EPTI wasn't certain if I would be able to do this, I have 5 classes in one day and have around 100-200 pages of reading on my offdays, but I only had around 90 to do today so I decided to set aside some time and do this. Onto the substance :
Today I'm covering Yellow's fall from his peak ZvT, which occurs in the trigem 2003 msl finals against Oov, and in some ways, this was his fall as a S-class gamer overall - it's the last SL he ever makes it to the finals in, and he doesn't place in any more until 06. This was from Oov's 27 game Z winning streak.
An addendum to the previous examination
One important factor I forgot to mention about Yellow's zvt in the previous entry is that his very small army format is successful because he could save up larva and easily switch to a massive army if he sees them moving out. This concept has grown less and less true over time as Terran macro and denying scouting have become better, and the modern matchup requires Z to utilize every larva.
The foreword
Unsurprsingly, the reason Yellow's beastly ZvT ended was a series with Iloveoov, the founder of modern macro based play in what was largely considered a micro matchup. Yellow had lost 2 or 3 games to lesser T players in unimportant tournaments before this (after a 15 game winning streak), but he would almost assuredly have recovered if not for this series. (There's no VODs so it's hard to tell).
This series is one I'd never heard of, but apparently the last game of it (Yellow v Iloveoov on Uboat) is famously painful for yellow fans. It's incredibly good, despite the end score of it being 3:0, and it's very noteworthy in that Fantasy's entire TvZ was probably stolen from the first game - mass tanks, valkyries, mech wind up being used.It's a battle of 2 extremes - the harassheavy, control oriented Yellow's zvt vs Iloveoov's brute force, macro tvz.
Throughout the entire game Yellow does nonstop harass and fights off armies with what are totally impossible odds in modern zvt (3 lurkers and a control group of hydras take out two tanks and 15+ mnm, with the majority of the kills being done by 1 lurker and 3 hydras).
However, the entire series must be examined to truly understand what occurred here - Iloveoov famously fell to July in a zvt match that was closely fought, and no one game of that series would be complete without the others. It is the same here, however I have chosen to spoiler these games in case someone wishes to only examine the most important match.
The Setup
+ Show Spoiler +
The first match of this game starts on gauntlet, with yellow 9 drone scouting and 12 hatching 11 pool 10 extractor. Oov walls off with one barracks (this map allows it at the choke, afaik) and denying scouting.
Oov opens with a factory, not bothering to make marines, and Yellow flies his OL in close enough to see the fac and backs out. After this, Oov adds an additional factory and machine shop. The OL does a return visit to see, and Yellow backs out. At this point, I personally don't understand what oov is doing - he has one marine and Yellow's lair is almost done. The korean announcers started talking about Science vessels, but Oov instead looks to be going 2 fac vultures. Yellow begins his spire shortly before they move out, and places 2 sunks at both bases to deny the 4 speed vults from eating drones. Oov's starport is only just starting it's control tower after mutas are out. He runs around his vults in front of yellow's mutas and it distracts them effectively, to the point that Oov has a valk and goliaths out, leaving him entirely safe to do whatever in his base. He uses his vultures to deny Yellow from successfully taking a 3rd by sniping drones, expands. Yellow tries to harass in Oov's base with his mutas only to face 3 valks and a small force of goliaths, but in the meantime has converted to hydralisks and a few scourge. Unstacked mutalisks are indeed not frightening at all. Yellow takes his third and Oov his second - this match feels very similar to some of JD and Fantasy's better games. Oov at this point has 5 or 6 valks, and Yellow tries making scourge to counter but they get sniped by Valks.
Oov begins making his 3rd command center and begins his 6th factory - 4 of which have machine shops. Yellow is starts a hive while attempting to take his fifth. Yellow has probably 30 hydras while Oov has something like 12 tanks and 8 goliaths - they exchange thirds, with Oov saving fewer of his scvs. At this point, he knows the size of Yellows army, and decides he can take it, and sends his 10 or so tanks straight at yellow's main, bringing a few vults - Yellow tries to cut off reinforcements and drops hydras on top of tanks, attempting to take out the force - however, his reinforcements are something like 8 hydras against 5 tanks and multiple goliaths.
Analysis of the first game
This game was somewhat emblematic of the shifting paradigms - Yellow's massively better control was no match for Oov's macro in this game, and the valkyries of Oov successfully prevented Yellow from shifting to the best counter against Tanks, mutalisks and enabled Oov to make a 15-20 large tank army with only 6 or 7 goliaths supporting it. However, Yellow was clearly not playing at his best in this first game, onto the next.
Jim Raynor's memory, indeed
+ Show Spoiler +
The next match was on Jim Raynor's Memory J 1.5 - a famously imbalanced map in it's original format, however on this version it wasn't quite as bad for tvz (58% for T this tournament). Oov chooses to go mnm instead this game, with Yellow again choosing a spire opening. One thing is clear from the previous game - Yellow's muta control isn't great.
Oov tries an early sunken bust, which yellow continually scouts by suiciding one ling into it, and easily has 3 sunks ready in time, allowing his mutas to get out. Yellow notes the large army sitting outside his base, and decides to go harass with his mutas, thinking there won't be a large army in oov's base. Oov's macro, however, results in a massive mnm army sitting inside his base. He runs a drone by oovs army, which results in Oov stimming and chasing it, and then flies his mutas into Oov's base and kills way more scvs than makes sense. Oov has amassed a tremendously large force - off of only 3 rax and one base. Yellow's 4 sunks, 2 control groups of lings and 12 mutalisks look pathetic vs it - Yellow's engagement is superb, but it's impossible to win with that vs 4 control groups of mnm. Yellow panicks and hurriedly makes lurkers, which hilariously take out half of oov's mnm running up the ramp - this game is a perfect example of the cheater terran nickname of Oov's.
Any player besides Yellow would be accused of playing poorly for not having gg'd yet, however Yellow has always done best in small army situations, so he decides to try and hold his 3rd for as long as possible - Oov brings out tanks and Vessels, and that is the end of that, however. Yellow's harassment attempts with small forces just does not work vs Oov - his macro is too good, he always has at least 12 mnm in his natural due to this.
[Analysis]
Notable about this game is that it's really apparent that Yellow is best with lurker first openings. The lack of defiler play, muta stacking and hold lurker kills Yellow - if any of these innovations had been discovered at this point, he would have been much more successful throughout these first two games. At this point, Yellow clearly knows that something has to change about his gameplay, and steels himself to play a totally different style within the next game.
The Key Game, Epiphany too late
The first 2 games of this series were just clear demonstrations that the metagame had escaped Yellow - but the third was his attempt to wrench it back into his grasp. It starts on Uboat with Yellow at 2 oclock and Oov at 7. This game is a must watch for any fan of TvZ, and is by far the best TvZ single game of it I've ever seen.
Yellow opens with what looks like overpool, and transition into a 1 hatch lair strategy, and the camera pans to a view of Boxer looking worried ( I think it's boxer). Shortly before his lair finishes, he adds an extra hatch and places his spire. In a way, this opening reminds me of Yarnc's vs Flash in the OSL - perhaps the Z and T players of modern eras have been watching old VODs?
Oov opens 2 port wraith without scouting Yellow's fast spire. Yellow adds his den around when the second hatchery finishes - the build now begins to echo modern zvp builds, with scourge and hydra to counter the T air dominance.
Yellow messes up and loses his scourge, allowing some harass to occur. Also evident in this game is that patrol micro is not discovered yet- oov has to cloak to deal with scourge.
Oov does a fair amount of damage with his wraiths, then begins to go up to 4 gates off one base, while Yellow takes his natural and decides to go for drop play with his initial Hydras, killing Oov's only factory and patrolling the middle of the map.
Noticing that most of Yellows forces are busy roaming the center of the map, Oov proceeds to do so much damage I'm amazed Yellow doesn't gg, killing every drone at the natural and 5 or 6 OL's. Both Yellow and Oov proceed to use air transport as the primary method of moving their army, with Oov dropping 4 dropships of Mnm into yellows' main, killing the spire and spawning pool, and most of the main's drones.
Oov spots Yellow's army alone with his wraiths, then starts to attack and gets several free kills with wraiths, then starts to attack yellows army with his mnm force, only to notice the lurkers killing his forces. Yellow then starts to force his way back into the game from sheer willpower alone- simultaneously dropping both Oov's main and natural mining lines after engaging the army - then killing 3 tanks and a control group of mnm with 8 hydralisk and 3 lurkers, killing 2 tanks with 3 hydras and a lurker.
Yellow's harassment begins to work like it did vs Xellos, succeeding in keeping Oov's wraiths from being used to harass or attack, and his peerless lurker/hydra control begins to be very apparent - he easily fends off mnm armies with small groups of hydras (misrah would love this game, it shows exactly how to use hydras vs mnm). At this point, it has been 2 base T vs 2 base Z - Yellow starts to take his 3rd and 4th simultaneously.
Yellow then doom drops oovs main, successfully killing off all of oov's ground forces, and the majority of his wraiths, but is fended off. Oov has a massive army, and proceeds to move out with it (20:48), tons of mnm and a few tanks. Oov knows about Yellow's third, but hasn'st scouted the 4th yet - Yellow and Oov trade 3rds, yellow successfully destroying Oov's cc with a small group of hydras (2-3 OL's worth) while Oov uses 30 marines and 3 tanks - this is the epitome of the difference in their styles. Yellow starts taking a ninja 4th by Oov's main base as Oov destroys his natural. Yellow decides to start massing up units to break out , and it's a fairly glorious sight. Yellow is successfully keeping Oov at one mining base while mining off of 2 (1 mostly mined out) and getting a 3rd going up.
Oov takes out Yellow's 4th, and then loses almost all of his mnm army to two very well placed lurkers, and at this point corners Oov's remaining army and removes the tanks, converting to a lurker ling force as Oov retakes his third and floats his nat CC to some other base - and 2 well positioned lurks take out massive amounts of mnm, and Yellow goes for an attack on the third after this - unfortunately running into oov's dropships dropping units, coming out with 2 lurks vs 1 bunker and 1 rine, Yellow then kills most of Oov's dropships with scourge as they take his 2nd mining base, sendind 3 more lurkers that proceed to positively rape Oov's scvs lines. At this point, Yellow has stepped up his play to what seems like an inhuman level of play - his scourge are everywhere, he's using tiny armies to demolish Oov continuously.
Now for the down turn : He moves his Overlord army out to kill Oov's last 2 mining bases, and his scourge barely miss the dropships coming to destroy his main due to being ordered to follow the scourge.
The last 15 minutes of this game that defy summarization - you have to watch them to understand - from 30:00 minutes on or so.
It turns into an elimination race with both players performing long distance mining, with Oov down to a few mnm and Yellow down to lurkers. This is one of those times where Oov does display brilliant micro, but had Yellow not lost his tech buildings, it would be a far different story- the capability to make scourge would have instantly won him the game.(Dropship tank micro vs lurkers, both players have 2 -3 workers, medics being used to kill lurkers, etc.)
At the end, there is some cute chatting I'd love to have translated.
Analysis, comparisons
Both players play entirely recklessly this game, almost never defending their expansions, instead charging ahead to secure advantages. Yellow is clearly in the mindset of all or nothing, the entire game, as is Oov. 1 hatch Lair has never been a strategy that works without surprise, and he appeared to be toying with going 2 hatch muta until scouting the starports. There are so very, very many ifs to this game - if that lurker had been burrowed, if that rine hadn't gotten off one last shot, but the majority of them come back to this very recklessness characterizing the game.
If Yellow had defended the drop that killed all his tech (which he could have easily done), then he would have been in a much better position - but had he been in the mindset to play in this defensive position, he never would have been able to come back from his early disadvantage.
Had Yellow won this game, there is no doubt in my mind he would have won the series and climbed back onto being the best ZvT - it's clear from this game that he developed a keen understanding of precisely what he had to do to counter Oov's style, and some poor choices at the end of the game (scourge on follow rather than patrol) prevented him from being able to successfully close the game, as well as not being able to to come to this epiphany before being at a massive disadvantage - he grasped the metagame, but the mindset required for him to grasp it was lost after being crushingly defeated in this game, and he was never able to recover.
His answer was very unique and something that I've never seen in any other zvt, hydralurkerscourge, using small amounts of excellently positioned lurkers to eliminate inordinately large amounts of mnm and to harass with, while using his large hydra army to eliminate tanks + wraiths, and to lure mnm into lurkers and snipe expos. This game once again convinces me that Yellow has peerless small army control.
In a way, this loss reminds me of Jaedong's ee-han timing vs Stork, had Jaedong's mutas succeeded but Stork still won the game, Jaedong would not have the great zvp he has. Yellow's aggressive, small amount of units with heavy harass in zvt was cast aside from zvt, in favor of July's aggressive style, which although not considered a macro zerg today, he was considered at the time (according to July in a recent interview).
The heedless aggression of both players acting together is something that is rarely seen in the deciding set of a series, that leads to close, base trading elimination games like this. Modern hyper aggressive players, when facing another, tend towards having one player play defensively (See Bisu v Iris game 5), as it leads to more certain victories, and this is another clear change from the older times
.
Edit : Also, if I mess up on my history or analysis of something, please correct - I've only followed pro SC for about a year and don't really know the full story behind things like the map jim raynor's memory. (Grammar as well, it's also been my weakest point as a writer). If you wish to argue a contentious point with me, go ahead. I welcome criticism.
