lol
http://drop.sc/29203
Scorched Haven
Ok to start we decide have begin with my standard 10 pool w/o gas build. A sloppy wall off alows my inital ling to get in due to a sloppy wall off and get be an annoyance for a while. I think the enemy overreacted here fully epecting more lings to be coming but it was not the case. So i see a very delayed cyber core and a lot of zealots. Still in the dark about the other guy. Felt it was safe to expand and did.make drones for a while then start building roaches. Then some strangeness. They atk us but only one of them with a proxy pylon in the back but it didnt matter because it was 2v1. Where was the other guys army?????? After cleaning up the small push we press our advantage and go for the juglar. It apperas we have a victory destroying the small forces of blue but to dismay out of oranges base comes.......... a god damn mothership and carriers!!!! ok we back out we still did dmg after all and had more bases. They come with the mothership to the opening of our natural but dont atk??? guess they wanted to get there bases up? We decide to set up a contain of our own and wait till max to atk with the idea being to neural the mothership and vortex their army which works but to our dismay we start to lose our foothold and must back out and sac the golds we had taken.
I started to get nervous at this point and my mouse hand actually started to shake and i starting screwing up missing a lot of injects. I dont know but i feel one of the worst feeling in the world is going back to your base to realize you have only 3 larva at each of your hatchries and i felt we were gonna lose. I then actually had this thought to myself in game, " What the hell is wrong with you this aint the god damn GSL man up.
I managed to eek out 22 corrupters and we won.
On to game 2
Game 2
1-0 good guys
Tyador Keep
http://drop.sc/29208
After some celebration on teamspeak we enter game 2. Apparently i was a little amped gues my apm was around 200 for the first 5 min when i normally hover around 100. We decide to my standard build while we get blink stalkers. We felt it would absouloutly destroy them if they decieded to teech to mother ship again. My 10 pool forces a complete wall as well as a forge so we were kind of wary of a similar tech build. When our blink stalkers hit we see the twlight council and i remark DT's? My teammate says well they have a lot of stalkers and they just used blink so im gonna say blink. So after excellent scouting and almost sniping one main nexus we get ready for the big push. We are able to hold and i felt i was macroing well i get out a lot of roaches and we push back. I get a few infestors and its gg.
2-0 advance to the round of 16
ah it feels great
Doesnt just roll of the tounge round of 16 sounds good on a resume dosent it.
We have to wait for our next game as the previous rounds haven't finished. We talk on teamspeak and half listen to the stream of the tournament. I notice both team eg is still alive as well as combat ex and deezer and i start to think i hope this stream is on a delay.
Quickly we find out we are facing none other than spanshiwa's team. Unfortunatly they dont cast the games but whatever.
Game 1
http://drop.sc/29214
Ruins of tarsonis
vs a double z team.......uh oh
i think our lack of experience really let us down here as we got a good read on what we expected to happen and we were right as my 10 pool was able to get 2 drones and from the info i got i expected a lot of speedlings with banelings likely. I thought my normal quick roachs would be able to hold it off with zealot support....... i was wrong the amount of speedlings was stagering and we were overwhlemed my roachs were able to kill a lot of banelings but it was way 2 late.
1-0 bad guys
Game 2
http://drop.sc/29215
Tyrador keep
We pick tyrador keep because..... i dont really know why but i guess since we have never lost on that map it felt like a good enough reason. they do a similar opening and we wall off completely and my teammate take the inside base. they have total map control and it dosent feel safe for me to expand. Looking back we should made an effort for me to gain an expo we did have a good amount of sentries so we should have been able to hold it. They had an econmic advantage so we diecide to push but we get crushed and its our exit from the tourney.
2-0 bad guys
conclusion
Looking back on the tourney the 2 wins felt amazing while the 2 losses i think just really showed us we have so much more to learn builds we think our safe really arent but i also felt it was due to not being in that situation a lot. I think just playing a lot more will be the solution for us.
Some personal things i notcied i felt i was playing real fast at times and i think i just need to calm down. I dont know if pros ever get this feeling but the tournament games felt diffrent to me and i felt diffrent while playing. Even though it was only for 250 dollars for some reason it just felt so diffrent from ladder. Maybe that feeling will go away once i play more games.
On the tournament itself. I loved the open nature of it i didnt have to prove anything to anyone to get into just give our names and we were in. It fell really cool to possibly go up against the pros from eg and to actually play one in spanishiwa
But i've talked to much its time to play and get better and i hope for the next tourney will be even a bigger step forward.
