[OSL] Korean Air OSL 2 Grand Final - Page 193

On September 14 2010 16:46 vectorix108 wrote:
oh man great pics!
man what i would do if i ever met a progamer....

On September 14 2010 19:36 pred470r wrote:

i'd piss my self if i met flash

On September 14 2010 09:23 Noxide wrote:


Someone recognized him while he was shopping too lol

On September 15 2010 17:14 endy wrote:


Yep. Defintely. After the award ceremony, Flash was escorted by ~30 guards because there were around 200 hundred fans following him (including myself). And I know by experience that a lot of chinese fans like to stalk their favorite celebrities next to their hotels lol.

I admit I almost asked one of the staff if he knew by chance at which hotel Flash was staying but I changed my mind thinking that my wife would probably not appreciate it. ^_^

On September 12 2010 15:54 Invictus wrote:


I don't recall jaedong doing any 9 pools..?

On September 16 2010 05:58 malathion wrote:
RE: Mindgames, I think we should really think about this more like the chess players do. BW is well developed enough that we have actual 'opening theory' and that is all we are talking about when we talk about 'mindgames' really -- a player's choice of opening is as important as his overall style or skills, and knowledge of the opponent's preferred openings, looking for holes, and playing theoretical novelties to counter them is a huge part of any strategy game with linear development.

On September 17 2010 05:33 GolemMadness wrote:



Not really the same thing, since Starcraft is a game of incomplete information. You have to predict what your opponent's going to do, and think about what he thinks you're doing. In that sense, it's more like poker. Chess opening theory is more memorizing moves and understanding the resulting positions.

On September 17 2010 06:57 Grend wrote:

I disagree as I think the chess analogy has more merit than you give it. The information thing is kind of false as there are pretty much set timings where you will gain the necessary information to discern what your opponent is up to a large extent. But if one player decides to go for an unusual opening, the opposing player may not be aware how to properly respond using his own more standard opening properly and so on. (Giving the advantage to the player who plays the novelty given that he has practiced it towards the more standard openings). You could say that SCBW opening theory also revolves around memorizing buildorders and understanding the counters to what your opponent is doing.

On September 17 2010 10:11 malathion wrote:

The other cool thing about StarCraft now that it has become so developed is that the enemy has a finite number of plausible builds. Most 'offbeat' builds will lose to Flash even if he fails to scout them just because the timing windows will be so gaping that progamers will drive trucks through the timing windows with his god mode macro. Therefore, there aren't many builds that a strong player really has to prepare for or think about as there are for a weak player. So while StarCraft has imperfect information, it's still very far from zero information, and the better a player is mechanically, the more safely he can ignore the possibility that the opponent is doing something weird.

What that means for my 'opening theory' analogy is that players like Flash and Jaedong have reached a level of mechanical and theoretical development where coming up with 'theoretical novelties' -- aka novel builds that the opponent is unprepared to handle, is a huge way to get an edge over your opponent. (This is not really the case for anyone playing on ICCUP where the best way to get an edge over the enemy is furthering mastery of the fundamentals.) For example, Flash obviously cooked up two prepared builds in G1 and G2 of the MSL finals that he had worked on specifically for Jaedong. In the chess world, top-10 players all know each other's openings inside and out exactly for this purpose - so they can try to find holes in their pet opening lines and exploit them. We have a shadow of that in StarCraft now, which is exciting to me, because it means that we are witnessing the evolution of StarCraft strategy drifting slightly away from mechanical domination and slightly into more theoretical, "meta-strategy" realms where players are trying to get inside each other's heads.

On September 17 2010 11:40 Ver wrote:


This has been the case for at least 8 years now if not more once strategy started to solidify. Some memorable examples were iloveoov/yellow when iloveoov opened with mech/valkyrie on Gauntlet (2003), then did a delayed sparks rush in game 2, and Nada/iloveoov taking the initiative by throwing out a surprise sparks rush vs July in Iops (2004) and Shinhan 0 (2005).

Yeah the depth is really awesome and but it's not an evolution by any means. Just the current generation doing it at modern strategical level.

Also Flash's builds in game 1/2 were both 'weird' in the sense that if Jaedong had a maphack he would've auto won because Flash's builds were not 'optimal' (his strategies relied on manipulating perceptions and predicting future moves completely accurately). There's not much of a chess analogy there because Flash was predicting Jaedong blindly and Jaedong couldn't react to Flash's strategy, like Kasparov would a novelty, because he doesn't see it coming (it's game over when he does see it coming, while Kasparov can find a refutation over the board). Without fog of war, Chess has far more good variations, but with fow, many, many more strategies become possible.

On September 17 2010 11:40 Ver wrote:


This has been the case for at least 8 years now if not more once strategy started to solidify. Some memorable examples were iloveoov/yellow when iloveoov opened with mech/valkyrie on Gauntlet (2003), then did a delayed sparks rush in game 2, and Nada/iloveoov taking the initiative by throwing out a surprise sparks rush vs July in Iops (2004) and Shinhan 0 (2005).

Yeah the depth is really awesome and but it's not an evolution by any means. Just the current generation doing it at modern strategical level.

Also Flash's builds in game 1/2 were both 'weird' in the sense that if Jaedong had a maphack he would've auto won because Flash's builds were not 'optimal' (his strategies relied on manipulating perceptions and predicting future moves completely accurately). There's not much of a chess analogy there because Flash was predicting Jaedong blindly and Jaedong couldn't react to Flash's strategy, like Kasparov would a novelty, because he doesn't see it coming (it's game over when he does see it coming, while Kasparov can find a refutation over the board). Without fog of war, Chess has far more good variations, but with fow, many, many more strategies become possible.