[Article] Best Zergs to never win a major.

On January 13 2015 22:27 Chef wrote:
I can't agree with your assessment of Zero. I followed him closely a long time, and I really liked him as a player, but a convincing case can't be made for nervousness as the issue (it feels like a very random thing to blame generally). Zero had issues (or maybe just quirks) with his gameplay that cause him to sometimes lose unexpectedly. The biggest thing you notice when you watch Zero for a long time is that his greatest strength is his late game, more specifically his large army control and macromanagement, and general strategic insight into the later stages of the game.

Now you will immediately think of game 5 vs Jangbi where Zero lost a tonne of stuff just to not realising there were dts killing all his drones (but you will also see in that game his strengths). You might point to that single game as a loss due to nervousness, but 1 it doesn't say much about his overall career in which he went deep in many tournaments, and 2 if you watch the video the way his face looks is like he's got serious eye-strain from over focusing, like he's actually in pain. That's his own fault, but it's not nervousness really.

The thing you have to analyse about Zero is that he has a record like 55% vs anyone, from mediocre players to TBLS. He doesn't lose 50% of the time because he gets nervous, he's loses 50% of the time because he doesn't get to the part of the game where he's truly strong. Against TBLS he has a pretty strong game because those are also players who largely want the game to go on longer because their advantages usually grow. That's why we know Zero is so strong at all, because he can beat these players in the late game (even if he is not absolutely dominant). The problem is that Zero loses tonnes of games due to stupid miss steps early on, and in the last OSL we did kind of see Zero trying to reform his early game (to pretty decent success we must admit). But that only works on the aggression. The weakness of Zerg as a race generally is that if they are playing for a long game, they have to walk a very fine line for the first 10 minutes where it is extremely easy to lose, and that is where Zero loses all his games (in what looks uncharacteristic of a great player). If you look at the Zergs who really did become champions, they did so because 1 they were aggressive players who took control of the early game or 2 they were very consistent about walking that fine line the first 10 minutes. That's not to say Zero is really bad at it, he's a pro and he has pro level zerg, but that's what you need to be dominant at to get that 60-70% winrate.

For me Zero is Queens / Hive ZvZ, proxy hatches, Queens ZvT, drone rushes, and beastly large army control. It's very telling that when Zero looked really strong was when he players against Terran's turtling mech and not putting much pressure on him early game.