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The Night was dark and full of Terrans
In today’s first set of games Jin Air would try to get their first win of the season while KT would fight to keep their winning record.
TY celebrated his 6th anniversary of entering proleague by playing against his old team. As he went into the opening game up against Jin Air’s ace sOs. TY opened up with a single proxied tank which was able to prevent mining from the natural of sOs.
Going into the mid-game TY showed excellent drop play while sOs showed an equally strong defense. But every time TY dropped, sOs would lose a few probes before trading units, while the KT Terran slowly teched to a late game composition. At the end of it TY had the slightly better army and was able deny sOs of his first win of the season.
In the second game the other KT Terran, Flash, took out Rogue after an initial large roach attack. The roach aggression managed to trade evenly against Flash but at every other engagement or harassment Flash would increment out an advantage until the KT ace was up 50 supply and a mining base.
KT’s Terran force secured a 2-0 lead and it was now up to Jin Air’s Terran battalion of Cure and Maru to even up the scoreline against the KT Protoss duo of Zest and Stats.
Although Jin Air, during their last season as ‘Team 8’, finished second last Cure was one of their players that could always be relied upon when his team needed him most, even taking the ace role off of TY’s shoulders more often than not.
Now under the new ‘Jin Air’ banner with a reconstructed lineup Cure still played the vital role of delivering where it counted. An early 12-14 barracks pressure would seriously delay Zest’s expansion enough to force a haphazard gateway attack and eventually a win for Cure.
And in the fourth match: a breath of fresh air.
Maru would open up gas first, are you paying attention? Because after that he’d build reactored hellions and win, does that make sense to you? It didn’t seem to make much sense to Zest either as he spent chronoboost on his probes and relied on a nexus cannon defense. Unfortunately for KT hellions kill probes faster than a nexus cannon kills hellions.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/cDVOj7a.png)
Maru’s double pronged micro was able to whittle Stats down to 8 probes. From there Maru decided this was one of the two situations in which TvP mech is viable (the other is if your name is SuperNova). The tank-hellion follow up would force the ace match.
Maru was sent out once more, this time as the Jin Air ace since sOs still lacked the confidence that a much needed win would give him. Everything was ready for an epic Flash vs Maru ace match, that was until Zest was chosen to represent KT in the decider giving us our 4th PvT of the night.
The Jin Air ace would play a very standard game, confident in his ability to beat Zest in the mid game. Zest went for a 2 base blink all-in that Maru managed to scout a minute before it hit. Without the surprise factor Zest didn’t have the edge he needed to win. Maru would defend and give Jin Air their first series win.
Jin Air 3:2 KT
The next series would feature Samsung and CJ.
In the TvZ matchup there are several ways to play mech. The most common of which is to build up to a 2-2 timing that should hit before hive tech. And then there’s the Samsung Reality way…
In fact this particular star craft match reminded me of the most famous boxing match in history ‘The Rumble in the Jungle.’ Muhammad Ali had been out of the international boxing scene for over 3 years and was now challenging the younger and stronger world heavyweight champion George Foreman. Ali was aware of his chances and decided to use a special strategy…
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EKXFD8S.png)
just replace ‘Muhammad Ali’ with ‘SamsungReality’, ‘George Foreman’ with ‘CJ.Hydra’ and ‘rope-a-dope’ with ‘boring turtle mech’ and you’ll have last night’s game.
Yes, that (regrettably) happened. Hydra would mine out his half of the map, have a 15k-10k bank and still couldn’t break through despite the Samsung player only finishing 3-3 at 30 minutes. With Reality's triumph Terran had six straight wins on the night.
In the next game Samsung’s Shine would have a better concave against EffOrt in the roach wars. CJ would have to rely on their Protoss duo to take it to the ace match.
In the third game herO would out Colossi’ Stork putting CJ on the scoreboard.
Thankfully rOrO and Sora were able to deliver a game that bandaged the rest of the series. The GSL champion and Samsung ace, rOrO, held off Sora’s initial blink aggression. Both players would tech up with the occasional zealot run by or burrowed roach hit squad. rOrO’s weapon of choice was a brood lord + swarm host army while Sora would produce void rays 3 at a time to integrate into his colossi ground army.
A haphazard engagement by Sora would give rOrO a definitive lead. A similar engagement would give rOrO his first win of the season and the surprising result of Samsung having two series victories to CJ’s two series losses.
Samsung 3:1 CJ
