I've been practicing super hard as of late, 20-30 games a day between ladder, practice games with friends, and solo games where I refine my builds in the new HoTS BOT, which is an awesome tool that everyone should use. I guess I'm doing a type of bootcamp to get my skill up as high as possible before the Atlanta lan-fest, which will be my first lan event since MLG Raleigh all the way back in 2011 (the one Bomber won that was in the middle of a hurricane). I stopped playing Wings shortly after that because I was getting totally sick of losing to BL infestor every single game.

Anyway, in the year since I stopped playing my skills massively declined, but I feel as though I'm pretty much where I was before I stopped, and I'm only getting better.

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I hit top 8 in my division pretty early in the season, but I went on an epic losing tear shortly thereafter. I wish I had screen caps of my match history from back then, but I pretty much hit 3 or 4 losing streaks of 7-8 games, pretty much because I could not play TvT to save my life (still can't well, but I've learned a bunch thanks to watching DeMuslim and Polt) and TvP. TvP was the worst for me, since I couldn't figure out TvP late game, but I was also losing to what seemed like a different all-in every game. Since TvP felt like my worst matchup, I've been focusing on that, and I think I've pretty much figured out most if not all of Toss' dangerous 1 and 2 base all-ins, as well as looking at some holes in standard toss play and how I can exploit them. Basically it seems that standard toss has a huge timing where they need to tech to their Collosus and/or HT late-game which Terran can exploit with drops while taking a fast 3rd (I usually start my 3rd CC around the 8:30 mark) and fast 2/2 while still keeping a bigger army. Seems to work for me at least, I don't really lose to protoss anymore unless they fake tech to HT's/ Collosus and choose the other tech path, and I misscout it, meaning I'm engaging HT's with Vikings or engaging collosus with ghosts...

...Or if I get all-ined, which feels like every game. Maybe 1 in 4 games i get to play a macro game against protoss, the other 3 are all-ins. Anyway it obviously comes down to scouting and putting toss on a build, which is way easier said than done, but it's still manageable.

Anyway, here is the game that put me at #1, it was super intense and I'm not sure I handled the early all-in properly, but I feel as though I played it pretty much perfectly from there out. Enjoy!

http://drop.sc/340407

From here on out the next goal is obviously masters. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm definitely getting there it really comes down to refinement. Been playing some games on EU server just to test the latency and I've been hitting a few masters players. Had some great TvT's and TvZ's, so I'm confident I'm only a few improvements here and there before I achieve that goal!