iloveoov: The Greatest Genius

After oov won against Boxer in the Ever OSL finals most of the crowd immediately left. And I don't know if FBH's half-naked ceremony made people leave but it fit well.

It may have been 3-2, but oov went from being down 2-1 to utterly dominating the flabbergasted Nada in games 4 and 5.

Note that he won against Boxer even after losing against the incredible game 4 build and looking visibily disturbed. And it was a series that he "force[d] himself to win."

oov up until facing Julyzerg 03/04/05-04/07/01. Nearly 15 months.



oov start of career to ever osl victory 03/04/05-04/11/20. 19 1/2 months.

People dismissed it as luck because Boxer's wraiths flew so close later on, but that was more of Boxer sending his wraiths away from oov's base than actively scouting for expos, for his wraiths didn't even scout the expo properly and did not attempt to scout any others. He sent out a deliberate scouting scv later which discovered it, so it would've been more luck that Boxer found it when he was not intending to.

Ironically, Boxer, who immediately comes to mind as the most aggressive and risky terran without question, and certainly was, played far more economically safely than oov. Consider Boxer's original innovation: 1 base harass. The most striking thing about it was how long Boxer took to expand. Usually he would only expand as his main minerals were running dry, although he often would only expand after his main ran out and just float his cc to the nat. While this build requires you to forego a cc until a fair amount of harassment is done and SV tech+ 3 rax is reached, there is little reason to not expand unless the enemy was near breaking point from the harass. The 8 marines sacrificed in making the CC are more than made up a few minutes later. Their loss is completely insignificant unless the battle is continually active and any loss in production for either side would spell their loss; which is true sometimes, but not always, and not for how long it takes for the main to run out.

Having played this build almost exclusively up until '06 or so, I realized how strong defensively strong this build was. You would march/fly around the map shutting down zerg expansions and disrupting their econ/tech. And of course, when they couldn't stop you from doing this, they would try to counter. And these counters would never succeed, because you are running off of 1 base, and short of defilers, which zerg could never reach in peace, there was no way they were successfully countering a 1 base terran.

One can argue that this is also due to Boxer and the trend started by him simply believing that aggressive play can accomplish the job well enough and the overall neglect for economics. However, ask yourself why Boxer still sticks to 1 base builds to this day. Why did Boxer stick with this style even after Nada pushed an expansion much earlier (though much later than oov would)? It's because Boxer can create a game flow where the battles are decided with small unit aggression, where he reigns supreme. Any earlier attempt at expanding would put him in peril to zerg counters, and it would not be necessary to do this if he could control the gameflow.