New Year, New Season! The ASL is back for its 15th season, where does the time fly huh? Of course things did get a bit dicey with the season starting 2 weeks later than it was supposed to due to reasons that are not made entirely clear.

Regardless, here we are and the result of that delay has forced Afreeca to schedule all of the Ro24 in the span of a week and we here on TL will also be covering all of the Ro24 in this one article.

One of the better things that has happened over the break is the rise of the Major Proleague and the lower tiered version the K League, the daily proleague style matches which fans can follow here, gives us fans a good idea of how all the players have been performing competitively more so than just random sponsor matches on outdated maps, taking a look at that data that has been collected so far from eloboard

Mini is one of the top 3 protoss performers in the major proleague puts him way above the pack compared to the rest of his opponents in the group, Action who primarily only participates in K League and not that often either and sSak and HiyA who are not active participants in either league.

While that may suggest that sSak and HiyA might be practising in private their past performances seem to leave a lot to be desired, anything could happen but Mini would still be the favourite against them on a cold rainy night in Stoke(I genuinely can’t come up with a starcraft variant of this), Action on the other hand would keep up with Mini but I doubt would take the game against him.

Mini and Action to Advance!

Is this an exciting group? If you're a Bisu fan, surely it is. Bisu arguably has the easiest group of all the "tier 1" players.
While this should be is easy for Bisu, it definitely isn't for the other contenders. Sharp and BarrackS are both fairly inconsistent players and I don't remember seeing HyuN pretty much since MBC Hero disbanded.

I looked into HyuN's history and we did see him in ASL before, however qualifying for ASL seems to be as good as it gets. I don't really expect any more from him. One thing in HyuN's favor is that he only has to practice ZvT if he is serious about advancing from this group. Looking at the latest ASLs BarrackS and Sharp are very similar skill level and that makes it difficult to predict which player is joining Bisu to the next round, but if we look at the daily proleagues BarrackS has had little and poor performances unlike Sharp. Also if both players have a good day Sharp is better than BarrackS (in all match ups). Both BarrackS and HyuN are to surprise us.

Bisu and Sharp To Advance!

Another group, another 4 players, another 3 races. Actually, this season's Ro24 has all 3 races present in each group, which means fewer potential mirror match ups! *kids in the background cheering*

This season ASL gave all players a tier ranking: tier 1, 2, 3 or 4. Each group is fitted with one player from each tier. The first match to be played is always tier 1 vs tier 4. For this group that is Soma versus... *drumroll* ... Ample. Who would have guessed? Soma should get a free win here and I argue the same is true for Best in his first game vs Mind. Then we get Soma vs Best for our winners' match which should be fire works. Thereafter either player will face off against Terran once again. And they are the favourite here once again, especially if it's Best. When we're talking gateway-man, this guy is practically the godfather of it. He is known to even slam Flash + Show Spoiler + with it.

Mind needs to step it up and get lucky enough to fight Soma, as Best is no Bisu + Show Spoiler +and thus he won't get a free pass in a rematch vs Best either. As for Ample I'm sorry to say he really is tier 4 when it comes to the no.1 BW league that can be played in.

Soma and Best To Advance!

Apparently everyone predicted the makeup of the group Jaedong was going to be in well in advance based on how afreeca works its tiering system to assign Ro24 groups, do the stacking allegations have any merit though?

Snow is by far and beyond the best player in the group, even if his offline results tend to be shaky they usually don’t hurt his ground in this stage of the tournament, it also helps that he’s the best performing protoss player if not the best performing player overall in the Major proleague, this should be solid 2-0 from him.

This leaves us with Shuttle, Jaedong and BishOp, the last of whom isn’t the most active with the online play and when he has hasn’t shown the kind of results needed to advance against these players, Shuttle and Jaedong are going to be the big tossup, Jaedong has some confidence working against protoss off late going on a good streak in the Major league compared to late January, Shuttle on the other hand has struggled to gain big wins.

Snow and Jaedong to Advance!

What a lovely group. My favourite Zergs, Queen and Bag of Builds.
The best 2 match ups include Zerg and we'll get to see both this group. As fun as it is to see Zergs get destroyed by their opposing races, I don't think that will happen here. Besides I wont deny, to say I'm a biased writer is not a lie.

Mong plays in K-league every now and then where he mostly finds himself fighting vs Effort and when he does, that goes either way pretty evenly. Right, I hear you thinking: *Effort, that guy who is Flash's kryptonite, so that means Mong has a monster TvZ*, however Effort has wrist problems and thus doesn't really compete anymore. Hence we haven't seen him in any of the lastest ASLs. Anyway it means I conclude Mong's TvZ isn't bad, but nothing spectacular either. I'm also keeping in mind his last ASL performance here where a loss to no one other than Shine contributed to his knock out.

A player or rather players we haven't seen often in the daily proleagues are Shine and Ruin. This makes it a bit hard to gauge their skill levels. Shine often pulls through regardless whether we've seen him active or not, he is the one and only bag of builds after all, always hungry for a hard fought, well earned win. And Ruin, well.. I don't see him ruining anyone's day soon other than a few Chinese players ^^

"You didn't write about Queen!"
- Yup.
Queen and Shine To Advance!

The formation of Ro24 groups is based primarily on performance in prior seasons of the ASL and nowhere is it that obvious as it is in this group.

Light is one of the best performing players right now in the Major Proleague, it's most impressive that anyone can have an overall winrate above 60% in starcraft at any point in its history and competition wise he blows the rest of the group out of the water, he should 2-0 with ease.

Stork has found himself somewhat invigorated since his retirement from competition(that didn’t last lol) being a regular player in both the Major Proleague where he has middling results and K League where he does pretty well and pads his stats to be one of the better overall performers. While JyJ has pretty much been the punching bag of K-League itself suffering a sub 40% winrate. Sacsri seems like a wild card, hopefully he shows good games this season.

Light and Stork To Advance!

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