EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Vw6mS.png)
The Infested Archon's IEM World Championships Preview
With the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship to start soon, The Infested Archon is bringing you up to date on all the latest news going into this huge tournament.
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IdrA withdraws from the tournament
In a surprise announcement, Greg “IdrA” Fields has withdrawn from the tournament. Initial speculation was that he was afraid to face Stefan “MorroW” Andersson. IdrA lost to MorroW in the finals of the IEM Global Challenge in August and insulted MorroW when he chose to switch to Zerg. However, it was revealed that IdrA has been training with Liquid`Ret in Korea. Ret defeated MorroW in the finals of Assembly using an amazing strategy of building Roaches early, which MorroW was completely useless against. It is believed that Ret showed IdrA how to build Roaches early, making defeating Morrow totally trivial.
As it turns out, the real reason for the withdrawal was due to IdrA's flight to Germany was delayed by an hour. Upon hearing this, Greg immediately left the airport and went back home, believing that this 1 hour disadvantage would be impossible to overcome in the tournament.
Three Koreans and an Aussie, well, not anymore
Last week, IEM announced that ST_Ace, ST_Squirtle, and FOXMoon would be taking part in the World Championship. These three players, along with FXOmOOnGLaDe, recently competed in the GSL Code A tournament. However, all four players lost decidedly in the first round. Because of this utter failure, it has been announced that these 4 players have been uninvited from the IEM World Championship.
IEM spokesperson Carmac, who attends the prestigious RotterdaM University of Starcraft 2 for the Ungifted, had this to say:
“Initially when we were able to get these Korean players to come to Germany for the IEM World Championship, we were incredibly excited. Together with mOOnGLaDe, we had 4 GSL players, which was awesome. Unfortunately, after actually watching the GSL and seeing all four of these players lose in the first round, we realized how big of a mistake we made. We then took a closer look and realized our errors in judgment. Moon is one of the best Warcraft 3 players in the world, and we assumed that title automatically carried over to Starcraft 2, but apparently it does not. Squirtle beat one of the best players in the world, MVP, but it turns out that MVP sucks and can't even beat a Brood War Golden Mouse winner. mOOnGLaDe is regarded as the best player on the SEA server, which we didn't we realize was like being the tallest person in a room full of Huk's. As for Ace, we took his name off the top of the TLPD ELO rankings. Unfortunately, we sorted it alphabetically instead of ELO.”
Because these four players had already booked their non-refundable flights, IEM has decided to fully compensate for their troubles by giving them free ESL TV Premium tickets for the duration of the tournament.
...And the Rest
With only seven players remaining, a few of the players took a step back and looked at the competition. Realizing that Sjow and White-ra were still left and that between the two, they have won pretty much every SC2 tournament in the past 3 months, qxc, MorroW, Tarson, Socke, and Fenix have decided to not even bother and just let Sjow and White-ra duke it out for the finals. IEM tournament organizers agreed, saying, “Sjow and White-ra are going to play each other in the finals anyway. Why go through all the trouble of playing a bunch of meaningless games when the finals are already a foregone conclusion.”
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For those of you who didn't like the last article and seemed to miss the point, even though you're probably not reading this article and much less clicking on this spoiler, the idea behind the article was to get people to calm down, and realize that all these complaints people have are worthy of discussion, but that everything will turn out OK. The casters and tournament organizers and other prominent community members care just as much as you do and aren't trying to destroy SC2. So, step back, take a deep breath, and stop being so angry!
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