Pholon's Best Cheeses - 2009

Despite the mediocrity of game 3, the fourth game is easily the most exciting of the night. EffOrt, on the left side of the map, opens with a standard 12 pool into expansion, while July on the right pulls one of the ballsiest ZvZ builds I have ever seen in progaming. He builds a proxy hatch in a hidden location at the bottom of the map - purely for building hidden lings as it is not near any minerals.

EffOrt senses something is up as his overlord arrives in July's base and finds the timing completely off for someone with no natural expansion. He sends his initial lings all over the map searching for July's proxy - but in one of the closest scouting calls I've seen in a while, BARELY misses the edge of the creep - and is therefore extremely surprised when July shows up with an overwhelming ling force. What happens next is some of the best ling/drone micro I've ever seen in a ZvZ - EffOrt uses a perfect concave and drone positioning to make his smaller army as cost effective as possible. July wins the fight but with far fewer lings left over than he should, and as EffOrt continues to spawn lings he soon regains control of his natural and throws up a sunken.

Effort's insane defense has clearly thrown July off guard at this point - because he begins to make sloppier erratic moves - rushing his lings straight to EffOrt's main, being extremely aggressive with his inferior mutalisk count, etc. His one major chance to get an advantage - killing EffOrt's red hp natural hatchery - is ignored in desperate attempts to take out drones. With his back against the wall, July brilliantly takes out EffOrt's damaged spire using a single sneaky hero ling - but is so far behind in both muta count and drone count that he is unable to capitalize on the advantage it gives him. Effort streams into July's base and he types out.

An unfortunate loss for July - he showed very creative ZvZ and intelligent ZvZ play, but EffOrt proved too solid to allow this unorthodox strategy to succeed. Congratulations to EffOrt for taking the 3rd place title for GOMTV and getting a ticket to Blizzcon!