EPT Hi! I got into TL because of FPL, partly thanks to The_Templar's recaps in round 1. Those have been a little rarer recently (Templar is a busy man), so I figured that since I was thinking about FPL a lot, I might as well try to write about it. I ripped off the format from Templar, as you can see, with his quasi-permission. This is obviously not official TL material, just a fan's perspective.
Player of the week:
LeenockThe 4th-most owned player got 9 points this week from two wins vs. Prime. His victory over
BBoongBBoong was unremarkable, but he made many mistakes against 
KeeN in the ace (losing a drone to a reaper, failure to cancel his building third base under fire, building ultralisks). Nevertheless he kept his macro up, rounding out all the upgrades and tech structures for an eventual switch into corruptor/broodlord. Damn I wish I hadn’t traded him for 
Hush lo these many weeks ago….Runner-up:
StatsFricken’ finally! After weeks of inexplicable slump, the original Chintoss took an extremely important game against
Hurricane, contributing to KT’s 3-0 and therefore securing a round playoff spot over the sputtering Samsung. Though still not a good investment overall this round, Stats’ low trade value gave a number of people a much-needed shot of 4 points at the very end of FPL.Anti-player of the week:
BomberSeeing Bomber playing against
TANGTANG, 57 people removed him from their anti, fearing the worst. 182 people, however, believed in the 3-0, and chose to risk it. -4 for you! TANGTANG’s last Proleague match did not go well, and Bomber successfully brought Sbenu to the ace with one nasty engagement.Runner-up:
YoDaYoDa has been a pretty solid choice for anti this whole round, but he has shown a willingness to play cancer mech against Zerg opponents, memorably taking out
soO in Round 2. His massive tank count proved to be too much for Curious, who took some poor engagements (i.e. he built ultralisks).Team of the week: Philozovic
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Rlth2K0.png)
The #1 Frenchman took home 31 points this week with prescient trades for
Leenock and Bomber. Indeed, prescient trading in general has served Philozovic very well, with an overall +50 trade gain! Of course, 33 of those points have come from GuMiho—removing him from anti and acquiring him on main. Nice work!Worst team of the week: elwoodng
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Xi8v56J.png)
This one is actually a tie, at -9 points, but I give it to elwoodng instead of Shinzuwa because elwoodng got only 1 point from main (
BrAvO lineup apperance), followed by the nasty shock of -10 from Leenock and Curious. My condolences—try trading next round! You had a really good setup for it in the early weeks.Best possible no-trade team:
$8
Zest 29$5
GuMiho 23$5
DongRaeGu 21$4
Leenock 19$3
Blaze 19$3
Solar 18$2 MVP 9
$9
Maru -4$4
Creator 0$0
MacSed 0For a grand total of 134 points, i.e. 2nd place.
Best possible team:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3OZRcah.png)
I made this a spreadsheet for easier viewing. It assumes the same anti team as above. DAMN that is a lot of points! Some of the trades don’t really make a whole lot of sense without foreknowledge, but I’d say about half of them are pretty reasonable. It’s interesting how many times the teams had to be traded in order to compete with SKT itself. Finally, you’ll note that only Zest remains untraded throughout the process. I guess
Zest is Best after all.Bonus
And now for some bonus material in the form of Round 4 overall recaps. Since TL does its own official version of this, I tried to come up with some interesting categories that wouldn’t overlap too much. So if you had the best team, best no-trade team, etc., then I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the real thing. If, however, you’re interested in…
Main team bait for FPL 2016:
MaruI call right now that Maru will be 7 points in Round 1 next year. That’s still high but absolutely worth it, as long as his wrist problems are addressed. If not…
Runner-up:
DearThis one is more of a guess, but Dear struggled a bit this round and will likely be 5 or 6 points next year as well. That’s pretty good for someone who can take out anyone on Earth on a good day. It’s just that on a bad day, he gives games away to the likes of Blaze. Speaking of Blaze…
Anti team bait for FPL 2016:
BlazeRemember in Round 2 of this year when Panic cost $1 and earned 13 points? Well in Round 3 he was up to a hyper-inflated $5, which translated to a measly 3 points. If this sinusoidal trend continues, Blaze will be $6 or even $7 next round and a fine choice for anti. Or he could get even better and start winning ace matches.
Runner-up:
SolarOh, shit.
RorO is back! Do you have nerves of steel?Funniest pro team: sc2Bomber
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/r0eOmmD.png)
This one is subtle but good.
Bomber naturally picked an all-Sbenu/Yoe lineup with himself as captain. His loyalty netted him a lot of points, thanks especially to the Zergs (not so much to his own play, unfortunately). Where it gets interesting is the anti. Bomber made the ultimately terrible decision to anti CJ herO. Why? Because he played herO in week 1, of course! If that’s not confidence I don’t know what is—“I’ll beat herO so badly in week 1 that he’ll crash and burn for the next month and a half.” Sadly, this didn’t happen. If only Sbenu had played JAGW in the first week, Bomber might’ve had the good fortune to anti Maru instead, which would have catapulted him from #469 to #197 in the final rankings. Finally, despite his loyalty to his team, he anti’d fellow Sbenu player SSoja. Why? Did he just know that Ssoja would never play? Then why not pick Jim? Or does he just hate Ssoja’s guts? We may never know.Runner-up:
Welmu![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/G9gvEDO.png)
The Finnish Protoss picked a really solid team that performed really well: a mix of Sbenu and SKT with an MVP-heavy anti. The humor here is the single trade that Welmu made:
GuMiho for HerO on anti. Here I’m imagining that in between practice sessions Welmu found the time to check the week 2 lineups, saw that GuMiho was playing, and said “oh hell no” to himself while swapping him out. After all, Welmu is 0-2 to GuMiho…but 2-0 vs. Liquid HerO. Seeing as how HerO went 0-1 this round while GuMiho went 5-2, it was a good choice.Most disastrous attempt at failure: AcGrly
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Gm5Mwy2.png)
Many people believe FPL to be too difficult to win and aim instead for the bottom of the barrel. What they may not realize is how difficult it is to truly fail at FPL. AcGrly no doubt thought an
INnoVation/ByuL/Maru anti was foolproof, but that was before the Jin Air ace had the worst round of his career. As for the main team, why not go all-in on Prime, or pick only 1 and 0 point players? Why risk 3-pointers like Solar and Sorry who might get fielded and take wins? And win they did, Solar with his 10 point week and Sorry with solid victories vs. KeeN and Flash. KeeN and Hurricane also did all right for themselves. This team, aiming for the bottom, didn’t even get below 0. Thhhbbppt!Most disastrous attempt at success: hUed
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/49zQvzN.png)
Yes, hUed was screwed over by the failure of
Maru and Jin Air this round. The real problem, though, is the trades. Many fell prey to the Leenock for Hush trade that ultimately cost 16 points. Others also traded Solar away after he beat BBooongBBoong but before his rampage vs. MVP. Not so many, however, traded FOR GuMiho on anti right before week 2, particularly when the original anti choice, HerO, was not even playing. Why, hUed, why? Did you fear HerO showing up in an ace match? Later trades indicate that hUed never gave up, but alas, persistence was not rewarded, and hUed closed out Round 4 with 1 point. : (Group awards:
The following three awards are based on the average points earned by various groups and is intended purely for humor, not informational content. In other words, there’s some trash talk. You’ve been warned.
To trade or not to trade: Trade
Uh, wow. The LOTS of Trades group placed 2nd overall with an average of 97.9 points and an average ranking of 73.4 – an average rank on the first page! Meanwhile, the No Trade Challenge group languished far behind with a mere 49.5 points on average, and an average rank of 616th. While they may claim a certain purity of game, they were crushed. Humorously, one of their would-be members apparently decided that they were too passive and formed his own group, TRADING IS FOR B A B I E S, which closed at 40 points and rank 805th. The moral of this story: trade -- it's better!
Best KT: SKT
The SKT Best KT group beat out the KT Best KT group by a significant margin (an average of 10 points). You might think this is due to SKT’s superior performance in Round 4 (1st place instead of 4th), but interestingly both groups were mostly opportunistic and didn’t actually favor one team or the other: only seven out of the thirty-one combined SKT or KT fans actually put their FPL $ down on their favorite teams. So why the discrepancy? Well, 70% of the gap is attributable to KtJ, whose joke team earned -14 points (and would have done way worse if not for Solar’s surprise performance). Meanwhile, trufan rotta went all-in on KT Rolster, and was punished for his loyalty with rank 1024. The moral of this story: don’t let fandom get in the way of your FPL.
Best country: Belgium
Well, “non-country” or not, Belgium generated the best FPL-ers this round, with an average rank of 424th. The UK bottomed out the countries list with an average rank of 723rd. The moral of this story: suck it, Nigel Farage!
Well, that’s that! And now as the days get shorter and colder, we must wait for months in darkness until FPL begins again. Unless you live in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case enjoy your spring, you upside-down crazies!
Thanks for reading!
