EPTThese are my initial impressions of my students. The idea here is not to insult their play, but to record where their play is at so that we can judge progress in the future.
coolHite - 997 Gold Terran
coolHite has played about 160 games on the ladder. As a mid level gold player, he does a suprising number of things right in his games. His openings look pretty standard and they're executed well. His macro while on 1 or 2 bases is actually very good. I'm not really sure yet if he knows any micro techniques.
I think what keeps him from playing better is that he doesn't do much scouting at all, so he's generally playing blind. As a result he tends to build a certain pre-determined set of units and attack when he feels like he has enough. There's little aggression in his play, and without early pressure his opponents are allowed to do as they please in the early game. He doesn't know any timings, and needs to gain a bit more technical knowledge of Terran units and tech. he doesn't have much of an understanding of the details of the 3 different matchups.
This player, I think, has a lot of potential. He plays with a certain intuition that I like to see. After complimenting him on a couple of very well timed PDDs in his replays, I found out that he didn't actually even know exactly what a PDD did, but he was still managing to use it properly and to great effect.
Task one for coolHite is to improve his scouting. I've introduced him to a few scouting ideas and asked him to play a couple games where he scouts properly as an assignment.
Dullahan - 1600 Bronze Terran
Dullahan has played about 250 games on the ladder. As a player towards the top of the Bronze ladder, he understandably lacks an understanding of several fundamentals. His openings are strange and innefficient. His macro is very poor, making him build up large amounts of excess resources very quickly regardless of the number of bases he's mining from. He doesn't understand unit strengths and weaknesses and, as a result, doesn't know how to judge weather his forces can come out on top in a battle. He doesn't build an appropriate amount of unit producing structures. In one game where I was evaluating his play, he had expanded, had 3,500 minerals in the bank, and was being overwhelmed by a force of 9 stalkers and 2 zealots.
Dullahan does show some feel for micro. He also tends to have pretty dominating map control in his games.
Task one for Dullahan is to get him producing scvs consistantly and building appropriate unit producing structures.
VanderLuust - 800 Gold Protoss
VanderLuust has played around 100 games on the ladder. His macro is pretty good and he demonstrates a basic understanding of some micro. He scouts pretty well, has a sense of map control, expands appropriately, And seems to understand some matchup details and unit compositions.
The biggest flaw I noticed in VanderLuust's play was that he stops producing probes too early, allowing his opponents to pull far ahead economy-wise, despite having the same number of expansions. Despite this, he is still a tough opponent. He was just recently promoted to Gold, and I don't expect him to remain there for long.
VanderLuust's assignment is to play a couple of games where he never stops making probes.
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