Two weeks and Two COVID diagnoses later we finally have the first Round of 8 match, well its now the last one, Soulkey and Rain face off on their climb to claim the ASL championship gold.

Rain vs Soulkey is on paper not only a great BW match but one with crossover appeal for these two players are not just phenomenal BW players but absolute top tier beasts as RTS players looking at their long careers.

The saying goes that you never forget how to ride a bicycle, but Rain is someone who never forgets to be Tour De France ready as a player able to show peak performance even after taking multiple breaks and retirements over the years, an uncanny level of persistence in holding on to his ability to play BW. He’s practically cruised through the ASL thus far only managing to drop a single set to Light in what was his only hard fought series against one of the few players who is capable of taking him down, now he’s up against another one in that list.

For what its worth, Soulkey may have already gotten his moral victory this season managing to shake off his very shaky ZvZ skills by taking down both hero and Jaedong in Bo3s in the Ro16, but now onto the next challenge, beating Rain, which as we get to the numbers will show that this is turning out the be the ZvP matchup the fans have been clamouring for all season

The fact that this match has been delayed by two whole weeks left both players with a lot of time to practise and prepare for just one matchup and their sponbbang for march proves it with both players just playing PvZ/ZvP for the most part with Soulkey showing a 64.5% winrate after 73 games and Rain showing a 61.8% winrate after 34 games. While both players have an excellent record, Soulkey having a better winrate with almost twice as many matches is definitely a positive for him. We’ll see how well they’ve prepared specifically for this series though.

Rain picked Revolver(Set 1) and Eclipse(Set 3), while online figures show decent results for protoss in PvZ the map has yet to see an offline match for the matchup, Eclipse is an interesting pick for Rain, offline and in general overall its been a fantastic protoss map against both terran and protoss as of late but in the ASL, especially this season Zerg is 5-3 over protoss.

Soulkey had similar map picks with Allegro(Set 2) and Vermeer(Set 4), much like Revolver, Allegro has yet to see a ZvP in the ASL, hard to say how it will play out for both players but considering how good it is to defend a 3rd base as zerg in most of the locations on the map it will be good for them. Vermeer seems like a no bRainer for zerg looking at the record including a 4-2 win record on the map this ASL alone.

Final map is Butter if we do get to here, while I do like Soulkey’s chances on this map I also feel that if we got to set 5 this is where he would start to choke like he normally would unlike Rain who plays phenomenally when the pressure is up to him.

Rain to Advance to the Ro4 3-2!

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Writers: BLinD-RawR
Graphics: v1
Editors: BLinD-RawR