EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/HODM7FZ.jpg)
I was supposed to put this up sooner but I’ve been tremendously busy ever since coming home. I was going to give myself a one week break but upon seeing what July had in store for me I gave myself 3 days to rest instead. Beware: this is rather wordy. Maybe read it in parts…
Hi guys, this is a recap of my experience at DreamHack Summer 2013.
The lead-up to this tournament was the best I've ever had, I was able to train harder and longer, put all my experience to good use and focus purely on my game. I had some issues with my practice leading up to IEM Singapore last year and was very crushed when, despite coming straight from practicing with the Prime team in Korea, I only placed 13th-16th. This time around was completely different, for several months I've been focusing on practicing constantly and steadily evolving my play. I've been taking large amounts of notes and have been methodical in improving my build orders and learning new builds to stay ahead of the meta. On top of this, I find HotS has made playing zerg so much more exciting and I much prefer the active, multitask-focused styles that it allows.
There were some problems with my practice as spending several months playing Starcraft for at least 8 hours a day took a bit of learning to deal with distractions, to keep focused, stay positive and continue to keep exercising. There were times where I raged, got upset, or fell into negative spirals and stopped exercising and just kept queuing up games for days and days, and would begin to play very badly. Thankfully I overcame these hurdles and learned how to organise myself to be extremely productive and positive. The 2 weeks before DreamHack I felt very happy in my play and like I was constantly moving forwards, I was in the best shape ever.
The reason I could focus so much on practice was thanks to Exile5 taking great care of me by booking this trip months in advance and they, along with Dot, planned the entire trip out, booked my tickets and put an itinerary in my hands. I've flown overseas many times and never has it been so easy with even my bus from the airport pre-booked in advance.
THE JOURNEY TO SWEDEN
I left home to go to Sydney airport on 9am Monday morning and arrived at my hostel in Stockholm on 10am Tuesday. Taking into account the 8 hour trip back in time, it was a 33 hour transit from door-to-door. Whilst it sounds very long to many people outside of Australia, it's actually not too bad for us!
The Hostel was the best I've ever stayed at; filled with friendly backpackers and with that happy, adventurous atmosphere that we all love. I dropped my things off and walked a few blocks straight to Inferno PC Cafe, the biggest LAN Centre in the world. The place has hundreds of PCs and is filled with gaming statues, figurines and wall hangings. There are couch-booths for XboxLive players, a small "eSports Arena" with a viewing area and gaming, internet and hardware sponsors line the walls.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DSWax79.jpg)
The most popular games are LoL, Warcraft III, DotA, CS, CoD 4 and SC2. There are big HotS posters everywhere and many of the staff can be seen wearing HotS T-shirts. The PC’s are beastly and the only problem is you can't access windows settings to fix mouse and keyboard settings so I had to hunt for a little while to find a good PC.
A highlight of practicing in Inferno for the next 3-4 days was some of the Swedish teenagers watching my APM and asking me what league I was in and getting excited when I told them I was a pro-gamer. Some of them even asked for photos with me, which was really cool
Stockholm was a very beautiful city. Many of the buildings are very old and the streets and sidewalks are wide and un-crowded. At night the streets are almost eerily empty in the city centre.
One of the great things about staying here was that whilst it's about as expensive as Sydney, the fast-food is much higher quality. I was amazed at how good just a simple whopper meal at BurgerKing tasted and also hit up their Subway multiple times.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Dq8U31P.jpg)
On the Friday I got the train to Jonkoping. Being the smart guy that I am, I decided I could read Swedish and that the word "Plat" on my ticket was Swedish for platform. I arrived at my platform and there was a timetable, with a train coming roughly every 10 minutes, I could see my train just 30 minutes away. No problem, I sat down and began to read my book. Being the genius that I am, 5 minutes before my train departure time I start to wonder why an intercity train isn't at the platform ahead of departure. I then went back to the timetable and still see my train on it. I also realise that there hasn't been any of the 3-4 trains scheduled before it pulling into my platform, which then tells me that this is the schedule for ALL the platforms, not just this one. Soon enough I figured out which platform my train is ACTUALLY at and run over to see it chugging off to Jonkoping. Wow, I'm retarded. Luckily, there was another train in a few hours which I managed to catch and so I was on my way, feeling like a bit of a moron. I arrived in my nice hotel and had an early night.
DREAMHACK
The next section will be about my time during the tournament and is so jam-packed I have written it in a journal style so it’s a bit easier to follow. I’ve also put in some photos taken to hopefully break it up a bit.
Day 1
• Got up very early and went to breakfast where I met x5 manager Shinkz and his mate Josh. We got a taxi to the venue, found our way in through the player entrance. I recognized Suppy in front of me in the line and chatted to him for a bit, he's a super nice guy. We were there around 8 or 8.30 to practice for our 10am games but PCs weren't free until 9am, so Shinkz showed us around the venue, which was absolutely massive. He pointed out the kebabs and Wok noodle place that had the best venue food and took us through the many halls filled with thousands upon thousands of BYOC spots where nerds were setting up shop. Also spoke to MYIPengwin and MYINiroxs and chatted with a few other SC2 people.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/d6MXU2G.jpg)
• Eventually got on a PC and practiced 2 games with Suppy. Was so excited that I forgot to fix all my settings and for some reason my hotkeys reset so lost both pretty convincingly. Had time to play 1 or 2 ladder games while vetoing maps and waiting for stream and felt decently warmed up - then they invited me and Lucky to lobby for the first mainstage event.
• I knew the meta was shifting heavily towards gasless openers and, even though I only had a few days practice with them, I opened game 1 with one. Lucky surprised me by going for a Targabane, one of the builds I knew how to hold in theory but had only played against once or twice. I froze up and was very slow to build a secondary wall and failed to snipe down the 2 creep tumors blocking my placement so it was horribly positioned. I lost instantly.
• G2 I went for one of my favourite aggressive ling-bane openers which KingKong used on me at ACL Brisbane. I remember being shocked when what looks like a speedling all-in actually uses banelings very early to become incredibly hard to stop. I've also seen Life use this opener multiple times in GSTL, so I know it's really good! It turned into the ling-bane skirmishes that are common following this opening and Lucky went super heavy on his ling-bane counter aggression, turning it into an incredibly messy war. I know many players don't like fighting this way against Koreans but, after practicing vs Korean pro-gamers with 170ms at home, then practicing with less than 20ms, I felt really confident. I transitioned into upgraded zerglings eventually which hard-countered his mutas and then finished it with an ultra-infestor push on his 3rd while 3-3 cracklings destroyed his entire main base
• G3 was Bel’shir Vestige and, seeing how the lingbane micro fights went in the previous game, I felt like the same opening would serve me well. It turned out he was doing an old school pool-hatch with the late gas going down around 3:10. His queens had to hold on his ramp to stop him from dying, so I sniped his natural and which put me instantly way ahead, eventually finishing it with a roach-bane follow-up push.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kuA56iQ.jpg)
• At this point I was pretty happy. I hadn't really expected to beat Lucky, especially as ZvZ hasn't been my strongest matchup lately as it took me a while to get used to mutalisks in HotS. More importantly my warm-up, while adequate, didn't really make me feel super strong and I gave away game 1 pretty much for free. So, after those circumstances, winning the series made me feel very confident.
• That was the end of Day 1 as they had to slog through dozens more groups for the rest of the day. We hung around the twitch lounge, met lots of new people like Incontrol, Apollo and Nathanias who were all super nice and chill dudes. Met lots of cool players like all the MYI guys and girls and some of my old IeSF/Gamecom/Korea friends like SortOf, Poyo, Pandatank, Feast and Dayshi. The Dutch players are probably my favourite. I met Harstem and Darkomicron and spent a lot of time talking to them and Poyo, the Dutch trio. Harstem’s reaction to finding out Stardust won was hilarious at the afterparty. Shinkz and I were cracking up laughing and wish we had it on camera. He was amazed that someone that proxy 2 gates so much on ladder had won Dreamhack
• We watched the opening ceremony of DH which was basically just a mini-rave in the main BYOC hall and then eventually headed back to Jonkoping for a bit of PC cafe practice. I remember sound didn't work on my PC and it felt so odd to play without sound, but it forces your eyes to glue to the minimap and so I surprised myself by beating players like TLO, Ret, Kas, Vortix and Titan on ladder. We eventually got hungry and got kebabs. Yet another amazing experience with the quality of Swedish fast food, the store took a good 10 minutes or more to make our kebabs and we were wondering if they forgot our order when they brought out some of the tastiest and most satisfying kebabs. They were the length of my forearm and filled with tasty meat, sauce, salad and hot chips. Delicious!
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/geFTNJm.jpg)
Day 2 Group 1
• I slept in a little more this day and got to the venue a bit later, warmed up and then eventually got into the group matches at 1.30pm. I had to play Slivko, Cytoplasm and Poyo. I knew Slivko was the guy to beat and so was pretty pumped to play him first up. I know he plays an incredibly greedy style and decided to early pool G1. However, I didn't count on the fact that he has sick drone micro, cross-map star station is massive rush distance AND I forgot to chase his overlord from my natural so it was really obvious I was following up with a 1 base ling-bane all-in and he crushed it, despite him opening exactly the way I knew he would. I was a bit angry that I didn't just 10p baneling, so the next 2 games I just played really greedy while scouting to check he wasn't going to all-in. Both times I managed to get it to the mid-late game where I could pull him apart with small counterattacks and abuse his lack of multitasking. G3 got really epic with a final brood-viper-corruptor-queen-infestor battle that I barely won, and I fist-pumped pretty hard when I won that.
• vs Cytoplasm I was rushed into game still very pumped from beating Sslivko and made a lot of small mistakes in the early game, such as not seeing 30 lings run right past my overlord and hence having my economy ravaged! It worked out to be a really cool opportunity though because I knew Cytoplasm was out of practice and I was in prime condition so I chose the 2 most "comeback" specialty units I could think of in the muta and swarm host and just massed them up while using hidden bases to come back from a situation where I was completely dead. Was really cool to do something unique and make such an epic messy comeback from a lost game, on the main stream in front of 30,000+ viewers. In Game 2 my ling-bane all-in worked despite him scouting it.
• In Game 1 vs Poyo I let him be incredibly greedy and made a lot of small mistakes despite zero pressure, so lost pretty badly. G2 his 2rax was inches from breaking me but I just barely broke out and killed him with my counterattack. G3 I just hit a big 1-1 roach timing and easily won vs his greedy mass reactor powering. (Editor’s Note: Changeling on the depot in game 3 was pretty epic to watch, even though not many people noticed it :D)
• I was really happy to get 1st in my group again, despite continuing my tradition of screwing up one game in each series I never really got shaken and just found ways to come back.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hO0Y24P.jpg)
Day 2 Group 2
• Our final group wasn't until 10pm, so I slept on the couch which, for some reason, nobody was sitting on in the twitch lounge, only to be awakened by Hotbid poking me and asking me to move from the "Interview couch". Worst guy, Hotbid. Tried to relax, wandered around a bit, watched a bit of dota, got incredibly bored, couldn’t get a PC to practice and ended up starting to own poker before having to bail to find out groups and warm-up.
• I had two wishes with the final group stage. The first was to dodge Life, and the second was to have no terran.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/wNaANJU.jpg)
• Well, I got Life, but I didn't get any terran! So it was half a blessing.
• I had Starnan first who'd surprisingly made it out of a very hard group in stage 2. I held his blink timing in game 1, and game 2 went swarm-hosts on Akilon. I hadn't really practiced my swarm host play and so I screwed up my ratio, only having about 16 swarm hosts when he got up to 8 collossi --> I should have had at least 25 with his huge commitment to ground, and more static. He crushed through, so I did a weird muta swap before going back to swarm hosts and it devolved into an exceptionally messy game which I barely won.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Jg5h45q.jpg)
• Next I played Tod and we had the infamous debacle of both thinking it was cross-map only star station. I went 3hatch before pool, not realising that he'd sat behind me and watched me do the same opener game 1 vs Starnan. His blind counter involved proxying 2 gates in an empty base cross-map from him, and upon moving into an empty base with 4 zealots going "WTF ITS NOT CROSS?". I was shocked too and paused instantly, not realising what build he was doing and agreed to rm. I checked the match history and saw what he'd done only to giggle to myself, if it actually was cross-map I would have died!
• Tod's PC then had troubles multiple times and half an hour later, at about 1am, we finally got started. We were all getting very tired by this point, and I was stretching and drinking Red Bull to stay alert. After speaking to Tod briefly I decided he would do what all protoss are doing right now which is either heavy committal to cannon/proxygate opening OR a no-scout opening. I decided to do the ultimate meta and 3h before pool again. Unfortunately Tod took a middle of the road approach with a forge-scout build and cannon'd my natural. My response was poor and I lost the game outright. The next game I opened safe and held his gate pressure smoothly and exploded to 70 drones on 4 base, 5 hatch vs his 2-base. I scouted his follow-up immortal-gateway move out and saw there was no 3rd base. My explosion of muta-ling was out just in time to overwhelm his small stalker count.
• Game 3 I opened safe again vs his Naniwa/Bielsko eco 4-gate pressure. I initially held it quite easily with my hatch on 200hp, but didn’t watch as my units pathed within a centimetre of his pylon and, because it was behind the hedge, didn’t kill it. 2 more zealots then warped in and killed my 3rd. I stayed cool and rebuilt it and we continued to skirmish on the map, eventually working into 180 supply 6 base with mass muta and some ling-roach vs his 3 base 120 supply protoss. I spotted his DT shrine and kept attacking, knowing I didn't need to respond just yet as it had just started. I went in with 2 separate squads of mutas while hitting the front and spilling lings in, knocking down his stalker count, killing a nexus and knocking his probe count down to 35. I was ecstatic, I'd taken my commanding position in the game into a definite win. And then I heard the Swish Swoosh of DT’s attacking drones. I'd completely forgotten to respond to the DT shrine and despite chopping off both his legs with my aggression, all 6 bases had zero detection and a DT in each base. I lost 65 drones in the space of a minute and was completely crippled. I kind of imagine the next 10 minutes of the game being like the Black Knight in Monty python and the Holy Grail once he's had all his limbs chopped off and refuses to surrender and keeps trying to bite King Arthur lol. And so I lost eventually, despite continuing to counter with my small muta counts and ling runbys to buy time. He split his army effectively and continued DT counter-attacks and I just couldn’t afford static defence and so kept losing drones and eventually lost. I knew that now I had to beat Life to qualify for top 16.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/9W8zw2h.jpg)
• At this point I had nothing to lose, I knew that there was no expectation of me making it through anymore and so I had to play for pride and the off chance of pulling off a win. Not only was he favoured over me, but Life is my hero and idol. He revolutionized zerg play and showed an understanding no other player had before. It's kind of surreal to meet your idol, who's 10 years younger than you, a young kid really, and get to play him, but it's also really invigorating and exciting. I knew we were both tired and so hitting some sort of surprising all-in would have a good shot of working. Game 1 I tried to do a hatch-gas-pool ling pressure straight into an incredibly fast roach-bane all-in. The ling pressure went well and right off I was amazed that I could micro around his ling-bane and pick off banes with pairs of lings without too much trouble. He tried to counter with a big ling-bane pressure just as my roaches were moving out, a really good situation for me as typically what he needs to hold is spines and queens more than ling-bane. However Life countered very well, cutting off reinforcements and forcing me to micro in 2 locations. I held his counter at home with almost no drone losses but in the meantime accidentally rallied my 4 lings supporting my roaches into his natural where they died. So whilst I cleaned up his attack at my natural I should have been hitting with 10 roaches and 4 banelings, almost guaranteed to win vs his ling-bane and 2 spines, but, with no banelings supporting the roaches Life pulled his drones and executed an amazing surround before my other lings could arrive, killing all my roaches and cutting my attack off. His mutas finished me off in the following minutes.
• G2 vs Life I went gasless opener and he did a rush for roach speed and just +1 whilst I went for the faster 3rd and slower 1-1 upgrades and much slower roach speed. His timing killed my 3rd and got a good trade on my roaches, but as his economy was still only equal it was still very close. Our skirmishes broke off and we both sent counterattacks out, however I surprised his and stomped it, and then pushed to his 3rd whilst my other counter worked into his natural and killed his queen and some drones. My front army pulled back a little and he overreacted and pulled half his army to defend the 5 roaches in his natural. I saw everything and as soon as he pulled back I charged into his front half of the army and killed it before the 2nd half could re-unite. Winning from 10 drones and a base down, with almost identical army counts. This really put me in good spirits.
• G3 he did a speedling all-in vs my hatch-gas-pool and got a queen and 1 or 2 drones. I had a small lead and counte-rattacked and so we went into the standard whirlwind situation, 10 minutes of ling-bane skirmishes. I made 1 or 2 small mistakes more than Life though and he gained a small lead. Again he went for his super fast roach speed, completely skipping upgrades whilst I went for 1-1. He hit his timing just as my 1-1 finished but my roach count was still too small, his timing was absolutely perfect. Just 5 or 6 more roaches and I would have held and had a convincing upgrade lead. I shook my head, grimaced and smiled and laughed knowing I'd come close and fell short, but still done well. I opened my twitter and facebook to find a huge outpouring of support for me and it immediately made me feel so happy and supported by the community.
Day 3
• I went and watched a lot of matches, hung out with more people, went to the twitch after party where I got to meet Bruno the DotA 2 caster, who reminds me so much of Borat with his unbuttoned shirts, hairy chest and gold chains lol
. He's hilarious. Squirtle was the most interesting Korean as he makes a huge effort to speak English and hang out with foreigners so was really cool to see him hanging with Feast and a few other guys a lot. Jaedong came into the after party with sunnies on walking with the biggest swagger ever you would have thought he won the thing! EG is definitely having their effect, soon he will be getting huge muscles no doubt! Eventually the party closed, so we hung out on the streets for an hour or two and then it got so cold I jogged home to my hotel in the bright orange 3am Swedish summer "sunset" that lasts all night. Woke up early, got the train back, had my first "Swedish" food from a cafe in Stockholm of boiled fish, potatoes, beetroots and capers, which was strangely delicious despite its simplicity, and began my trip home.![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0bik0kn.jpg)
• Left Jonkoping - 9am Tuesday, got home 12pm Thursday - 43 hours, but the stay-over in Singapore and constant sleep on flights made it much more fun. Saw my friend from when we were kids who works there and got to have steamboat/hotpot/bbq with the clan aLternative guys + Belgian beer at a bar afterwards. The Indonesians are currently burning their farmland or forests or something and its all blowing into Singapore so the whole city was covered in smog and apparently its semi-toxic pollution levels for the moment because of that so quite a few people were wearing masks
. I think this just added to the sense of mystery and adventure HOMEBOUND
On the last leg of my trip home to Sydney I had time to reflect on my performance and the most upsetting parts of getting knocked out were definitely the game 3 against Tod where even he came up and said if I just sat back and wasn't so aggressive, or if I just built a spine and spore at each base, then he would have had no chance. But even my series against Life if I had those 4 banes with the push I really think game 1 could have been mine. Or if in game 3 I hadn't made so many mistakes in ling-bane wars. So I felt a little bit bitter... but overall that bitterness was buried beneath a lot of satisfaction and happiness. The game 3 vs Tod was SO FUN to play. Using 2 muta squads at one point and constantly attacking and dancing around his bases was so fun to execute, and likewise skirmishing ling-bane with LIFE was just amazing.
I had so much fun in these games and was so happy to have come so close to beating both Life and Tod. A few small changes and I would have gone into the top 16 without dropping a set. Yet even though none of that happened this was my best performance ever. It was the first tournament where my team completely supported me right from the beginning giving me months of practice, a prepared itinerary and everything sorted. I had time to get over the jetlag and practice in great conditions.
My years of steadily improving at Starcraft has finally reached the point where I went over to the low ping ideal environment and was beating all of the best foreigners on ladder and jumped straight to the top 10 on EU - Something I'm sure even 6 months ago I wouldn't have come close to reaching. HotS is a much more fun game and my skill has jumped forward so much in this fun, multi-tasking friendly game. The diversity of strategies has made everything so much more exciting and it's been really cool to grow along with the meta-game.
POST DREAMHACK
Sponsors
I’ve done a few video reviews in the two weeks since arriving home from Sweden. Keeping sponsors happy is a big part of my life. Along with my results, it gives them a lot of confidence in their support of me. It helps that I also have genuine joy in receiving their products, which makes them easier to review.
Shameless advertising
Here I am with my CM Storm QuickFire Pro keyboard (with brown switches). Really love this keyboard. I only started using it a month before going to DreamHack, but the transition from my old keyboard was effortless so it made it really easy to get used to.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ARxtsWg.jpg)
Who doesn’t want a few Gigabyte Notebooks to use? Portable and perfect for long-haul trips to countries on the other side of the world to Australia. Even great to practice SC2 on!
In addition, I also received a Gigabyte Nvidia GTX 780, one of the newest graphics cards on the market. I’ve been meaning to use this to finally get back to streaming in HD quality again, but unfortunately my schedule hasn’t afforded me time yet.
(I’m always looking to improve my video reviews so feel free to let me know what else you’d like me to focus on, how else to improve, etc)
Tournaments and practice
July also means a few other things for me. It wouldn’t be a pro gamer’s life if I didn’t have to practice for more tournaments. I have great hopes for the NA WCS Challenger Qualifiers, and even with the influx of Korean players I need to keep my faith up that I can do well there. I fell to Xigua in the Ro16 a couple days ago in the first qualifier. It really highlighted some key errors I made in that ZvZ series which I have since worked on. I have also modified my sleeping schedule to allow me to cope with the timezone differences. Instead of sleeping at 1-2 am (like a true nerd-baller) I have been going to bed around 8-10 pm and waking up between 4 and 6am in the morning. It’s hard to adjust to at first but I’ve found that my body just feels better from going to sleep early for a change.
+ Show Spoiler +
In a Sea of Koreans ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/9xfqiSr.jpg)
I also have a really good chance to qualify for IEM Shanghai directly to continue my long-standing love affair with IEM events. I have qualified for and attended three of these so far – Guangzhou, Cologne & Singapore! The people I’ve met and the cultures I’ve experienced at these events are incredible. Last but not least, I will be flying interstate to Adelaide for AVCon for a big LAN and then Melbourne for PAX Australia the following week. Crazy!
THANK YOUS
Big thank you to my team, Exile5, and my sponsors (Nvidia, Western Digital, Cm Storm, Cooler Master & Gigabyte Notebooks) for their incredible support. Australia is still a tiny drop in the ocean compared to NA/EU/KR and travel anywhere for tournaments isn’t cheap.
Thanks to all my fans, all the guys that run the events and help manage the streams and just anyone who takes part in enjoying and playing Starcraft 2. I love this game and I love sharing my passion for it with all of you.
If you’d like to see more photos from DreamHack, there are plenty more photos on my team’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/teamexile5
