The First Step

First allow me to introduce myself.
I'm a mid-masters zerg player named Raggy, I play for the team VIP-Gaming. I'm 18 years old and I'm at the last year of high school. I’m Danish and live in my own apartment. I love playing Starcraft, and have been doing so since it launched, I actually got into the beta but was a hardcore wow player at that point so did not give a shit.

What got me into Starcraft or rather, who. Well it was my father. Me and my father used to watch Stargate Atlantis together while I was younger and he then one day got a spam mail from a game company about starcraft he read though it and it reminded him of the series Stargate and then called me and asked if that game would be anything for me.

And so I got into starcraft. I played the campaign and beat it after about 2 weeks( I played on brutal). Then I decided to go on with the multiplayer picking a race, I wondered about what to pick for a long time, but finally decided to go with zerg since I had not tried them yet.

I joined my first game which was in practice league, my opponent a Terran asked if we could agree not to attack for the first 15 min. Ofc I said yes as the newbie I where. 7 minutes later when I had about 10 drones and 50 lings I decided to attack him thinking he would have nothing. Then I meet the siege tank, a unit that most zerg players have nightmares about when they go to sleep. I lost the game.

About 2 days later when I opened up SC2 again I figured if there would be any guides on the internet like there where for WoW. I searched and found a guide on how to six pool. As the newbie I was I where fascinated and tried it. The next 4 games I won, 3 against a Protoss and 1 against a Zerg. Then I joined the next game thinking “ Wow this is so easy maybe I will get the 5 win streak achievement”, I was wrong, this would not be easy as the opponent was a Terran. I made my six pool and walked my zerglings to his base but only to see a wall of.
I lost.

Later after searching for ages I found a guide on how to mutalisk rush from 1 base, into an expansion with about 10 spines. This would be my new build against terran.

With these 2builds I made it up into high silver. When I faced a protoss who 4 gated me. Never having seen any player get that many units that fast before I immediately changed race to protoss and did what he had done.

3 months later. I would now be a top diamond toss player working hard to improve my macro, looking down on the toss players who would win by cheesing. I had one goal, getting into the infamous Masters League. I almost made it, I started facing players who were in mid to high masters as equals. Then I decided to go on a vacation to France for about 2 and a half week. When I came back I sat down thinking I soon would get into masters, how wrong I where….

I lost the first of many games that day, all sight of macro skill I had before where now gone.

In frustration I started to use the 4 gate build which had gotten me to platinum league. Only to realize that the players I now faced had no problems against this build. I Then collected my thoughts and decided to play it straight up and get back into shape.

That was when I was contacted by a diamond Zerg player called VIPIrony. He had seen my post on a forum looking for a team or clan to play in. I then joined VIP-Gaming.

I got back into shape and started scraping the borders of master’s league again, but one night I had a discussion with Irony about how Zerg should be played. He meant that the only way to play Zerg where to sit back and macro up and then go destroy the opponent with superior macro. While I had an idea that as a zerg player you could utilize drops and counter attacks to win while still macroing up.

This made me do a thing that changed my life in many ways…

I changed to the dark side. I had joined The Swarm.

I bought a NA account and decided to train Zerg on that. I got into platinum league and started to learn the Zerg race. After about 2 weeks of training I decided to go back on my normal account and play. I played and started winning in Diamond and began meeting high diamond players. Then real life came into play, finals and other school related stuff. We are now at the very end of 2011 and I had been without a computer capable of running sc2 for 3 weeks, when I finally got my hands on one. I got on teamspeak with my team mates and started playing some ladder. I lost the first of many games that day. The next day I was really sad looking at my match history seeing that I had lost about 7 games in a row. Then I stayed up late to watch State of the Game, which is around 2 am in Denmark.

Around the end a guy asked Artosis what to do with ladder anxiety, which I had at this point due to the losing streak.

Dan then said something which changed my life. He said that if you wanted to do anything serious with SC2 you just have to hit that ladder button, face that you suck and lose if that’s what happens. I realized that he was right.
The next day totally pumped after what Artosis had said I played a ton on ladder games, about 15 I think. I won them all, around the last 10 games I started meeting favored players and masters players who were equal.

The next day after school I played 2 games and thought to myself, why not try and lose a game and see if I get promoted. I then six pooled a Terran player on Shattered Temple, but he had not walled of. I ofc won the game but did not get a promotion. About 4 games later I started getting on a losing streak. when I had lost 5 games I out of nowhere saw the Master League symbol on my screen. I shouted out so loudly that people walking on the streets would have been able to hear it. I had made it into masters league.

I now sit here 8 weeks later and I’m about mid masters level and started thinking. What am I gonna do with starcraft? go pro? keep playing for fun?

I then decided on a goal for myself.

Get into Grandmasters League, it seems very unlikely but well the same I thought about getting into Masters when I was Plat.