EPTFirst some background on myself. I am currently a sophomore in computer science (course 6.3), and I've been involved in CSL ever since I first found out about the club during my first week of orientation. I didn't play BW melee and I didn't follow competitive BW until I had started following sc2. When I arrived at MIT I was a diamond player, but after some help from MIT's CSL team I am now one of the top masters player of our team. I've also become the president of the club, and the coordinator for the CSL team after the previous president and coordinator left last year.
CSL has been a great experience for me, I have a lot of friends from it and it makes playing Starcraft a much more social and interesting hobby. MIT has been part of CSL ever since it was founded, infact MIT vs Princeton was the first match in CSL history. Along the way we've learned a lot and I hope to share some of that knowledge with other CSL coordinators.
One of the most important things in making CSL a good experience is organization. One of the nice things about being a recognized student organization at MIT is that it forces us to be somewhat organized. We need to have a club president and treasurer, keep track of membership, apply for funding each quarter, determine what to spend our funds on, as well as a number of other tasks mandated by our ASA. Our club maintains five primary mailing lists:
starleague-officers: myself, the treasurer and two other senior members who deals with officer activities, as well as our past presidents and staff liaison.
starleague: the list of everyone in our university interested in starcraft, and also those who have left MIT but are still interested in MIT starcraft activities (190 members, around 8 of which are no longer at MIT).
starleague-planning: the list of all those interested in planning MIT starleague events and things such as lineups for CSL ( 8 members, all currently at MIT).
starleague-team: the list of all masters/GM players who actively play for our CSL team ( 9 members).
starleague-strategy: A mailing list that members put themselves on. This is where most of the core members will discuss, and do things like send replays of games they played to discuss.
I suggest that other teams also try to adopt similar practices and have a clearly defined leader and group of people that help him/her lead and organize as well. A lot of what I do would not be possible without the help of all the people on the planning list, but it’s important to have someone who has the responsibility to make sure things get done.
For CSL matches we also try take the games with the same preparation that any pro Starcraft team would. Before the matches each week, we always practice the strategies that we want to prepare on cloaked maps (ones that hide the build orders) or on smurf accounts. We try to never prepare on our real accounts on ladder or uncloaked maps. We also realize that not all teams do this, or they may not have prepared something special for the match, so we always do our research on the players we are playing against as well. We go through our opponent’s match history and search online for replays of them in other matches. When the CSL website is working, we also download their replays from previous matches against other teams. We will often have much better information on our opponents than they do on us.
For instance, in my most recent match, I was playing a protoss on Metropolis who was higher ranked than myself. I looked through his profile and figured out after a bit of testing that he scouted on 13 or later based on his gateway timings. Knowing this and the map, I choose to cannon rush for my match, as it is quite strong on Metropolis and he would have a hard time defending it with no scout despite being higher ranked. The week before, one of our masters players was going to play a Zerg on Ohana that he was favorite against. We looked through the Zerg’s match history and noticed he had played several custom games on Ohana recently and every game he had gone for a roach rush. In the CSL match the Zerg player roach rushed just as we expected.*
In addition to giving MIT a higher win rate, it also gives us to discuss and plan throughout the week before the match. It’s also something that’s less time consuming than actually playing matches--you can discuss and plan over email without actually having a block of 30 minutes to sit down and play games. It also makes the CSL experience more of a team experience and not an individual league as you will need your teammates to practice with you on your smurf and on cloaked maps.
While MIT is very competitive, we also try to make as many members involved as possible. Whenever we have a match we’re fairly confident in we’ll play our weaker members in one or two of the games. Not only does this give them experience in playing in most stressful conditions, it also makes more people attached to our team and our results! I think it’s very important to do this. My first year in CSL I played several matches and lost nearly all of them because I couldn’t play very well with the pressure, but this year I have done much better. Members will graduate and it’s important to keep new blood flowing!
During our CSL matches, we also always request that matches be played sequentially, and try to stream the matches. Even if the matches are played simultaneously, we try to cast them afterwards on stream, and not leak the results to those outside of starleague-team and starleague-planning. In the past we also met to play our matches and watched/casted them in one room and had the person play one room over. This is harder now that the matches are on the weekend and we meet on Friday.
Lastly, MIT also holds events/tournaments outside of CSL. Last year, we had a showmatch with KAIST, held a team tournament for local schools, and an individual tournament open to all MIT students. This year we had a showmatch vs Harvard, and held an individual tournament open to all MIT/Harvard students. While our CSL meetings and matches may only have 10-15 members each week in attendance, our showmatch vs Harvard and almost 1000 viewers, and our live finals for MIT tournaments can have 150 people in attendance.
These events are another way of making sure we stay organized, and also are very important to keep people interested in Starcraft in our school. Every time we host a tournament or a showmatch, I see more people online on my friends list on battle.net, and every live event we can convince a few more people to show up at meetings. An important note here to all coordinators is that advertising is very important! There are probably a lot of people in your school mildly interested in Starcraft but not enough to show up every week to your meetings or play that often. As you all know, there are a lot of people that just watch, and do not play Starcraft!
I hope this blog was helpful for others involved in CSL! It has been a great experience for me and I hope others can find the same.
I would like to thank our sponsors from the last event MIT held as well, ZOWIE. They were very supportive of our event and provided us with all of the prizes. I am now using a ZOWIE MiCO and it’s the best mouse I’ve ever owned!
*We didn't actually win either of the games I described, but we did lose with more information! Both games were lost due to execution mistakes.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0G8XP.jpg)
