German KoTH - A Look Back

If you closely followed the past pieces of the Advent Calendar you might realize that there's an Ariadne's thread or some sort of „overall“ topic connecting several of the pieces so far: A spolight on the seemingly small things within our community. Today's door has two similar goals, hyping the upcoming German King of the Hill and showing that events like this might very well be the first chapter of a bigger story.

To do that, we travel back in time, almost five years in the past. Back then, in January 2009, one of the last editions of another German King of the Hill took place. This event series was unrelated to today's hosted by Celetuiw. However, they shared similar goals: Providing interesting games and promoting the upcoming stars of Germany. The reigning champion was none other than GoOdy.

GoOdy, back then, was already a well established member of the international elite. He started out as mucho player and could be seen idling in channels like op wax] on Europe, using the alias WWW)TooGoodForYou(. In the early days the good mannered player still used Terran and was known as „good“, but „not good enough“ to seriously be considered as top contender. He was more of a dark horse and high finishes like a second place in the German GIGA Grand Slam were not likely. His close friend and caster Sonic[SHlT] always teased him on stream for having five Siege Tanks in all of his factories lined up – a result of his very low APM ratio. Nobody really understood how GoOdy could take games against better players with such ridiculous macro-management, but he did. His Vulture raids always found weak spots and his map awareness was there.
      A few years later, after being defeated in the German World Cyber Games Preliminaries, GoOdy switched races and picked Protoss as his main. After this switch, GoOdy started to finish better. At the international arenas he went under the radar for long. In 2008, only one year after switching, he made it to the last eight of the prestigious WCG Finals after beating Cloud. Even before that he caused minor upsets, as he took games off the ZvP monster Mondragon in somewhat important games. No wonder he also roflstomped most of what Germany had to offer in the King of the Hill event series hosted by broodwar.de and GosuGamers. The uprising stars of the German B Team, and internationally known names like HoRRoR, experienced first hand how hard GoOdy was as opponent.

Hence, the new contender of the series we'll be looking at was seen as the loser before the game even started. The guy's name was Anton „kolll“ Emmerich, whom you know today. Even though the rumor states that kolll went for a shiny B- ranking in his first ICCup season, it's questionable. It remains a fact that kolll already played longer in lower divisions of the BWCL and eventually joined the oldschool clan IPS, thus being able to play against the best the German scene had to offer. Be that as it may, GoOdy was already A-, which means a real huge distance to the lesser rank. One of the German organizers, called zZzZ-, who was also only 12 years of age, tried to promote the shit out of the other youngster, kolll, but nobody took him seriously. People watched his replays and judged that kolll was a one trick pony and one of „the mass gamers“. One of his earliest anti-fanboys, by the way, was HoRRoR.

Back to the series. If there was one match up worth watching once GoOdy's nick popped up, it was his play against Zerg. He used to open with outdated one base strategies on maps you aren't supposed to tech up fast with one gas only. But he made it work. He then transitioned into mechanically demanding stuff and went nuts. Kolll on the other hand, well... we said he was a one trick pony. Could the youngster be the David slaying Goliath?
Sit back and enjoy the entire series casted by Celetuiw and RedW4rri0r!