EPTJust taking a bit of a ladder break at the momeng so I figured it's a good time to write another part of this blog! The last one didn't really have much content since most people were on vacation, but now everybody is back in action practicing hard for the upcoming round of Proleague! Choya also took the liberty of signing me up for the GSL qualifiers....... so I'm practicing about as hard as my body can manage so I don't get embarassed too hard!
Practice nowadays basically consists of waking up at around noon, spending maybe 30 minutes waking up, eating some breakfast, and then somebody will ask me to play our ranking match, and so as not to keep them waiting I'll oblige even though I'd prefer to have another hour or so to wake up. This has turned out to be really helpful, because the games themselves wake me up very quickly. At home often I'll decide to spend maybe 20 minutes on Reddit while I wake up, and reddit being reddit that quickly turns into 90 minutes and suddenly I've wasted a ton of time, so having kicked that out of the daily routine is definitely a positive!
Generally I'll try to get all of my ranking matches out of the way in the first 4-5 hours of the day and ladder afterwards. It makes for a really interesting contrast. I've only been able to play maybe 10 ladder games a day because of the time it takes to go through the ranking matches, so my improvement's surpassed the rate at which my MMR is going up on ladder. The result is that I'll basically wake up, lose 20ish games in a row in ranking matches, and then go on to win 80% or so of my ladder games, haha.
Ranking match results have been bad on paper. I decided after the first day (as per Horror's suggestion) to play only macro games. Sure, maybe I could take a game off one of the Protosses with a well executed cheese, but I really don't learn anything from that, so it's basically a waste of time. The result is that I've been throw every kind of all in from the Protosses and every variation of aggressive openings from the Terrans. I'm REALLY bad at holding off Protoss all ins, so I think I've survived 1 blink all in and 1 soul train, but taken way too much damage both times. I spent 2 days not playing a single ZvT beyond 9 minutes or so because I'd just keep dying, but Gumiho and Marineking have given me pointers on all of our games, so today I've succeeded in surviving past the initial aggression in every game, albeit still dying later on. Departure has been out of the house so we still have 4 games to catch up on, and with few Zergs here, ZvZ practice has basically been getting stomped by Losira's roach timings, and being outclassed by Horror's all ins and muta vs muta control, but I feel like wins vs Horror are within the realm of possibility, and I almost had Departure last time we played, so hopefully I can take one of our 4 games today!
I got out of our neighbor hood for the second time yesterday, going to Rain's GSL group with one of our old mYi teammates, Positive. He's an absolute bro - a few days ago he came all the way to the MVP house just to say hi and drop off some Korean food he bought me! Rain's GSL group went pretty badly, but we met up with StarDust afterwards and went out for some food and a couple beers, so all in all it was still a really good night! Didn't really get a chance to say hi to Tastosis as we left after the loser's match, but I'm sure I'll see them again.
So that's pretty much what I've been doing the past week. We have our showmatch vs MVP tonight, so don't miss that! It'll be on BasetradeTV in about 3 hours! Other than that, don't expect too much in the way of updates next week beyond gameplay; I'm not really planning on going out again until after GSL qualifiers, but a bunch of my friends will be in town for those so that should be a fun evening! Thanks for taking the time to read through this, and as always if you have any suggestions or requests let me know!
PS: Sorry for not being able to include pictures really! I neglected to take any at the studio, and having been cooped up in here for most of the time, there haven't really been any picture-worthy moments, haha.
best of luck, always nice to read up on your Korean adventures!
