EPT
Nerchio vs Patience
You guys all know that I'm a big Nerchio fan, and after Dreamhack Valencia I think he's definitely one of the best foreigners around- and the very best zerg, obviously. He's good at ZvP, he's shown a lot of promise in his sets against ShoWTimE and Neeb, and he shouldn't be too out of his element against cheese. On the other hand, Patience is pretty damn good too- he lost to Rogue earlier this tournament, but he's beaten the lower tier of zergs in Korea fairly consistently while taking games off of some of the very best. I consider this a 50-50 matchup on paper. It's a top-tier but not dominant ZvPer from WCS against a mid-tier PvZer from Korea, and as such should be fairly close- of course, reality has a korean bias, so if the trends of previous years follow through we should see Patience winning this by a 3-1 or 3-2 scoreline. If Nerchio wins this match - especially in dominant fashion - that lends a lot of cred to WCS as a real challenger of the korean mid-tier, although it's far from doom-and-gloom for Korea or anything. It just helps my theory that foreigners will perform well against the players at blizzcon who aren't TY/Stats/Zest/Dark.
Rogue vs Solar
Because this is two koreans and I'm not all that well versed in the korean scene I won't comment too much on this one, but generally I think of this as a similar 50-50 series and it should be exciting to watch. Nerchio against the winner of this would be very exciting, and would continue to deepen the pool of knowledge we have about foreign-korean relations right now.
Neeb vs Bly
Bly making the Ro8 thanks to disappointing performances from Harstem as well as uThermal is a bit unexpected, but not too crazy. It doesn't point to too much of an over-performance, and as such Neeb should be the winner here most of the time. They did have a close set in a Gauntlet a while back - Bly went 2-0, then 1-2 against Neeb, who proceeded to 4-0 Hydra - but otherwise Neeb has the head-to-head dominance. A Neeb vs ByuN semifinals is particularly interesting, considering Neeb destroyed ByuN in the Gauntlet a few weeks ago, 6-1.
ByuN vs Hydra
ByuN of all players is not someone we can discount online. There's a lot of generally accepted theories about top koreans playing less than fantastic in online competitions; some of this I believe, some of this I disagree with. When Snute beat Zest, I thought that was a legitimate win that would be much harder to recreate offline. It shows that Snute is a smart player and Zest has weaknesses, but those weaknesses would be much harder to exploit if it was a well-prepared for offline match such as Blizzcon. On the other hand, when ShoWTimE played largely standard games against TY/Solar and got beat 3-1 in both sets (if I recall correctly) I didn't think that was an online excuse type of series. Both players played their status quo and ShoWTimE came off about tier below the good koreans; I do think he's improved a lot since, but those sets have fueled my theory of top-tier foreigners being around mid-tier in korea. With players like Maru, who are known to kind of dick around online? Yeah, upsets mean a lot less. But if anything, ByuN overperforms online- he holds something like a ~88% winrate, and that makes Neeb's upset of him in The Gauntlet so utterly crazy to me. This is arguably one of the best online player in Korea, and Neeb manhandled him. Of course you can't use the logic of 'Neeb > ByuN' just because of one upset, but it's a very interesting result that surprised me quite a lot. Therefor, it's going to be interesting to see how ByuN does against Hydra. ByuN should realistically be the favorite for the entire event, but he's struggled quite a bit with foreigners and it'll be interesting to see if a close set against Hydra (as well as Neeb and maybe Nerchio later on) can keep up that trend.
Overall, Nerchio vs Patience is the most important matchup here by far. Not only is Nerchio the hottest foreigner right now, but we haven't seen him against koreans much (not since his losses to Ryung last TING) and Patience (as well as Solar if that match lines up) is potential blizzcon attendee. Otherwise, Neeb vs Bly is likely to be a boring 3-0/3-1, Rogue vs Solar will be interesting, and ByuN vs Hydra could either be surprisingly weak or pretty damn good.
Also- my current prediction for Blizzcon Ro16 is either 6-2 or 5-3 in the koreans' favor. Right now it's actually very open for foreigners, but I do buy into the establishment thinking that players such as Patience and Cure will likely be weeded out and replaced by the likes of Dear and maybe Maru. Still, I'm confident in foreigners, and it should be an awesome event.
