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This was the second time I have been at an MLG event, the first time was back in 2011 @ Raleigh. I was quite fortunate to qualify through CSL, getting the free airfare round-trip + hotel Blizzard so graciously offered. Not only was I excited to get to come back to MLG and not have to pay a single cent for my flight... but even better, was that the BW pros would be there (as well as a large number of other pros!), and also I would get a chance to check out Heart of the Swarm  .
THURSDAY
Departure
My flight to Anaheim California was scheduled at around 11:30 AM, so I had to make sure to leave around 7:30-8:00 AM due to ridiculous traffic (welcome to Houston, Texas), and because I had to drive to the Complexity Gaming team house where my brother (coLTriMaster) was residing currently. The house itself is about an hour away, but with traffic you can imagine the drive takes quite a while. Luckily, the house itself is about 15 minutes away, so after getting to the house it would be no problem to get to the airport (we were carpooling to save money on parking/gas).
When I woke up, I was exhausted. Imagine packing your belongings, getting prepared, only to realize you went to sleep that same day at 6:00 AM =P. I didn't really practice like I should have, I just spent time browsing the web, eating, and lifting at around 2:00 AM.
Anyways, after the long drive filled with lots of other cars, I finally arrived at the house, where my brother also went ahead and gave me a tour of the place. It is really beautiful, and I have to say I'm definitely jealous (something I noticed was that their boat outside had "Mother Ship" written on it  ). He had already been awake for a while, as he had went ahead and dropped off his manager Scott a while before, as Scott was on standby for a flight to Anaheim as well. Also, the only people living at the house at the time were the two of them, as everyone else would be coming after MLG Anaheim apparently (and my brother already lives in Houston so...).
When we arrived at the airport, we almost ended up going on separate flights (we have the same flight arrivals/departures since we are going together). I had checked in the night before, but TriMaster didn't, so I was good to go while my brother had to talk to people and figure out what to do. When it finally came to boarding the plane, it turned out I was good to go, but my brother told me at the desk with the other flight attendants that he might have to catch the next plane apparently (maybe something to do with standby's and what not?), luckily enough, I saw him get on the plane 5 minutes later.
The plane flight itself was terrible for myself. If I may recommend, never do dead-lifts before plane flights, because even though I was sleep deprived I could not fall asleep as my back was so uncomfortable for that 3-hour flight. @#*&ing great way to torture yourself.
Arrival
When we finally landed and stepped outside, it just hit me. The weather was @#&$ing amazing. No longer would I have to bear with the ridiculous humidity/temperature of Texas weather, but here I was faced with temperature that actually felt... good. California, I know I'll be missing this about you.
We finally arrived at the Red Lion Hotel, I believe around 3:00 PM? We saw a few other WCS/Competitors there, like Eifer, Sonata, HeavensLight and just a few others, as well as some other people I did not recognize. While waiting for our hotel rooms to be ready (I believe check-in started at 4:00 PM), we went ahead and grabbed some Subway to eat, and also scoped the area out a little bit. After check-in, we pretty much hung out with HeavensLight for the rest of that time, and went back out to the small corner store to buy a pack of water we split with Heavens. During this time, there still wasn't that many players who had arrived yet, as many others would arrive later on in the night. Either way, while hanging out with Heavens with nothing much to do, he fell asleep. I don't recall if HeavensLight fell asleep in our room, or if we were hanging out in his room, but this actually was a result of said naptime:
+ Show Spoiler +
Needless to say, I found myself bursting in tears for literally 10 minutes just because of that one line from my brother. Don't know why, but it was just damn funny to me at the time, maybe because we had nothing else to really do =P.
A little while after that, sometime in the evening, we met up with the complexity player manager, Scott. We went around I suppose just trying to find the other coL players, and we did manage to find Killer and GanZi. I think after a while the plan was to go out and eat, but anyways... Killer is hilarious. Not much else to say. He came off as a relatively funny individual, who was fun to hang out with overall. GanZi was more reserved and quiet, but was still easy to talk to. I think Killer has better English than GanZi, but either way they both could understand basic English good enough, or at least I thought so. We also tried to find Heart, but nobody including Killer really knew where he was. I figure he was sleeping... as most of the other Koreans were sleeping since Korean time is basically 12 hours different and they were all probably tired from their long flights. We went to Coach Choi's (MVP Coach) hotel room, but he couldn't come since the other person he was staying with had the key, so we said our quick farewells. Last on the list was the MVP team itself, as my brother was already familiar with them. Monsters, Tails, DRG, and Dream were there, and it took literally like 2 minutes of knocking before we managed to get them to open the door, albeit we were literally about to turn the corner away before the answered. DRG/Tails answered the door, evidently awaking for sleep, so it's quite predictable to see that they ended up not wanting to come eat with us and rather to sleep longer.
We basically ended up eating at some pub/grill place, where you basically put your food together how you want and they cook it. If any of you have ever heard of Mongolian Grill (the only thing I know of that's similar to this), think of that except with an outdoor karaoke and also a bar.
One thing I took quick notice though, was that:
A) This is California
B) We are right by a Convention Center & Disney Land
A + B = TOURIST TRAP
So just be aware things will be much more expensive if you ever come to another MLG Anaheim.
The food was still pretty good, and we had fun chatting with one another. Talking about random things, and throwing out jokes here and there.
I'm going to skip this part of the story for private reasons though (nothing bad, just don't know if the other guys would care or not and I would rather not post anything they care about).
  
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reserved
FRIDAY
I woke up early in the morning at around 9:30--- I would have slept longer, but was kept up a decent portion of the night due to a certain person's heavy snoring ('cough' TriMaster). Either way, I don't know if it was due to the 2 hour time zone difference (from CST to PST), or maybe it was nervousness about playing this morning, but I still couldn't fall asleep as long as I liked.
Today I had to check-in between 10:30-1:30 at the convention center for WCS, and by 5:30 PM for the MLG open bracket (which I opted to play in as well), so I figured if I was really feeling exhausted I would have plenty of time to nap, though I definitely would have preferred to practice a bit more instead.
After I was finished getting ready, I went ahead and left alone, as TriMaster was going to meet up with his manager before heading on over. Since we were staying at the Anaheim Red Lion Hotel (where all other WCS qualifiers were at), we were like, around a 5-10 minute walking distance from the Convention Center itself, which was not the far. I ended up walking on the opposite end of the Convention Center, and so I had to walk about 5-10 minutes extra again since I didn't really know where I was headed other than the Convention Center. When I arrived to the check-in area, I met up with some familiar people/people I know from online, like heavenslight, hawk, binskilight, hazelynut, kawaii, caliber, etc. (sorry if I forgot anyone =P) --- and I also met up with my brother who was there already.
After I finished checking in for WCS (did not do MLG check-in, there was a line so we decided to do it later), me, my brother, and Scott (complexity manager), all went to grab a bite to eat first, since we were still not allowed into the venue for a bit longer. We ended up getting sandwiches from the hotel cafeteria (not as good as Subway of course), and then ran into Brian (Fnatic translator/manager), who is a really kool d00d. When finished eating, we headed back to the venue and by that time were allowed to go inside and prepare.
I went straight for the competitor area and started practicing as many games as possible on ladder, as I wanted to feel as comfortable as possible. I was playing on a smurf and actually ran into a few familiar WCS people, though I didn't say anything since I didn't want to reveal who I was =P (got to keep them strategies secret, am i rite?), although I didn't end up playing any of them.
When 1:30 PM came around, it was time to play Round 1 of the WCS USA qualifiers--- unfortunately they were right about the "predicted seeded players bracket" from the teamliquid forums. I was playing Sheth round 1, and was really worried about how the games would go.
However, I still prepared beforehand... when I saw the "predicted seeded players bracket", I scrounged up replays of TaeJa vs Sheth from Red Bull LAN that was held in Austin, Texas, and carefully studied all the games. To sum it up, TaeJa went for CC First into a strong bionic player that transitioned mostly into Ravens. I really liked this style, and decided to also try to make note of Sheth's play style--- he seemed to prefer ling/infestor over ling/bane/muta (though he did build banelings at times), so I knew I didn't have to waste lots of money on turrets all over my bases. I also heard from some people that he can be "unpredictable" when it came to attacking--- so that I needed to play cautiously and watch out for any aggressive maneuvers.
I was also feeling slightly reassured about one thing in particular--- my PC back at home kind of struggles in larger games, and definitely lacks a lot to be desired vs the competitor PCs. I did not have to deal with lag/slowing down during the ladder practice matches, so I was feeling slightly more confident about large scaled engagements since I felt very comfortable with unit control when I had no lag.
But even with this worry settled in my mind, I still did not practice TaeJa's build (lack of practice partners) and instead focused on heavily memorizing key details: "When did he take his gas? Start upgrades? Secure his third? What was Sheth doing?" etc. The one map in particular I focused a lot on was Cloud Kingdom, and with luck out of this world... our map vetoes actually came down to that map. The map-veto system was slightly different than what I was expecting, but to explain the details about it I kind of forgot the entirety. I know Player A vetoes first map, and then Player B vetoes maps 2 & 3, but I forgot if Player A then vetoes 1-2 more maps and then Player B picks the starting order of the remaining maps... so, something like that I suppose.
Game #1 went better than I expected--- the build worked out quite well on Cloud Kingdom. At one point I was a bit worried, when Sheth played aggressive and attacked my 3rd and natural in a double prong attack--- killing a couple of SCVS. Luckily, I probably did not lose more than 10, and I had already stockpiled a decent amount of workers from having the 3rd up for a while. I think this went well for me, as I killed a lot of Zerglings and was able to counter with a strong push. If I remember correctly, I took a strong lead as I killed his 3rd and continued to tech/macro and eventually adding Ravens into the mix (the goal is to make a strong bio + raven with HS, which works quite well against ultras or brood lords). I was very happy to have won this game, and winning the first game in a bo3 is always a definite moral booster for anyone.
Game #2 was basically the same style of Bio into Ravens (though I don't believe I ever managed to afford Ravens), except I did not CC first. I did a standard 1-Rax expand (was worried Sheth might 6 pool ), but overall I think this game was mostly one sided as Sheth continued to take his side of the map while slowly dwindling me down, and I failed to do any decent damage to his macro/infrastructure. Looking back on this game, I wish I had done a 2-rax with the 3-bunker wall-off, simply because I had won the first game, and rehashing the same style can be rather bad especially if he adapts to hard counter that play style.
Game #3 Tal'Darim, I wasn't sure what to think as this map can be good sometimes and bad others. It played out the same as the other games except it was definitely the longest and more tense (for me anyways). I think my biggest error in the game was not attacking when I should have, though I'd have to honestly take a look at the replay (which are unavailable sadly) and see if it would have been smart. In essence, there are always things you can do better, but I was not too disappointed when I lost. Sheth is obviously a Top NA Zerg player, and I felt I played a well fought 3rd game overall, so there was no shame in defeat (though I hate to lose regardless!).
After losing 2-1, I started going around finding out how everyone else I knew had done, and had a quick chat with Kawaii when he asked me the basics of how Sheth played. Sheth came on over to set up, and Kawaii told him something along the lines of "Zergs OP" and also that I was telling him how he played against me. It was all in good fun though, no hard feelings and nothing but respect (except for him being Zerg ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ).
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EPT
