EPTFriday:
Very early Friday morning me and 3 friends left from Rochester on our way to MLG. The drive there was a pretty long 6 hour ordeal. I drove the whole way while my friends spent most of the time napping and just resting. We arrived at our pretty cheap and crappy hotel around noon and checked in. We went and grabbed food at an Asian restaurant that was right next to the hotel. After we finished we headed to the convention center to start our MLG weekend.
When we arrived, 2 of my friends had to go grab player passes and I grabbed my spectator pass and went on inside. This is my 2nd time at MLG so I wasn't as awestruck as I was in Providence but if you've ever been to an MLG you know the feeling when you walk into the arena for the first time. It's really an amazing experience and I recommend that if you can GO TO AN MLG.
I was just walking around and I said hi to some people that I knew from online but hadn't met offline just yet like iSPyre, Pokebunny, ClashVirgil, and some guys from cvg. For awhile I just hung around and waited for games to start up.
Once games started up my 2 friends had to go play their matches and I just tried to keep an eye on them the whole time. One of my friends is just a mid masters player that played coLRyze first round and lost to him 2-1. My other friend, you may have heard of him over the weekend, was Yata. His first two rounds were easy for him but we had figured out that he was going to play Fnatic's aLive in his third round match. This match was the biggest thing that happened for me on Friday.
The first game was a relatively expected stomping. Alive was just everywhere and Yata couldn't keep up with the drops and just fell to his harass. However, it was the second game that was the most exciting game of the day for me. Yata chose Antiga Shipyard as the map for the second game. Early in the midgame Yata baited out aLive's army with just a few stalkers and had hidden his army in aLive's third. Once aLive came out Yata brought his army down the ramp and absolutely crushed through aLive's army at that point. From there Yata probably could have gone in for the killing blow but he was content with backing up and macroing up. He added on tech structures and upgrades. Then aLive came over and put on insane pressure on the cliff to Yata's main. If you've ever tried to face a Terran that's good at abusing that cliff on Antiga you know how frustrating and annoying that can be. As a result of that pressure Yata was unable to take his third and fell behind economically and he lost from there.
After that match we spent the rest of Friday just watching matches that were going on around the player's area.
Saturday:
We got to the event around 1 pm because the games really didn't start until two for Yata. The previous night we figured out that if Yata got through two rounds he would be playing Destiny. The two people that stood in his way were relative nobody's. When he got Destiny it was a relatively easy 2-0. I believe a ton of people have seen Destiny's tweet referencing these games and I'll tell you the first game was "cheesy" and all in. Yata did a 3 stargate build and pushed with a bunch of phoenix and voidrays along with some gateway units and Destiny was simply not ready for it and died. The second game however was a 2 base immortal push that was not cheesy and it was not all in.
After Destiny it was ClashShew on the other side of the table. During all of Yata's games on Saturday I sat behind him and watched so if it seems like I'm just talking about his run through MLG it's because that's really all I watched on Saturday.
The first game against Shew, Shew cannon rushed on Antiga and it failed. Yata was able to get a pylon into his base and from there it was simple. The second game was a long macro game and Yata made a misstep engaging shew's army only 30 seconds before he was going to have a Mothership. So now that series was locked 1-1 and it went to the last game and I'm failing to recall exactly what happened in this game but Yata was able to take it and move on to play none other that Complexity's Killer.
This match was the single most exciting part of the weekend for me. First game Killer did a 4 gate while Yata went 2 gate stargate. Yata held his ramp with sentries while Killer expanded behind his 4 gate. Yata added 2 more gateways and just plain old attacked and killed Killer rather easily. The second game Yata did a dt rush that was scouted by killer and it failed and Killer came and killed him with blink stalkers after he tried to expand. For the third map Yata chose tal'darim altar for a pvp. Yata did the same exact build that he did in game 2 except that Killer only spotted the Twilight council and did not spot the Dark Shrine. Killer 4 gated and he had made a robo in advance however, there was only 1 pylon powering it. With just a few seconds left on the observer build time the pylon died and with that the game. Killer stayed until his last unit died but he had been knocked out by some guy from the NA ladder.
After that game Yata had to play Drewbie and according to someone who had overheard a conversation that Drewbie was having he underestimated Yata's skill because he was just an NA ladder player. Yata took a quick 2-0 over Drewbie and moved on to face the Korean that is so well known for his TvP and how just amazing he is.
Yata stayed at his computer and waited then Puma sat down right across from him. In the first game Yata was ahead for the majority of the game. He took down 5 medivacs of units taking no damage in the process. However, he made one tiny but critical mistake. He did not have an observer with his army. Cloaked ghosts came on in and emped pretty much everything. Yata's army melted and it was GG. The 2nd game was simple. Yata did nexus first and failed to stop the bunker from going up. GG Yata.
After he was knocked out we went and got dinner then went back to our hotel. We were excited because he had done so well and people were talking about him.
Sunday
We got to the Convention center around noon and when we got there Jason's manager from cvg found us and told us that he had an interview with ESFI! We took Yata to do the interview and watched the games from the day. During the losers final between Heart and DRG Yata got a text from someone at MLG. He had won the Bic Breakout player award. He went and talked to the MLG guys and they're going to be making a video of his gameplay and a short interview that he did with them. Yata is partially deaf so they had to bring in an ASL interpreter to do the interview.
After all the excitement from the weekend the finals was just kind of meh for me and I didn't really get all that excited for it. After the finals finished we went and got dinner at a Mongolian BBQ place, which was a pretty cool restaurant, and we saw that the Liquid guys were there. Hot_Bid pointed me out because I was wearing the TL protoss shirt. It was pretty cool to see them out and away from the experience of MLG.
From there we had to drive the 6 hours home and we got back to school around 4 am and needless to say I am still exhausted but it was all worth it.
