EPT末 代 本 座
![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/images/c/ce/Flash17.jpg)
Flash's "Year of the Rapist" was unparalleled not only in its absolute scale (77% winrate, 70%+ winrate in each matchup, gigantic TvZ, TvP, and TvT winstreaks, 2 OSLs, 2 MSLs, all-killing SKT1, winning Proleague for KT, trashing Jaedong in 3 straight finals) but also in its variety.
Yes, you heard right. Variety.
It's been a staple of
They're wrong.
Flash was punished in 08-09 for being predictable. Lux and other Zergs figured out his turretless style in TvZ, and Stork and other Protosses exploited his passivity in TvP to steamroll him. Flash learned his lesson in response:
He was never going to get caught out of place by the metagame.
What is the metagame?
Consider a classic "strategic daisy chain": rock < paper < scissors < rock. Now replace that with three types of builds:
Greedy < Aggressive < Safe < Greedy.
This sort of "chaining" is well-known to most Starcraft players within games, and sets up most of the early-game dynamics for both BW and SC2. Examples.
Greedy > Safe
The Safe Player is investing in defense that he or she may not need, while the Greedy Player is taking an extra expansion, or making more harvesters. Later, let's say in the middle-game, both players' armies confront each other. The Greedy Player will simply have a larger army because he or she chose to start building an economy for a huge army while the Safe Player wasn't.
Aggressive > Greedy
The Aggressive Player uses a timing window to deal a serious blow to the Greedy Player before that later stage in the game. This type of play almost always immediately kills off the Greedy player, or can cripple them seriously. A good example of this is in TvP, when the Terran player sees the Protoss is double-expanding with very few gateways or tech. The Protoss is playing "greedy", and the Terran player goes 6-fact to attack the Protoss player before the benefits of that 3-base economy kicks in.
Safe > Aggressive
A "safe" play is to prepare yourself for possibilities that may arise by building defense of some sort. For example, let's say you're a Zerg player who has double-expanded, and you're against a Protoss player who has forge-expanded. You fly an overlord into his or her base and see 8 gateways, so you know the Protoss is going to produce a huge army to attack you. You would start playing "Safe" and building the appropriate defense to deal with a huge incoming attack, whether it be a thick sunken/spore/lurker field, or a huge flank of hydralisks and lurkers. You wouldn't play "Greedy", and just mass drones willy-nilly, or take two more bases.
The Safe Player is investing in defense that he or she may not need, while the Greedy Player is taking an extra expansion, or making more harvesters. Later, let's say in the middle-game, both players' armies confront each other. The Greedy Player will simply have a larger army because he or she chose to start building an economy for a huge army while the Safe Player wasn't.
Aggressive > Greedy
The Aggressive Player uses a timing window to deal a serious blow to the Greedy Player before that later stage in the game. This type of play almost always immediately kills off the Greedy player, or can cripple them seriously. A good example of this is in TvP, when the Terran player sees the Protoss is double-expanding with very few gateways or tech. The Protoss is playing "greedy", and the Terran player goes 6-fact to attack the Protoss player before the benefits of that 3-base economy kicks in.
Safe > Aggressive
A "safe" play is to prepare yourself for possibilities that may arise by building defense of some sort. For example, let's say you're a Zerg player who has double-expanded, and you're against a Protoss player who has forge-expanded. You fly an overlord into his or her base and see 8 gateways, so you know the Protoss is going to produce a huge army to attack you. You would start playing "Safe" and building the appropriate defense to deal with a huge incoming attack, whether it be a thick sunken/spore/lurker field, or a huge flank of hydralisks and lurkers. You wouldn't play "Greedy", and just mass drones willy-nilly, or take two more bases.
But what if both players are blind and don't see each other's builds right away? Then it becomes a game of guesswork, of asking questions like:
Is Greed popular this month on map X? Or is aggression more popular?
Is my opponent
Is my opponent
Is my opponent
While analyzing VODs, when Bisu meets a player of my skill level, he always plays safely. As a result, I completely excluded the possibilities of Dark Templars and proxy plays from my thoughts. I think it worked out well because Bisu did what I wanted him to do.
Flash was extremely adept at asking these questions, with the intuition of a seasoned poker player. He displayed flashes of this brilliance in his 2008 Bacchus OSL run:
Flash, then only 15 years old, used interviews before the OSL finals to talk about the "late game invincibility" of his anti-carrier TvP build, to goad Stork into playing greedily in the finals. Stork, never a strong Starcraft psychologist to begin with, obliged by going double nexus and even skipping the first zealot--the single greediest PvT opener possible--on Katrina, the map most friendly to Protoss air in the map pool.
Flash won Game 2 without losing a single unit:
But such egregious examples are not exactly reliable, and most Starcraft players have better mental strength than Stork did in 08. A much better example of Flash's mental edge comes about in his coup de grace series vs Jaedong in Shanghai.
I'll leave it to Kwark to explain why this is awesome:
For the last year Flash has been responding to mutalisks with a fast academy and second barracks to push out with some mnm just before mutalisks hatch, taking the initiative and forcing the Zerg to defend while base defenses are put in order. All Terrans have begun to emulate this.
This game, Jaedong got burrow research and some speedlings right before that timing when Flash would send out a small group of mnm, and set a trap outside of Flash's base. This was huge! If Flash played like normal Flash, then he'd walk over those those lings and lose his first group of mnm without achieving his goal of delaying the mutalisks, which would then arrive much faster than planned. It was actually the first time anyone tried this. It wasn't just a random burrow and hope, it was Jaedong working out a weakness in Flash's style and then saving it for a special situation in the finals. Absolutely incredible. His entire build was designed to be able to disable Flash's mutalisk 'defence' with zerglings, then muta harass Flash before he was ready, and have the hatchery count to follow through with zerglings for the win.
What made it more awesome is that Flash either sensed it or was aware that there was an exploitable weakness in his style and reverted to his older style against an opponent that he knew was good enough to exploit such weaknesses. So although we saw burrowed speedlings getting no action, there was a lot more going on there than that.
This game, Jaedong got burrow research and some speedlings right before that timing when Flash would send out a small group of mnm, and set a trap outside of Flash's base. This was huge! If Flash played like normal Flash, then he'd walk over those those lings and lose his first group of mnm without achieving his goal of delaying the mutalisks, which would then arrive much faster than planned. It was actually the first time anyone tried this. It wasn't just a random burrow and hope, it was Jaedong working out a weakness in Flash's style and then saving it for a special situation in the finals. Absolutely incredible. His entire build was designed to be able to disable Flash's mutalisk 'defence' with zerglings, then muta harass Flash before he was ready, and have the hatchery count to follow through with zerglings for the win.
What made it more awesome is that Flash either sensed it or was aware that there was an exploitable weakness in his style and reverted to his older style against an opponent that he knew was good enough to exploit such weaknesses. So although we saw burrowed speedlings getting no action, there was a lot more going on there than that.
Game starts at 27m55s:
In the end, Flash's grasp of the metagame was such that he could consistently wrongfoot his opponents. This, combined with his excellent grasp of positioning and timings, led many to state that Flash had "maphack". I'm not talking about just fans or amateurs--even pros and seasoned SC players said this.
In one particularly notorious game, Flash blind countered a 2 hatch lurker rush (roughly analogous to a speed/bane all-in) without scans or a scout in his opponent's base until the lurkers showed up at his front door.
The action starts at 6m10s--Flash sees basically nothing, then decides to make 3 bunkers at his natural.
After the game, Chinese commentators were talking to F91, a Chinese pro Zerg player, who said flatly that if Flash was playing in a Chinese league he would be banned or at least investigated for maphacking.
Flash's response in the interview?
"I just felt something was up."
Flash got the two rules of pro-level Starcraft down:
1. The real resource at the very tip top level isn't money or talent, but practice time.
2. If you aren't pushing the metagame forward, other players are going to use the metagame to crush you.
In regards to #1, Flash was able to make his opponents consistently waste time practicing for the wrong things. Oov put it best here:
I think he has the ideal mindset as a Progamer that I've been thinking about. There aren't many players who set strategic moves, and in the case of Flash, I think he's looking about 10 games ahead
By deliberately widening the range of builds and styles he would play, and his choices of countermoves (would he out-greed? rush? hunker down and turtle?) he forced his opponents to play suboptimally and train suboptimally.
In regards to 2... well, when you look at Flash in contrast to players like
Bisu, you'll see that Flash was much more avant-garde and varied in his choice of pre-set builds and in-game reactions. Flash was the one who invented the "14cc into anything from fast 5rax +1 to turtle and take the map" style of TvZ, which drastically pushed the TvZ metagame in his favor; his wide range of responses to Protoss greed also was the single reason why Protosses became afraid to 12nex versus him.+ Show Spoiler [personal opinions] +
(FYI, that is the single reason why I disliked Bisu so much--the guy never pushed the metagame of Protoss forward--just look at how he used Forge-DT-Expo for an entire year in PvP--and I believe much of the reason why Protoss as a race suffered so much in Brood War was that after Savior Bisu got lazy in assuming full responsibility as his race's torchbearer.)
On top of all this, Flash was playing Chess, too.
) 
