With Larva playing a semi-anti-meta zerg, I can see him make his way through with witty and confident decisions and prep. Bisu on the other hand is still a PvZ specialist and seems to be in great shape if online is a good indicator of how he will perform. In September Bisu went 41-24 vs zerg. Bisu played mostly vs Queen, HerO, Soulkey, EffOrt, and Soma(whom he is down against). Larva went 23-9 vs Protoss. However Larva lost all games vs Bisu in the last 5 they played, and most of his zvp wins were vs Mini, whom he beat like 12-2.
Statistics alone say its 50/50, but their heads up record says Bisu all the way. But so did Light's record vs Larva, which was 90% wins.
On September 30 2025 14:51 RJBTVYOUTUBE wrote: With Larva playing a semi-anti-meta zerg, I can see him make his way through with witty and confident decisions and prep. Bisu on the other hand is still a PvZ specialist and seems to be in great shape if online is a good indicator of how he will perform. In September Bisu went 41-24 vs zerg. Bisu played mostly vs Queen, HerO, Soulkey, EffOrt, and Soma(whom he is down against). Larva went 23-9 vs Protoss. However Larva lost all games vs Bisu in the last 5 they played, and most of his zvp wins were vs Mini, whom he beat like 12-2.
Statistics alone say its 50/50, but their heads up record says Bisu all the way. But so did Light's record vs Larva, which was 90% wins.
Guys, you can easily throw a fair coin heads five times in a row
It's a 1/32 chance
Even the above are small sample sizes vs. different players on different maps
The only conclusion you can make is that both of them are good at those matchups
Bisu really needed to get dweb. Its not useful generally but on these tiny ass island maps he can drop zealot+ht and smash the shit out of all larva's defenders.
Good game and good use of ensnare by Larva. Shows how hard it is to crack Zerg's defenses. I wonder if Arbiters would have worked better than the shuttles, or if the gas cost would have been too much.
he was too late on his expos, and he really should have gotten the middle island expo or the 11 island expo - both to secure his own but also to deny Larva
On September 30 2025 19:42 gravity wrote: Good game and good use of ensnare by Larva. Shows how hard it is to crack Zerg's defenses. I wonder if Arbiters would have worked better than the shuttles, or if the gas cost would have been too much.
On September 30 2025 19:42 gravity wrote: Good game and good use of ensnare by Larva. Shows how hard it is to crack Zerg's defenses. I wonder if Arbiters would have worked better than the shuttles, or if the gas cost would have been too much.
i think Arbiters would work but they just move too slow IMO
On September 30 2025 19:42 konadora wrote: bisu didn’t seem to have a late game plan
he was too late on his expos, and he really should have gotten the middle island expo or the 11 island expo - both to secure his own but also to deny Larva
On September 30 2025 19:42 konadora wrote: bisu didn’t seem to have a late game plan
he was too late on his expos, and he really should have gotten the middle island expo or the 11 island expo - both to secure his own but also to deny Larva
He really should've tried to force a fight when he had that third expo that Larva never scouted, before the rest of the islands came into play. He had an advantage then. When that early probe saw Larva's entire BO there's no way that Bisu couldn't spin that into a timing of some sort. He seemed to have a solid start but he sputtered out in the midgame and was totally choked except for a few smart plays. Larva seemed to have a good plan throughout even though he let that probe live way too long.
Bisu performance was a clueless pro who he doesn't know what to do in non standard situation. Complete misread to seeing a turtling zerg. For goodness sake, take one more expo and the map is split. Perhaps even get dweb. But you can see he's clueless.
On September 30 2025 19:46 psd wrote: No corsair/reaver into carrier play on this map is surprising, it feels design for it. high ground natural and 3rd with gas on island.
good play from larva tho
zerg have multiple ways to dominate carriers. too expensive and bad in the match up
On September 30 2025 19:42 konadora wrote: bisu didn’t seem to have a late game plan
he was too late on his expos, and he really should have gotten the middle island expo or the 11 island expo - both to secure his own but also to deny Larva
He really should've tried to force a fight when he had that third expo that Larva never scouted, before the rest of the islands came into play. He had an advantage then. When that early probe saw Larva's entire BO there's no way that Bisu couldn't spin that into a timing of some sort. He seemed to have a solid start but he sputtered out in the midgame and was totally choked except for a few smart plays. Larva seemed to have a good plan throughout even though he let that probe live way too long.
Larva knew the 3rd expo of Protoss. It' textbook play on this map. He just didn't care because his plan was just to camp until Bisu taps out.
There's no rush timing on this map by either side (if you watch enough games on this map you'll see, it always goes harassment into late game), the reason being the rush distance and most importantly, there's only one place to attack/defend so both sides can just gather their whole army + static defence and they will hold (see Snow Dragoon Reaver timing vs Effort earlier for example).
The only realistic way for Protoss to win on this map vs Zerg (provided both sides don't make huge mistake in the early/mid game like losing drones or probes) is to go Carriers and fight vs Devourers until one side runs out of money.
This map pool turns out to be not anti Zerg like many claimed at all.
On September 30 2025 19:54 TMNT wrote: There's no rush timing on this map by either side (if you watch enough games on this map you'll see, it always goes harassment into late game), the reason being the rush distance and most importantly, there's only one place to attack/defend so both sides can just gather their whole army + static defence
I wonder what would happen if both players camp and refuse to attack. Is there an ASL rule for that?
On September 30 2025 19:54 TMNT wrote: There's no rush timing on this map by either side (if you watch enough games on this map you'll see, it always goes harassment into late game), the reason being the rush distance and most importantly, there's only one place to attack/defend so both sides can just gather their whole army + static defence
I wonder what would happen if both players camp and refuse to attack. Is there an ASL rule for that?
If the arbiter counts it as a draw, the game has to be replayed.
On September 30 2025 20:19 Rainalcar wrote: This is why zvp is bullshit. Bisu had to guess the tech, guessed wrong, and suddenly Larva has a chance where he tried an all in with lings.
I think it's the fact that he can still make a game out of that opening, albeit staying behind the whole time, is more telling.
On September 30 2025 20:19 Rainalcar wrote: This is why zvp is bullshit. Bisu had to guess the tech, guessed wrong, and suddenly Larva has a chance where he tried an all in with lings.
it was over at minute 4. Every zerg can survive so far. If it is not an ASL then Larva say gg at minute 4.
On September 30 2025 21:14 Highgamer wrote: Man, Zealots are strong in TvP, but in ZvP they just look OP in so many situations. Probably it's Bisu's timing and micro magic, too.
also agreed that these kind of Zealot-heavy timing attacks are like the one time that P actually looks a little OP against Zerg (obviously it doesn't always work out like that...)
On September 30 2025 21:14 Highgamer wrote: Man, Zealots are strong in TvP, but in ZvP they just look OP in so many situations. Probably it's Bisu's timing and micro magic, too.
Bisu Zealots are stronger than others
Yeah, it's about anti-dodging against hydras, Bisu is particularly good at pursuing and targeting the right hydras I think.
Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
Larva is really out of game shape guys, don't put too much on this series. Bisu though, will be far superior against Soma compared to Best.
Bisu just has insane feel for this match-up. Did you notice how he built a cannon in main just as we was going to do an out of position attack on the natural? Knew that that was Larva's only comeback. He just knows, doesn't guess, plays aggressive. Knows the right way to play against Z.
I have him favorite against Soma. Although it's still a PvZ and no one is immune to the bullshit in that match-up but if the vast majority of the games are normal his 6-sair/zealot push constant pressure style is a hard counter to the bait and switch Soma dreams about at night.
Bisu with no mapple defense practice looks strong this is why he is my favorite Protoss player. Just not die against Soma all ins, and then win this ASL man, if Jaedong cant do it this season
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
I think Bisu didn't know about the 4th until fairly late. He had a zealot looking for a drone going down, but it never came. And the corsair never went that far South. He was probably going to expand and hang back, but when he saw the base he realised that he had to attack. Just taking his mineral only would've left him too far behind.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
I think Bisu didn't know about the 4th until fairly late. He had a zealot looking for a drone going down, but it never came. And the corsair never went that far South. He was probably going to expand and hang back, but when he saw the base he realised that he had to attack. Just taking his mineral only would've left him too far behind.
it was great game sense. attack before the 4th really takes full effect
On September 30 2025 21:59 BisuDagger wrote: Bisu continuing to show off his best form in years. It's really amazing how much changing his setup has improved his abilities.
The true test lies in SoMa, the currently best performing zerg online and offline. Can Bisu best the best zerg vs protoss of the modern era?
My relation of hate/love towards Bisu is still going strong, after all these years. His micro/multitasking is off the chart, always been. Its very impressive to see a confident Bisu toying with his opponents at the pro scene.
vs soma ? I think today's Bisu would win in 6. vs SnOw though ? Multitasking wont save him in a PvsP, even if he bring his A-game, it won't do.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
yeah Larva just needed 1 more minute for the eco to fully kick in, Bisu really struck at the perfect timing
On September 30 2025 21:26 oxKnu wrote: Larva is really out of game shape guys, don't put too much on this series. Bisu though, will be far superior against Soma compared to Best.
Bisu just has insane feel for this match-up. Did you notice how he built a cannon in main just as we was going to do an out of position attack on the natural? Knew that that was Larva's only comeback. He just knows, doesn't guess, plays aggressive. Knows the right way to play against Z.
I have him favorite against Soma. Although it's still a PvZ and no one is immune to the bullshit in that match-up but if the vast majority of the games are normal his 6-sair/zealot push constant pressure style is a hard counter to the bait and switch Soma dreams about at night.
Gonna be a fun series.
quote by the korean casters is that "Bisu was born solely to punish Zergs"
On September 30 2025 21:59 BisuDagger wrote: Bisu continuing to show off his best form in years. It's really amazing how much changing his setup has improved his abilities.
Fullscreen Bisu is different.
But to be serious, I think fullscreen probably helps him more in PvT which we can't really see this ASL. His PvZ... he's always expected to beat Queen, BTS, and Larva anyway.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
If i were you i will be careful with the Bisu hype. Cuz Bisu is always confident to play vs Larva. I dont remember ever him losing to Larva in ASL. every third place match the played Bisu always beat him. Larva playstyle also fit well to him. And i cant help but larva does so poor vs FlaSh and Bisu that im pretty sure him going into these guys is never easy. That said Bisu always looked strong in pvz to me. I was in disbelief how easy he was killed by Soulkey few seasons ago. The games he was losing on Retro etc didnt make any sense knowing what is capable of. (But Soulkey also is a big factor in denying him) Anyway i usually dont like protoss but i like Bisu. But Soma vs Bisu i will prefer Somato win. Advance to finals and get the championship.In fact Soma and Snow are kinda in the same ship. Extremely good performers online but need yet to win an ASL. Snow vs Barracks sadly gonna be a blender but Soma vs Bisu gonna be exciting for sure.
On October 01 2025 05:56 Timebon3s wrote: Pretty sure Larva beat Bisu in ASL doing turtle style. Or was that KSL?
That was a different Larva. Larva was playing 50 minute macro games against Snow and Mini 4-5 years ago, plenty of decent wins across all match-ups too. (including ZvZ)
I think Larva's run this ASL has been a bit of a fluke. Light was shocking in the group stages and cemented himself as the mental midget of Terran's pretty much.
Every time larva made hydralisks, bisu immediately punished with zealots. Larva needs to distinguish his zvp from zvt. Bisu is not easily boxed in. I thought Larva would successfully pull off a queen vs flash in the third game with zerglings, but as soon as bisu saw the hydralisks with his corsair he immediately broke off the siege. I think zerg players need to find out 9734 doesn't work, just like protoss players need to forget about FFE. If you make ghat strategic mistake, you gift one game to your opponent.
On September 30 2025 21:36 sas.Sziky wrote: Bisu with no mapple defense practice looks strong this is why he is my favorite Protoss player. Just not die against Soma all ins, and then win this ASL man, if Jaedong cant do it this season
I told before you can have a huge power spike at 9 if you mineral boost vs 12 if you don't. All those all ins Soma deal have a 45 second advantage. It is either do or die for protoss and soma can overcommit the protoss to defense without revealing his tech.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
I feel like Bisu would have really benefitted from dweb in game 1. The islands bases are so susceptible to dwebs since the area is so small and hydras/sunkens have nowhere to go. A couple weeks ago I saw him play vs JD on that map and he went for carriers in the late game supported by dweb and reavers. I feel like that is the strongest strategy for protoss on island maps, not sure why he went so hard on ground army when the bases are so hard to attack into on roaring currents.
Regardless he played great in the other sets. Looking forward to his match vs soma
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
He is retired from competitive play while playing in the most competitive tournament. Seems like a contradiction.
I’m as bit surprised by Larva playstyle. Is it me or that kind of turtle style is just off meta? Most ZvP I see these days have the Zerg player sniping HT with mutas and being on the offensive.
Happy for Bisu, though I don’t see him winning the whole thing. Will still be cheering for him.
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
This. Larva used to be the goat until a few years ago, but then he stopped playing and lost all of his skills. Lately he's been improving, but he's still a shadow of his former self.
On October 01 2025 15:53 Biff The Understudy wrote: I’m as bit surprised by Larva playstyle. Is it me or that kind of turtle style is just off meta? Most ZvP I see these days have the Zerg player sniping HT with mutas and being on the offensive.
Happy for Bisu, though I don’t see him winning the whole thing. Will still be cheering for him.
i wouldnt say off meta is the right term. larva's late game is like top 1/2 in both zvp and zvt. his problem is he often struggles to get to that point, especially after his competitive break.
this makes the way he likes to play zvp more unique because the matchup generally favours zerg having priority over the map for most of the early-mid game but larva is quite happy to cede map control in favour of econ. unfortunately his opponent is the biggest hard counter to him because bisu is an absolute macro god if left unchecked. its no secret amongst all the pros that bisus ability to grow his supply is better than every other toss and thats probably what threw larva off. his recent practice games probably werent against protosses with macro optimisation as good as bisu and larva ended up droning just a little too much which led to him getting rolled.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
I don't even think Larva's retirement has anything to do with the results. He's already gotten back in his shape. The thing is, before retirement he was still kind of Bisu's bitch, losing to him a huge amount of times (like 70% or something). He was the Zerg Bisu had the least problem with. When he said he would pick Bisu in his group for ASL11, everyone was like "nice joke Larva" (even though he did beat Bisu afterwards, but it's Bo1 anyway).
i do think bisu would have beaten larva in a bo7 even if larva was in his prime anyway, but matches like game 5 for example, i think showed that larva wasnt really up to speed yet. that was a game that larva absolutely should not have lost. the timing for bisu was more larva's mistake than bisu's clutch play
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
This. Larva used to be the goat until a few years ago, but then he stopped playing and lost all of his skills. Lately he's been improving, but he's still a shadow of his former self.
The goat ? He basically won a very close ASL vs Mini and retired lol. I dont ever remember him dominating everyone. Him like Soulkey was getting eliminated at early ASls cuz of zerg vs zerg. Then he beat Jaedong and few others on his way to the final. Larva was Known for playing 1000 games vs FlaSh and taking 20 lol.
Btw Game 1 What he did with the mass sunkens if Bisu just put 4 reavers to shutdown that shit.. But instead Bisu doing Bisu things decided it was more optimal to attack up ramp.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
Yes, and Bisu only camped and moved out at 150 supplies and 1a2a3a'd and won. Feels like something a B rank player can do too.
Nothing to do with having a lead with Nexus first and a executing 2 base timing while Zerg took his 4th base at 9:30 (game 2), holding off an all-in attempt with just Zealots and Probes while not even losing the Gate (game 3), a base trade that could have gone Larva's way if his execution was better and he didn't forget his Lurker in the Overlord (game 4), or hitting a timing right before Zerg's sneaky base kicked in, plus Zerg decided to fight the Protoss deathball by having his small groups of army going in one by one (game 5).
Btw, out of curiosity, what chokes do you consider wide? Polestar chokes don't seem wide to me. Neither are Metropolis. Knockout's double bridges and high ground 3rd aren't narrow enough for you? The only one I can say has wide chokes is Radeon. You want chokes like Fighting Spirit's?
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Then you go on ladder make 2 gateways ur op last scout and u get a free win without a sweat haha. Stress free LMAO. You are so funny.Or my favorite one. You doing well as a zerg then realized all your drones are gone by 1 DT. I mean i can type a book of how stressful zvp is. Like for example shit. play at 350 APM THE WHOLE FREAKING GAME BTW. ANd then look a second away and your whole army is gone to storms. Yeah sure stress free. ANd you can do this about any matchup. Starcraft is not stress free.Stop playing.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Then you go on ladder make 2 gateways ur op last scout and u get a free win without a sweat haha. Stress free LMAO. You are so funny.Or my favorite one. You doing well as a zerg then realized all your drones are gone by 1 DT. I mean i can type a book of how stressful zvp is. Like for example shit. play at 350 APM THE WHOLE FREAKING GAME BTW. ANd then look a second away and your whole army is gone to storms. Yeah sure stress free. ANd you can do this about any matchup. Starcraft is not stress free.Stop playing.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Then you go on ladder make 2 gateways ur op last scout and u get a free win without a sweat haha. Stress free LMAO. You are so funny.Or my favorite one. You doing well as a zerg then realized all your drones are gone by 1 DT. I mean i can type a book of how stressful zvp is. Like for example shit. play at 350 APM THE WHOLE FREAKING GAME BTW. ANd then look a second away and your whole army is gone to storms. Yeah sure stress free. ANd you can do this about any matchup. Starcraft is not stress free.Stop playing.
He said the P in PvZ is not stress free. He didn't say the Z in ZvP is stress free. How can you make a whole post countering something that's not there? This is why arguing with you is very not... stress free Eon. You constantly miss the points or get facts wrong or misremember things yet you're overly aggressive in your attitude.
Btw I don't agree with him that Soma standard game is shit. It's like saying Mini can't play macro too. They can both play standard and macro, maybe not the best of their race, but it's just that their chosen style is agression and tricky builds.
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
this is wrong though. Larva returned to competitive online gaming last november. He plays proleagues and he plays sponsor games. He started out by playing best of 21s vs pros multiple times a week in november and december and continued doing this. He played more than some of the major proleague regulars. He retired when they still used sponbang. He has 982 match entries on Eloboard. About 150 of these entries are from his retirement period where he would sometimes play some spon matches. The other 832 or so are from November until now. That is a higher amount of documented games than almost anyone else has since November.
Also the claim that Soma's macro is his weakest is dead wrong. His Macro is maybe his best aspect. He excells at it. But he also excells at tricky builds, all ins, and timing attacks. Just look at any of his online games in KCM, Proleague, or the Chinese sponsored best o sets, ultimate battle, or his ladder games.
On September 30 2025 21:36 sas.Sziky wrote: Bisu with no mapple defense practice looks strong this is why he is my favorite Protoss player. Just not die against Soma all ins, and then win this ASL man, if Jaedong cant do it this season
I told before you can have a huge power spike at 9 if you mineral boost vs 12 if you don't. All those all ins Soma deal have a 45 second advantage. It is either do or die for protoss and soma can overcommit the protoss to defense without revealing his tech.
45 second ? oo you mean with boost u can like ~5 second erlier a pool,lair and etc as zerg perspectiva. 45 is to much man :D
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
Yes, and Bisu only camped and moved out at 150 supplies and 1a2a3a'd and won. Feels like something a B rank player can do too.
Nothing to do with having a lead with Nexus first and a executing 2 base timing while Zerg took his 4th base at 9:30 (game 2), holding off an all-in attempt with just Zealots and Probes while not even losing the Gate (game 3), a base trade that could have gone Larva's way if his execution was better and he didn't forget his Lurker in the Overlord (game 4), or hitting a timing right before Zerg's sneaky base kicked in, plus Zerg decided to fight the Protoss deathball by having his small groups of army going in one by one (game 5).
Btw, out of curiosity, what chokes do you consider wide? Polestar chokes don't seem wide to me. Neither are Metropolis. Knockout's double bridges and high ground 3rd aren't narrow enough for you? The only one I can say has wide chokes is Radeon. You want chokes like Fighting Spirit's?
I can assure you PoleStar is the second worst map after Radeon for z v p. It's very difficult to find a good position to engage protoss on this map. It's also almost impossible to turtle as the map is very small with a third that is quite far and difficult to defend. And yes, the "chokes" are wide.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Then you go on ladder make 2 gateways ur op last scout and u get a free win without a sweat haha. Stress free LMAO. You are so funny.Or my favorite one. You doing well as a zerg then realized all your drones are gone by 1 DT. I mean i can type a book of how stressful zvp is. Like for example shit. play at 350 APM THE WHOLE FREAKING GAME BTW. ANd then look a second away and your whole army is gone to storms. Yeah sure stress free. ANd you can do this about any matchup. Starcraft is not stress free.Stop playing.
He said the P in PvZ is not stress free. He didn't say the Z in ZvP is stress free. How can you make a whole post countering something that's not there? This is why arguing with you is very not... stress free Eon. You constantly miss the points or get facts wrong or misremember things yet you're overly aggressive in your attitude.
Btw I don't agree with him that Soma standard game is shit. It's like saying Mini can't play macro too. They can both play standard and macro, maybe not the best of their race, but it's just that their chosen style is agression and tricky builds.
I was answering to this sentence. 'stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp' You can literally say this about any matchup any race. Is not just oh poor me protoss my stress is so high playing a zerg..
Is not about arguing. Since there is nothing to argue. Every race has to worry about different strategies. is funny cuz from the zerg pov all protoss has to do to shutdown most of the 'mindgames' is just make more canons lol. While from zerg lets take Soma vs Best on Litmus. You could say oh wow zerg just decided to go 3 hatcheries before pool. is that easy. In fact from the begin what he did with the drone killing that worker scout and denying information is not easy at all. In fact most of the times when zerg attemps pulling something like that he ends up getting scouted. The amount of attention and multitasking going on to pull those early tricks are actually insane. I means is pretty obvious some can pull it others dont even bother and stick to other ways. But since you guys all resume to zerg decided to go hydras and killed protoss is the goto. There is not even a point.
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
This. Larva used to be the goat until a few years ago, but then he stopped playing and lost all of his skills. Lately he's been improving, but he's still a shadow of his former self.
The goat ? He basically won a very close ASL vs Mini and retired lol. I dont ever remember him dominating everyone. Him like Soulkey was getting eliminated at early ASls cuz of zerg vs zerg. Then he beat Jaedong and few others on his way to the final. Larva was Known for playing 1000 games vs FlaSh and taking 20 lol.
Btw Game 1 What he did with the mass sunkens if Bisu just put 4 reavers to shutdown that shit.. But instead Bisu doing Bisu things decided it was more optimal to attack up ramp.
Larva was extremely strong. In my view he was the clear favorite against everyone other than Rush, who failed to stop him. After that I was almost 100% convinced he'd win the tournament, although Mini shocked us with his impressive skills. He made it a close final match.
If Larva had kept practicing after that, I'm convinced he would've destroyed everyone for years to come. Other players were very lucky that he went on a hiatus, because no other zerg player had such a strong macro game. He was the reason why Flash stopped doing mech transitions in every TvZ, as Larva proved that zerg was actually a clear favorite against that strategy. Towards the end of their rivalry, Flash could only beat Larva with heavy early/mid game aggression, and so the TvZ meta reverted back from mech to bio.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Then you go on ladder make 2 gateways ur op last scout and u get a free win without a sweat haha. Stress free LMAO. You are so funny.Or my favorite one. You doing well as a zerg then realized all your drones are gone by 1 DT. I mean i can type a book of how stressful zvp is. Like for example shit. play at 350 APM THE WHOLE FREAKING GAME BTW. ANd then look a second away and your whole army is gone to storms. Yeah sure stress free. ANd you can do this about any matchup. Starcraft is not stress free.Stop playing.
He said the P in PvZ is not stress free. He didn't say the Z in ZvP is stress free. How can you make a whole post countering something that's not there? This is why arguing with you is very not... stress free Eon. You constantly miss the points or get facts wrong or misremember things yet you're overly aggressive in your attitude.
Btw I don't agree with him that Soma standard game is shit. It's like saying Mini can't play macro too. They can both play standard and macro, maybe not the best of their race, but it's just that their chosen style is agression and tricky builds.
Hero is the only top zerg who can't macro properly, and among the top protoss players they all have strong macro. I don't know what people are smoking calling Soma's macro bad. His macro isn't god tier, but it's very strong. He wins a lot of late game scenarios, and anyone who says otherwise hasn't watched his games.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Then you go on ladder make 2 gateways ur op last scout and u get a free win without a sweat haha. Stress free LMAO. You are so funny.Or my favorite one. You doing well as a zerg then realized all your drones are gone by 1 DT. I mean i can type a book of how stressful zvp is. Like for example shit. play at 350 APM THE WHOLE FREAKING GAME BTW. ANd then look a second away and your whole army is gone to storms. Yeah sure stress free. ANd you can do this about any matchup. Starcraft is not stress free.Stop playing.
He said the P in PvZ is not stress free. He didn't say the Z in ZvP is stress free. How can you make a whole post countering something that's not there? This is why arguing with you is very not... stress free Eon. You constantly miss the points or get facts wrong or misremember things yet you're overly aggressive in your attitude.
Btw I don't agree with him that Soma standard game is shit. It's like saying Mini can't play macro too. They can both play standard and macro, maybe not the best of their race, but it's just that their chosen style is agression and tricky builds.
I was answering to this sentence. 'stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp' You can literally say this about any matchup any race. Is not just oh poor me protoss my stress is so high playing a zerg..
Is not about arguing. Since there is nothing to argue. Every race has to worry about different strategies. is funny cuz from the zerg pov all protoss has to do to shutdown most of the 'mindgames' is just make more canons lol. While from zerg lets take Soma vs Best on Litmus. You could say oh wow zerg just decided to go 3 hatcheries before pool. is that easy. In fact from the begin what he did with the drone killing that worker scout and denying information is not easy at all. In fact most of the times when zerg attemps pulling something like that he ends up getting scouted. The amount of attention and multitasking going on to pull those early tricks are actually insane. I means is pretty obvious some can pull it others dont even bother and stick to other ways. But since you guys all resume to zerg decided to go hydras and killed protoss is the goto. There is not even a point.
that sentence was in response to shinokukis claim that protoss can in fact play a standard macro game "stress-free". learn to read. and no, protoss cant just simply 'make more cannons' as a solution to any trick zerg might try to pull. its as stupid as saying zerg should just build a spore/sunken at every base to prevent dts or build 2 sunkens at each base to prevent +1 zealot push
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
this is wrong though. Larva returned to competitive online gaming last november. He plays proleagues and he plays sponsor games. He started out by playing best of 21s vs pros multiple times a week in november and december and continued doing this. He played more than some of the major proleague regulars. He retired when they still used sponbang. He has 982 match entries on Eloboard. About 150 of these entries are from his retirement period where he would sometimes play some spon matches. The other 832 or so are from November until now. That is a higher amount of documented games than almost anyone else has since November.
Also the claim that Soma's macro is his weakest is dead wrong. His Macro is maybe his best aspect. He excells at it. But he also excells at tricky builds, all ins, and timing attacks. Just look at any of his online games in KCM, Proleague, or the Chinese sponsored best o sets, ultimate battle, or his ladder games.
his macro isnt his best aspect. his best aspect is his early game. hes insanely good at setting himself up for a mid game where he doesnt go in behind, and then he just rides that momentum. that comes from his mind games, builds and all that.
guys like larva and soulkey are players that actually have great macro games and they excel off that. they know how to grind games out even from worse positions. soma is different where his entire playstyle revolves around not going into the mid game in a worse position at all.
when i say soma's macro is shit obviously im not saying he doesnt know how to press sh on all his hatcheries like some b tier ladder player. his macro is shit in the context of all the pros where there are other zerg players that are able to come back from worse positions in the mid-late game more than he does.
larva and soma are basically opposite ends of the spectrum; larva having weak early games and struggling to go into the mid game ahead but being an absolute god at late game army management, and soma being the player that relies on his early game advantage to carry him smoothly through the rest of his games.
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
This. Larva used to be the goat until a few years ago, but then he stopped playing and lost all of his skills. Lately he's been improving, but he's still a shadow of his former self.
The goat ? He basically won a very close ASL vs Mini and retired lol. I dont ever remember him dominating everyone. Him like Soulkey was getting eliminated at early ASls cuz of zerg vs zerg. Then he beat Jaedong and few others on his way to the final. Larva was Known for playing 1000 games vs FlaSh and taking 20 lol.
Btw Game 1 What he did with the mass sunkens if Bisu just put 4 reavers to shutdown that shit.. But instead Bisu doing Bisu things decided it was more optimal to attack up ramp.
Larva was extremely strong. In my view he was the clear favorite against everyone other than Rush, who failed to stop him. After that I was almost 100% convinced he'd win the tournament, although Mini shocked us with his impressive skills. He made it a close final match.
If Larva had kept practicing after that, I'm convinced he would've destroyed everyone for years to come. Other players were very lucky that he went on a hiatus, because no other zerg player had such a strong macro game. He was the reason why Flash stopped doing mech transitions in every TvZ, as Larva proved that zerg was actually a clear favorite against that strategy. Towards the end of their rivalry, Flash could only beat Larva with heavy early/mid game aggression, and so the TvZ meta reverted back from mech to bio.
So actually. Terran stopped doing the mech switch hardcore after the new 1-1-1 Build of FlaSh.Then Soma introduced real counters to it and terrans started doing it again but less cuz the maps werent the most apropiated to play that style. Instead going 4`barracks +1 into 2 starports like we still see was the build of choice. Mech Switch died cuz of the mass Queens style. For a while if i remember correctly Mong was the only guy that stick to it. Now i have to admit something. in 2021 i wasnt following starcraft. I kinda lost interesting after blizzard not upgrading the terrible mappool of Benzene/eclipse/optimizer/Plasma/Ringing bloom etc.
In fact i only recall seeing the finals from that ASL and i tuned in cuz im actually friends with Larva so i was curious if he could beat Mini lol. If Larva actually had year of domination in 2021 like Snow and Soma are doing then my bad.Genuinely didnt know. About Macro. Call me crazy but Effort macro is kinda insane too.There is this famous game between him and FlaSh before going to military that everyone was freakin out.
On September 30 2025 21:36 sas.Sziky wrote: Bisu with no mapple defense practice looks strong this is why he is my favorite Protoss player. Just not die against Soma all ins, and then win this ASL man, if Jaedong cant do it this season
I told before you can have a huge power spike at 9 if you mineral boost vs 12 if you don't. All those all ins Soma deal have a 45 second advantage. It is either do or die for protoss and soma can overcommit the protoss to defense without revealing his tech.
45 second ? oo you mean with boost u can like ~5 second erlier a pool,lair and etc as zerg perspectiva. 45 is to much man :D
You can boost saving 5 seconds, but saving 1 overlord and 3 drones, 4 larvae in essence, is part of the 45 seconds. The math goes, how much minerals extra is how much mining time. You save 200 from boosting and 250 from not spending for those units, something like that. I just went for the highest income gap and that was at that moment. You might say aha got you, however who cares whether you have 9 or 12 drones if you mineral boost the same income. PS: correction 9 mineral boost is 43.58s of normal 9 drone economy.
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
This. Larva used to be the goat until a few years ago, but then he stopped playing and lost all of his skills. Lately he's been improving, but he's still a shadow of his former self.
The goat ? He basically won a very close ASL vs Mini and retired lol. I dont ever remember him dominating everyone. Him like Soulkey was getting eliminated at early ASls cuz of zerg vs zerg. Then he beat Jaedong and few others on his way to the final. Larva was Known for playing 1000 games vs FlaSh and taking 20 lol.
Btw Game 1 What he did with the mass sunkens if Bisu just put 4 reavers to shutdown that shit.. But instead Bisu doing Bisu things decided it was more optimal to attack up ramp.
Larva was extremely strong. In my view he was the clear favorite against everyone other than Rush, who failed to stop him. After that I was almost 100% convinced he'd win the tournament, although Mini shocked us with his impressive skills. He made it a close final match.
If Larva had kept practicing after that, I'm convinced he would've destroyed everyone for years to come. Other players were very lucky that he went on a hiatus, because no other zerg player had such a strong macro game. He was the reason why Flash stopped doing mech transitions in every TvZ, as Larva proved that zerg was actually a clear favorite against that strategy. Towards the end of their rivalry, Flash could only beat Larva with heavy early/mid game aggression, and so the TvZ meta reverted back from mech to bio.
So actually. Terran stopped doing the mech switch hardcore after the new 1-1-1 Build of FlaSh.Then Soma introduced real counters to it and terrans started doing it again but less cuz the maps werent the most apropiated to play that style. Instead going 4`barracks +1 into 2 starports like we still see was the build of choice. Mech Switch died cuz of the mass Queens style. For a while if i remember correctly Mong was the only guy that stick to it. Now i have to admit something. in 2021 i wasnt following starcraft. I kinda lost interesting after blizzard not upgrading the terrible mappool of Benzene/eclipse/optimizer/Plasma/Ringing bloom etc.
In fact i only recall seeing the finals from that ASL and i tuned in cuz im actually friends with Larva so i was curious if he could beat Mini lol. If Larva actually had year of domination in 2021 like Snow and Soma are doing then my bad.Genuinely didnt know. About Macro. Call me crazy but Effort macro is kinda insane too.There is this famous game between him and FlaSh before going to military that everyone was freakin out.
Larva was the player who kept working on the broodling counter strategy to Flash's mech switch. He was the one who figured out that it is a hard counter. It developed over many dozens if not hundreds of games between those two players. Then Flash realized it wasn't working anymore and started relying on a repertoire of marine centric strategies, which included all kinds of older high aggression builds that he knew from his long standing career. This put Larva back in his place for quite a while until he also started to learn to deal with that aggression. He wasn't good at that stuff, and he got much better at it during his rivalry with Flash. This all preceded his ASL victory. Flash is basically responsible for much of Larva's later success. And their rivalry is responsible for the meta changes that destroyed the TvZ mech switch.
Eon why don't you spare some of your energy to help us translate mtcn's posts? Since I see you don't ever disagree with him and even agree with him sometimes. What does he mean in the above post? Does he mean Zerg should go for 9 Hatch instead of 12 Hatch?
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
This. Larva used to be the goat until a few years ago, but then he stopped playing and lost all of his skills. Lately he's been improving, but he's still a shadow of his former self.
The goat ? He basically won a very close ASL vs Mini and retired lol. I dont ever remember him dominating everyone. Him like Soulkey was getting eliminated at early ASls cuz of zerg vs zerg. Then he beat Jaedong and few others on his way to the final. Larva was Known for playing 1000 games vs FlaSh and taking 20 lol.
Btw Game 1 What he did with the mass sunkens if Bisu just put 4 reavers to shutdown that shit.. But instead Bisu doing Bisu things decided it was more optimal to attack up ramp.
Larva was extremely strong. In my view he was the clear favorite against everyone other than Rush, who failed to stop him. After that I was almost 100% convinced he'd win the tournament, although Mini shocked us with his impressive skills. He made it a close final match.
If Larva had kept practicing after that, I'm convinced he would've destroyed everyone for years to come. Other players were very lucky that he went on a hiatus, because no other zerg player had such a strong macro game. He was the reason why Flash stopped doing mech transitions in every TvZ, as Larva proved that zerg was actually a clear favorite against that strategy. Towards the end of their rivalry, Flash could only beat Larva with heavy early/mid game aggression, and so the TvZ meta reverted back from mech to bio.
So actually. Terran stopped doing the mech switch hardcore after the new 1-1-1 Build of FlaSh.Then Soma introduced real counters to it and terrans started doing it again but less cuz the maps werent the most apropiated to play that style. Instead going 4`barracks +1 into 2 starports like we still see was the build of choice. Mech Switch died cuz of the mass Queens style. For a while if i remember correctly Mong was the only guy that stick to it. Now i have to admit something. in 2021 i wasnt following starcraft. I kinda lost interesting after blizzard not upgrading the terrible mappool of Benzene/eclipse/optimizer/Plasma/Ringing bloom etc.
In fact i only recall seeing the finals from that ASL and i tuned in cuz im actually friends with Larva so i was curious if he could beat Mini lol. If Larva actually had year of domination in 2021 like Snow and Soma are doing then my bad.Genuinely didnt know. About Macro. Call me crazy but Effort macro is kinda insane too.There is this famous game between him and FlaSh before going to military that everyone was freakin out.
Larva was the player who kept working on the broodling counter strategy to Flash's mech switch. He was the one who figured out that it is a hard counter. It developed over many dozens if not hundreds of games between those two players. Then Flash realized it wasn't working anymore and started relying on a repertoire of marine centric strategies, which included all kinds of older high aggression builds that he knew from his long standing career. This put Larva back in his place for quite a while until he also started to learn to deal with that aggression. He wasn't good at that stuff, and he got much better at it during his rivalry with Flash. This all preceded his ASL victory. Flash is basically responsible for much of Larva's later success. And their rivalry is responsible for the meta changes that destroyed the TvZ mech switch.
Too bad he cannot queen up every game because even in zvp he can steer a queen better than zero does.
On October 01 2025 21:45 TMNT wrote: Eon why don't you spare some of your energy to help us translate mtcn's posts? Since I see you don't ever disagree with him and even agree with him sometimes. What does he mean in the above post? Does he mean Zerg should go for 9 Hatch instead of 12 Hatch?
Don’t overanalyze it. I learnt to take his posts as a form of art and enjoy them without trying to look for a meaning.
On October 01 2025 21:45 TMNT wrote: Eon why don't you spare some of your energy to help us translate mtcn's posts? Since I see you don't ever disagree with him and even agree with him sometimes. What does he mean in the above post? Does he mean Zerg should go for 9 Hatch instead of 12 Hatch?
Not a strange concept. Since boosting give you some income faster and if you do it overtime is clear that you can get great results when it comes to eco. That is the reason sometimes do you even see 10 hatchery or 11 hatchery this days trying to counter 8 rax or 9pool vs zerg. 11h or 10h vs gateway first. The problem is that doing that you are sacricing other aspects of your game for the return of extra larva at early game. And the most important if terran just predict you will play like that and just hard counter you with eco Rush u are in more big trouble. So all those variations can be valid against the right card. But i mean that is pretty much progamer games these days. We truly need a map revolution.
I think the issue of you not understanding him is cuz he is thinking out of the box. And since the game is from 1998 we just get with the flow that everything has been explored. The reality is that no one is really trying to push out of the conform zone.Take as example Larva on game 1 vs Bisu and his strategy. I havent seen any other pro exploring such routes.
btw im also this way LOL. thats why i keep asking to get maps like Sylphid 1.0 Circuit Breakers Apocalypse Allegro etc. And to recent times Tempest was one of my favorites too. I really hate the gimmick maps being included .
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
Those maps didn't change between seasons, so you can't really use obvious features of them to justify swings in win rates. The sample sizes are too small for those numbers to be meaningful anyway.
On October 01 2025 21:45 TMNT wrote: Eon why don't you spare some of your energy to help us translate mtcn's posts? Since I see you don't ever disagree with him and even agree with him sometimes. What does he mean in the above post? Does he mean Zerg should go for 9 Hatch instead of 12 Hatch?
Not a strange concept. Since boosting give you some income faster and if you do it overtime is clear that you can get great results when it comes to eco. That is the reason sometimes do you even see 10 hatchery or 11 hatchery this days trying to counter 8 rax or 9pool vs zerg. 11h or 10h vs gateway first. The problem is that doing that you are sacricing other aspects of your game for the return of extra larva at early game. And the most important if terran just predict you will play like that and just hard counter you with eco Rush u are in more big trouble. So all those variations can be valid against the right card. But i mean that is pretty much progamer games these days. We truly need a map revolution.
I think the issue of you not understanding him is cuz he is thinking out of the box. And since the game is from 1998 we just get with the flow that everything has been explored. The reality is that no one is really trying to push out of the conform zone.Take as example Larva on game 1 vs Bisu and his strategy. I havent seen any other pro exploring such routes.
btw im also this way LOL. thats why i keep asking to get maps like Sylphid 1.0 Circuit Breakers Apocalypse Allegro etc. And to recent times Tempest was one of my favorites too. I really hate the gimmick maps being included .
No I think the reason WE don't understand him is because he often writes weird English.
For example, this sentence:
The math goes, how much minerals extra is how much mining time
I struggle to understand what it means. So I have to guess, and if you guess, you may be unsure of what he actually means. And he has like 10 sentences like that in a paragraph and at the end you have no clue what he tries to say.
I can rarely dispute the content of what he says, not because he's thinking out of the box. For example when he said Zerg should infest CC instead of attacking Turrets, ok I get it, ridiculous idea but I get it. But most of times I don't even understand what he says. So I figure we could use a translator here.
On October 01 2025 21:45 TMNT wrote: Eon why don't you spare some of your energy to help us translate mtcn's posts? Since I see you don't ever disagree with him and even agree with him sometimes. What does he mean in the above post? Does he mean Zerg should go for 9 Hatch instead of 12 Hatch?
Not a strange concept. Since boosting give you some income faster and if you do it overtime is clear that you can get great results when it comes to eco. That is the reason sometimes do you even see 10 hatchery or 11 hatchery this days trying to counter 8 rax or 9pool vs zerg. 11h or 10h vs gateway first. The problem is that doing that you are sacricing other aspects of your game for the return of extra larva at early game. And the most important if terran just predict you will play like that and just hard counter you with eco Rush u are in more big trouble. So all those variations can be valid against the right card. But i mean that is pretty much progamer games these days. We truly need a map revolution.
I think the issue of you not understanding him is cuz he is thinking out of the box. And since the game is from 1998 we just get with the flow that everything has been explored. The reality is that no one is really trying to push out of the conform zone.Take as example Larva on game 1 vs Bisu and his strategy. I havent seen any other pro exploring such routes.
btw im also this way LOL. thats why i keep asking to get maps like Sylphid 1.0 Circuit Breakers Apocalypse Allegro etc. And to recent times Tempest was one of my favorites too. I really hate the gimmick maps being included .
No I think the reason WE don't understand him is because he often writes weird English.
The math goes, how much minerals extra is how much mining time
I struggle to understand what it means. So I have to guess, and if you guess, you may be unsure of what he actually means. And he has like 10 sentences like that in a paragraph and at the end you have no clue what he tries to say.
I can rarely dispute the content of what he says, not because he's thinking out of the box. For example when he said Zerg should infest CC instead of attacking Turrets, ok I get it, ridiculous idea but I get it. But most of times I don't even understand what he says. So I figure we could use a translator here.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Again, what's your mmr and have you actually seen BO9 for zvps recently? Soma's macro is actually top tier. its just that his macro game is not close to his mind tricks and build trickeries.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
Yes, and Bisu only camped and moved out at 150 supplies and 1a2a3a'd and won. Feels like something a B rank player can do too.
Nothing to do with having a lead with Nexus first and a executing 2 base timing while Zerg took his 4th base at 9:30 (game 2), holding off an all-in attempt with just Zealots and Probes while not even losing the Gate (game 3), a base trade that could have gone Larva's way if his execution was better and he didn't forget his Lurker in the Overlord (game 4), or hitting a timing right before Zerg's sneaky base kicked in, plus Zerg decided to fight the Protoss deathball by having his small groups of army going in one by one (game 5).
Btw, out of curiosity, what chokes do you consider wide? Polestar chokes don't seem wide to me. Neither are Metropolis. Knockout's double bridges and high ground 3rd aren't narrow enough for you? The only one I can say has wide chokes is Radeon. You want chokes like Fighting Spirit's?
Chokes like polypoid is fine. Metropolis is a bit weird because you practically have to place your units in 3 places but it's somewhat "ok" for current meta What is crazy is that Bisu pylon scouted/made pylon vs larva's 11h on polestar and THEN proceeded to make 3 cannons (overreaction). Bisu also lost a free DT and he STILL had 170 PSI vs larva's 119 PSI at 11 min mark. That's a big joke tbh and it's such a slap for current pvz meta. You cannot defend that in maps like polestar where chokes are so wide your lurkers need to be spaced out and can't target multiple units effectively like you can on maps lik FS/polypoid
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
This. Larva used to be the goat until a few years ago, but then he stopped playing and lost all of his skills. Lately he's been improving, but he's still a shadow of his former self.
The goat ? He basically won a very close ASL vs Mini and retired lol. I dont ever remember him dominating everyone. Him like Soulkey was getting eliminated at early ASls cuz of zerg vs zerg. Then he beat Jaedong and few others on his way to the final. Larva was Known for playing 1000 games vs FlaSh and taking 20 lol.
Btw Game 1 What he did with the mass sunkens if Bisu just put 4 reavers to shutdown that shit.. But instead Bisu doing Bisu things decided it was more optimal to attack up ramp.
Larva was extremely strong. In my view he was the clear favorite against everyone other than Rush, who failed to stop him. After that I was almost 100% convinced he'd win the tournament, although Mini shocked us with his impressive skills. He made it a close final match.
If Larva had kept practicing after that, I'm convinced he would've destroyed everyone for years to come. Other players were very lucky that he went on a hiatus, because no other zerg player had such a strong macro game. He was the reason why Flash stopped doing mech transitions in every TvZ, as Larva proved that zerg was actually a clear favorite against that strategy. Towards the end of their rivalry, Flash could only beat Larva with heavy early/mid game aggression, and so the TvZ meta reverted back from mech to bio.
So actually. Terran stopped doing the mech switch hardcore after the new 1-1-1 Build of FlaSh.Then Soma introduced real counters to it and terrans started doing it again but less cuz the maps werent the most apropiated to play that style. Instead going 4`barracks +1 into 2 starports like we still see was the build of choice. Mech Switch died cuz of the mass Queens style. For a while if i remember correctly Mong was the only guy that stick to it. Now i have to admit something. in 2021 i wasnt following starcraft. I kinda lost interesting after blizzard not upgrading the terrible mappool of Benzene/eclipse/optimizer/Plasma/Ringing bloom etc.
In fact i only recall seeing the finals from that ASL and i tuned in cuz im actually friends with Larva so i was curious if he could beat Mini lol. If Larva actually had year of domination in 2021 like Snow and Soma are doing then my bad.Genuinely didnt know. About Macro. Call me crazy but Effort macro is kinda insane too.There is this famous game between him and FlaSh before going to military that everyone was freakin out.
Larva was the player who kept working on the broodling counter strategy to Flash's mech switch. He was the one who figured out that it is a hard counter. It developed over many dozens if not hundreds of games between those two players. Then Flash realized it wasn't working anymore and started relying on a repertoire of marine centric strategies, which included all kinds of older high aggression builds that he knew from his long standing career. This put Larva back in his place for quite a while until he also started to learn to deal with that aggression. He wasn't good at that stuff, and he got much better at it during his rivalry with Flash. This all preceded his ASL victory. Flash is basically responsible for much of Larva's later success. And their rivalry is responsible for the meta changes that destroyed the TvZ mech switch.
You talk as if larva actually had decent win rate. Larva would win 5-2 flash randomly and people just remember that but fail to remember larva overall record was like 20-152 lol and larva always lost vs flash/bisu even at end. Larva was never the dominant zerg online too. He wasn't the goat.
U being generous to metropolis. Metropolis basically force you to take a new main as a 4 and then pray that you dont die to the insane timing for 8 gateways that is coming at your face. Cuz on top of that creep doesnt even go very far in your natural so you are in a very weird position where your lurkers are out without defense from sunkens.And that is counting he decides to attack your main. Cuz he very well strike your 4 and put you in a very weird spot where you either counter attack and die to storms.Or you try to defend your 4 but end up losing all the units and the game. And that is the biggest issue of all these maps. No easy at all to defend or setup your 4 expo..
On October 01 2025 21:45 TMNT wrote: Eon why don't you spare some of your energy to help us translate mtcn's posts? Since I see you don't ever disagree with him and even agree with him sometimes. What does he mean in the above post? Does he mean Zerg should go for 9 Hatch instead of 12 Hatch?
Not a strange concept. Since boosting give you some income faster and if you do it overtime is clear that you can get great results when it comes to eco. That is the reason sometimes do you even see 10 hatchery or 11 hatchery this days trying to counter 8 rax or 9pool vs zerg. 11h or 10h vs gateway first. The problem is that doing that you are sacricing other aspects of your game for the return of extra larva at early game. And the most important if terran just predict you will play like that and just hard counter you with eco Rush u are in more big trouble. So all those variations can be valid against the right card. But i mean that is pretty much progamer games these days. We truly need a map revolution.
I think the issue of you not understanding him is cuz he is thinking out of the box. And since the game is from 1998 we just get with the flow that everything has been explored. The reality is that no one is really trying to push out of the conform zone.Take as example Larva on game 1 vs Bisu and his strategy. I havent seen any other pro exploring such routes.
btw im also this way LOL. thats why i keep asking to get maps like Sylphid 1.0 Circuit Breakers Apocalypse Allegro etc. And to recent times Tempest was one of my favorites too. I really hate the gimmick maps being included .
No I think the reason WE don't understand him is because he often writes weird English.
The math goes, how much minerals extra is how much mining time
I struggle to understand what it means. So I have to guess, and if you guess, you may be unsure of what he actually means. And he has like 10 sentences like that in a paragraph and at the end you have no clue what he tries to say.
I can rarely dispute the content of what he says, not because he's thinking out of the box. For example when he said Zerg should infest CC instead of attacking Turrets, ok I get it, ridiculous idea but I get it. But most of times I don't even understand what he says. So I figure we could use a translator here.
You don't have to quarrel to understand. I chopped off half of my post. Beforehand, • I went into each hatchery making (5-1.05)n larvae per minute, • How much time it would take to make 9 drones by, -9 drone 1-hatch 1 base 2 minutes, -18 drone 2-hatch 2 bases 1 minute, -27 drone 3-hatch 3 bases 40 seconds, -36 drone 4-hatch 4 bases 24 seconds. • If zerg skipped on an early natural how much it would skew math, -1 less base at 3-hatch, say, 27 drone 3-hatch '2' bases slows mining by 15% just so you would understand, but you keep posting this astroturf nonsensical jibberish just because I play zerg and you don't.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Again, what's your mmr and have you actually seen BO9 for zvps recently? Soma's macro is actually top tier. its just that his macro game is not close to his mind tricks and build trickeries.
Evil is guilty of slightly exaggerating, I mean no ASL Ro4 player or potent Proleague(s) player has a shit macro game, even relatively speaking.
I think their point that Soma’s strength is getting into an early/midgame advantage and riding that out, versus being good at playing from deficits and grinding it out probably does have some validity though.
It’s not as extreme, and it’s not all build gambles, some of it is his hyper-optimisations too, but it’s a bit reminiscent of how Mini plays.
Sure Mini can play a good macro game, but his stock approach is to try and play his macro games with a big initial advantage. Something that can bite him in the ass too.
Speaking of Soma, I don’t religiously follow the non-ASL stuff, how’s his matchup shape overall and how’s he stack up versus Bisu?
I’m a big Bisu fan, obviously some here are bigger :p But I’ve been rooting for Soma to win an ASL for ages despite not really being a Zerg enjoyer. Think it would be cool that like a (relatively) new player who wasn’t a previous frontline Kespa player and improved, innovated and optimised wins one of these things.
On October 01 2025 21:45 TMNT wrote: Eon why don't you spare some of your energy to help us translate mtcn's posts? Since I see you don't ever disagree with him and even agree with him sometimes. What does he mean in the above post? Does he mean Zerg should go for 9 Hatch instead of 12 Hatch?
Not a strange concept. Since boosting give you some income faster and if you do it overtime is clear that you can get great results when it comes to eco. That is the reason sometimes do you even see 10 hatchery or 11 hatchery this days trying to counter 8 rax or 9pool vs zerg. 11h or 10h vs gateway first. The problem is that doing that you are sacricing other aspects of your game for the return of extra larva at early game. And the most important if terran just predict you will play like that and just hard counter you with eco Rush u are in more big trouble. So all those variations can be valid against the right card. But i mean that is pretty much progamer games these days. We truly need a map revolution.
I think the issue of you not understanding him is cuz he is thinking out of the box. And since the game is from 1998 we just get with the flow that everything has been explored. The reality is that no one is really trying to push out of the conform zone.Take as example Larva on game 1 vs Bisu and his strategy. I havent seen any other pro exploring such routes.
btw im also this way LOL. thats why i keep asking to get maps like Sylphid 1.0 Circuit Breakers Apocalypse Allegro etc. And to recent times Tempest was one of my favorites too. I really hate the gimmick maps being included .
No I think the reason WE don't understand him is because he often writes weird English.
For example, this sentence:
The math goes, how much minerals extra is how much mining time
I struggle to understand what it means. So I have to guess, and if you guess, you may be unsure of what he actually means. And he has like 10 sentences like that in a paragraph and at the end you have no clue what he tries to say.
I can rarely dispute the content of what he says, not because he's thinking out of the box. For example when he said Zerg should infest CC instead of attacking Turrets, ok I get it, ridiculous idea but I get it. But most of times I don't even understand what he says. So I figure we could use a translator here.
You don't have to quarrel to understand. I chopped off half of my post. Beforehand, • I went into each hatchery making (5-1.05)n larvae per minute, • How much time it would take to make 9 drones by, -9 drone 1-hatch 1 base 2 minutes, -18 drone 2-hatch 2 bases 1 minute, -27 drone 3-hatch 3 bases 40 seconds, -36 drone 4-hatch 4 bases 24 seconds. • If zerg skipped on an early natural how much it would skew math, -1 less base at 3-hatch, say, 27 drone 3-hatch '2' bases slows mining by 15% just so you would understand, but you keep posting this astroturf nonsensical jibberish just because I play zerg and you don't.
How does this intersect with what opponents can do in a real game scenario?
It seems to me these aren’t optimisations on what one can viably do, but just abstracted calculations of one specific facet of a multi-faceted game.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Again, what's your mmr and have you actually seen BO9 for zvps recently? Soma's macro is actually top tier. its just that his macro game is not close to his mind tricks and build trickeries.
Evil is guilty of slightly exaggerating, I mean no ASL Ro4 player or potent Proleague(s) player has a shit macro game, even relatively speaking.
I think their point that Soma’s strength is getting into an early/midgame advantage and riding that out, versus being good at playing from deficits and grinding it out probably does have some validity though.
It’s not as extreme, and it’s not all build gambles, some of it is his hyper-optimisations too, but it’s a bit reminiscent of how Mini plays.
Sure Mini can play a good macro game, but his stock approach is to try and play his macro games with a big initial advantage. Something that can bite him in the ass too.
Speaking of Soma, I don’t religiously follow the non-ASL stuff, how’s his matchup shape overall and how’s he stack up versus Bisu?
I’m a big Bisu fan, obviously some here are bigger :p But I’ve been rooting for Soma to win an ASL for ages despite not really being a Zerg enjoyer. Think it would be cool that like a (relatively) new player who wasn’t a previous frontline Kespa player and improved, innovated and optimised wins one of these things.
On eloboard, Soma is strong in ZvP with a total lifetime record of 60%, which also corresponds to his recent shape in the matchup. However, Bisu is the only top Protoss that he has a losing (lifetime) record against (49%, compared to 61% vs Snow, 58% vs. Best, 57% vs. Mini). His recent shape against Bisu is pretty even (20-17 since July, 6-6 in September), though that still lags behind his overall ZvP record. To be fair, his lifetime record against Snow is probably a little inflated because Snow used to be literally incapable of winning PvZ at all. So in general I'd say that Soma has very strong ZvP but Bisu (and perhaps Snow) can definitely give him some trouble.
On October 01 2025 21:45 TMNT wrote: Eon why don't you spare some of your energy to help us translate mtcn's posts? Since I see you don't ever disagree with him and even agree with him sometimes. What does he mean in the above post? Does he mean Zerg should go for 9 Hatch instead of 12 Hatch?
Not a strange concept. Since boosting give you some income faster and if you do it overtime is clear that you can get great results when it comes to eco. That is the reason sometimes do you even see 10 hatchery or 11 hatchery this days trying to counter 8 rax or 9pool vs zerg. 11h or 10h vs gateway first. The problem is that doing that you are sacricing other aspects of your game for the return of extra larva at early game. And the most important if terran just predict you will play like that and just hard counter you with eco Rush u are in more big trouble. So all those variations can be valid against the right card. But i mean that is pretty much progamer games these days. We truly need a map revolution.
I think the issue of you not understanding him is cuz he is thinking out of the box. And since the game is from 1998 we just get with the flow that everything has been explored. The reality is that no one is really trying to push out of the conform zone.Take as example Larva on game 1 vs Bisu and his strategy. I havent seen any other pro exploring such routes.
btw im also this way LOL. thats why i keep asking to get maps like Sylphid 1.0 Circuit Breakers Apocalypse Allegro etc. And to recent times Tempest was one of my favorites too. I really hate the gimmick maps being included .
No I think the reason WE don't understand him is because he often writes weird English.
For example, this sentence:
The math goes, how much minerals extra is how much mining time
I struggle to understand what it means. So I have to guess, and if you guess, you may be unsure of what he actually means. And he has like 10 sentences like that in a paragraph and at the end you have no clue what he tries to say.
I can rarely dispute the content of what he says, not because he's thinking out of the box. For example when he said Zerg should infest CC instead of attacking Turrets, ok I get it, ridiculous idea but I get it. But most of times I don't even understand what he says. So I figure we could use a translator here.
You don't have to quarrel to understand. I chopped off half of my post. Beforehand, • I went into each hatchery making (5-1.05)n larvae per minute, • How much time it would take to make 9 drones by, -9 drone 1-hatch 1 base 2 minutes, -18 drone 2-hatch 2 bases 1 minute, -27 drone 3-hatch 3 bases 40 seconds, -36 drone 4-hatch 4 bases 24 seconds. • If zerg skipped on an early natural how much it would skew math, -1 less base at 3-hatch, say, 27 drone 3-hatch '2' bases slows mining by 15% just so you would understand, but you keep posting this astroturf nonsensical jibberish just because I play zerg and you don't.
How does this intersect with what opponents can do in a real game scenario?
It seems to me these aren’t optimisations on what one can viably do, but just abstracted calculations of one specific facet of a multi-faceted game.
I was like yourself, thinking Roaring Currents would be the end of zerg, but noticed how greedy it is. You have to strip your thinking from a normal game and look for where the optimisations are because Larva made Bisu throw in the towel. That speaks for the real gaming scenario I'm trying to demonstrate.
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Again, what's your mmr and have you actually seen BO9 for zvps recently? Soma's macro is actually top tier. its just that his macro game is not close to his mind tricks and build trickeries.
Evil is guilty of slightly exaggerating, I mean no ASL Ro4 player or potent Proleague(s) player has a shit macro game, even relatively speaking.
I think their point that Soma’s strength is getting into an early/midgame advantage and riding that out, versus being good at playing from deficits and grinding it out probably does have some validity though.
It’s not as extreme, and it’s not all build gambles, some of it is his hyper-optimisations too, but it’s a bit reminiscent of how Mini plays.
Sure Mini can play a good macro game, but his stock approach is to try and play his macro games with a big initial advantage. Something that can bite him in the ass too.
Speaking of Soma, I don’t religiously follow the non-ASL stuff, how’s his matchup shape overall and how’s he stack up versus Bisu?
I’m a big Bisu fan, obviously some here are bigger :p But I’ve been rooting for Soma to win an ASL for ages despite not really being a Zerg enjoyer. Think it would be cool that like a (relatively) new player who wasn’t a previous frontline Kespa player and improved, innovated and optimised wins one of these things.
On eloboard, Soma is strong in ZvP with a total lifetime record of 60%, which also corresponds to his recent shape in the matchup. However, Bisu is the only top Protoss that he has a losing (lifetime) record against (49%, compared to 61% vs Snow, 58% vs. Best, 57% vs. Mini). His recent shape against Bisu is pretty even (20-17 since July, 6-6 in September), though that still lags behind his overall ZvP record. To be fair, his lifetime record against Snow is probably a little inflated because Snow used to be literally incapable of winning PvZ at all. So in general I'd say that Soma has very strong ZvP but Bisu (and perhaps Snow) can definitely give him some trouble.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
Yes, and Bisu only camped and moved out at 150 supplies and 1a2a3a'd and won. Feels like something a B rank player can do too.
Nothing to do with having a lead with Nexus first and a executing 2 base timing while Zerg took his 4th base at 9:30 (game 2), holding off an all-in attempt with just Zealots and Probes while not even losing the Gate (game 3), a base trade that could have gone Larva's way if his execution was better and he didn't forget his Lurker in the Overlord (game 4), or hitting a timing right before Zerg's sneaky base kicked in, plus Zerg decided to fight the Protoss deathball by having his small groups of army going in one by one (game 5).
Btw, out of curiosity, what chokes do you consider wide? Polestar chokes don't seem wide to me. Neither are Metropolis. Knockout's double bridges and high ground 3rd aren't narrow enough for you? The only one I can say has wide chokes is Radeon. You want chokes like Fighting Spirit's?
Chokes like polypoid is fine. Metropolis is a bit weird because you practically have to place your units in 3 places but it's somewhat "ok" for current meta What is crazy is that Bisu pylon scouted/made pylon vs larva's 11h on polestar and THEN proceeded to make 3 cannons (overreaction). Bisu also lost a free DT and he STILL had 170 PSI vs larva's 119 PSI at 11 min mark. That's a big joke tbh and it's such a slap for current pvz meta. You cannot defend that in maps like polestar where chokes are so wide your lurkers need to be spaced out and can't target multiple units effectively like you can on maps lik FS/polypoid
for the record i dont play anymore so i dont know what my mmr is. regardless, based on your assessment of game 2 im just gonna come to the conclusion that you have no idea what youre talking about.
bisu started off with a bo win on polestar. 13 nexus vs 11h is a bo win for protoss. convenient of you to overlook that. also bisu never built 3 cannons so i dunno wtf youre on about there? he built 2 and the rest came after larvas mutas came out. also the dt cost nothing? its not like he invested in a shuttle for a dt drop. the dt replaces what would have otherwise just been a zealot. you talk like that dt death was massive. bisu rolled larva that game because: 1. he got away with a 13 nexus, 2. its bisu and hes a production god, 3. he cut corsairs in favour of gateways and didnt get punished for that either and 4. larva was STILL droning at the 11min mark because he was greedy. larva did literally nothing to slow bisu down after the bo loss from basically the 2nd minute of the game. and that is completely typical of larva because he doesnt prefer to play aggressively like soma does.
youre looking at the absolute best protoss at optimising production given the absolute best case circumstances to play to his strengths and youre crying that this is how all pvz games go in the current meta. jesus christ
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Again, what's your mmr and have you actually seen BO9 for zvps recently? Soma's macro is actually top tier. its just that his macro game is not close to his mind tricks and build trickeries.
Evil is guilty of slightly exaggerating, I mean no ASL Ro4 player or potent Proleague(s) player has a shit macro game, even relatively speaking.
I think their point that Soma’s strength is getting into an early/midgame advantage and riding that out, versus being good at playing from deficits and grinding it out probably does have some validity though.
It’s not as extreme, and it’s not all build gambles, some of it is his hyper-optimisations too, but it’s a bit reminiscent of how Mini plays.
Sure Mini can play a good macro game, but his stock approach is to try and play his macro games with a big initial advantage. Something that can bite him in the ass too.
Speaking of Soma, I don’t religiously follow the non-ASL stuff, how’s his matchup shape overall and how’s he stack up versus Bisu?
I’m a big Bisu fan, obviously some here are bigger :p But I’ve been rooting for Soma to win an ASL for ages despite not really being a Zerg enjoyer. Think it would be cool that like a (relatively) new player who wasn’t a previous frontline Kespa player and improved, innovated and optimised wins one of these things.
yes you are correct in your understanding of my point. somas game is all about early game control. thats what hes known for amongst the korean sc community. he quite clearly favours 9 pool/overpool over 11/12 hatch, and he favours leg speed over lair. all of those tendencies favour aggression and priority on the map rather than econ. thats just how soma likes to lay foundations for his games. you will almost never see soma play like larva or hero or action or even soulkey. zergs that dont mind being on the defensive and letting the game go to hive stage
soma actually comes out ahead of bisu in head to head in online matches. like 55/45. says a lot about how somas style is more of a natural counter to bisu. blocks early game vision and goes back and forth between hydra and muta comps to put bisu behind.
edit: i see the bisu vs soma comparison was already answered. different sample size to my one though
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
Yes, and Bisu only camped and moved out at 150 supplies and 1a2a3a'd and won. Feels like something a B rank player can do too.
Nothing to do with having a lead with Nexus first and a executing 2 base timing while Zerg took his 4th base at 9:30 (game 2), holding off an all-in attempt with just Zealots and Probes while not even losing the Gate (game 3), a base trade that could have gone Larva's way if his execution was better and he didn't forget his Lurker in the Overlord (game 4), or hitting a timing right before Zerg's sneaky base kicked in, plus Zerg decided to fight the Protoss deathball by having his small groups of army going in one by one (game 5).
Btw, out of curiosity, what chokes do you consider wide? Polestar chokes don't seem wide to me. Neither are Metropolis. Knockout's double bridges and high ground 3rd aren't narrow enough for you? The only one I can say has wide chokes is Radeon. You want chokes like Fighting Spirit's?
Chokes like polypoid is fine. Metropolis is a bit weird because you practically have to place your units in 3 places but it's somewhat "ok" for current meta What is crazy is that Bisu pylon scouted/made pylon vs larva's 11h on polestar and THEN proceeded to make 3 cannons (overreaction). Bisu also lost a free DT and he STILL had 170 PSI vs larva's 119 PSI at 11 min mark. That's a big joke tbh and it's such a slap for current pvz meta. You cannot defend that in maps like polestar where chokes are so wide your lurkers need to be spaced out and can't target multiple units effectively like you can on maps lik FS/polypoid
for the record i dont play anymore so i dont know what my mmr is. regardless, based on your assessment of game 2 im just gonna come to the conclusion that you have no idea what youre talking about.
bisu started off with a bo win on polestar. 13 nexus vs 11h is a bo win for protoss. convenient of you to overlook that. also bisu never built 3 cannons so i dunno wtf youre on about there? he built 2 and the rest came after larvas mutas came out. also the dt cost nothing? its not like he invested in a shuttle for a dt drop. the dt replaces what would have otherwise just been a zealot. you talk like that dt death was massive. bisu rolled larva that game because: 1. he got away with a 13 nexus, 2. its bisu and hes a production god, 3. he cut corsairs in favour of gateways and didnt get punished for that either and 4. larva was STILL droning at the 11min mark because he was greedy. larva did literally nothing to slow bisu down after the bo loss from basically the 2nd minute of the game. and that is completely typical of larva because he doesnt prefer to play aggressively like soma does.
youre looking at the absolute best protoss at optimising production given the absolute best case circumstances to play to his strengths and youre crying that this is how all pvz games go in the current meta. jesus christ
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Again, what's your mmr and have you actually seen BO9 for zvps recently? Soma's macro is actually top tier. its just that his macro game is not close to his mind tricks and build trickeries.
Evil is guilty of slightly exaggerating, I mean no ASL Ro4 player or potent Proleague(s) player has a shit macro game, even relatively speaking.
I think their point that Soma’s strength is getting into an early/midgame advantage and riding that out, versus being good at playing from deficits and grinding it out probably does have some validity though.
It’s not as extreme, and it’s not all build gambles, some of it is his hyper-optimisations too, but it’s a bit reminiscent of how Mini plays.
Sure Mini can play a good macro game, but his stock approach is to try and play his macro games with a big initial advantage. Something that can bite him in the ass too.
Speaking of Soma, I don’t religiously follow the non-ASL stuff, how’s his matchup shape overall and how’s he stack up versus Bisu?
I’m a big Bisu fan, obviously some here are bigger :p But I’ve been rooting for Soma to win an ASL for ages despite not really being a Zerg enjoyer. Think it would be cool that like a (relatively) new player who wasn’t a previous frontline Kespa player and improved, innovated and optimised wins one of these things.
yes you are correct in your understanding of my point. somas game is all about early game control. thats what hes known for amongst the korean sc community. he quite clearly favours 9 pool/overpool over 11/12 hatch, and he favours leg speed over lair. all of those tendencies favour aggression and priority on the map rather than econ. thats just how soma likes to lay foundations for his games. you will almost never see soma play like larva or hero or action or even soulkey. zergs that dont mind being on the defensive and letting the game go to hive stage
soma actually comes out ahead of bisu in head to head in online matches. like 55/45. says a lot about how somas style is more of a natural counter to bisu. blocks early game vision and goes back and forth between hydra and muta comps to put bisu behind.
edit: i see the bisu vs soma comparison was already answered. different sample size to my one though
Larva didn't do anything wrong and he droned hard on 6 lings too. The fact that PSI difference widened this much is obviously due to build order advantage that bisu has and the fact that bisu is a god. What I'm saying is that it's almost impossible to defend such 170 PSI army on modern maps like polestar. Look at the game snow played vs soma yesterday and almost all games were standard. It was crazy to see soma lose 30-40 psi while snow remained largely the same when they were fighting. Soma was trying to defend at wide choke, covering his main/nat with 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurks and expanded twice in that time, leaving soma to be behind economically. I'm also saying is that it doesn't even matter if bisu was at 170 psi. He still would've busted at 145/150 PSI (normal supply if no build order advantage) because its polestar. This is why you see so many zergs opting to not get to this stage in the first place.
On October 01 2025 15:10 Bonyth wrote: Larva retired from competetive online gaming. I think using his quarter-final game against Bisu for the sake of balance talk is just disrespectful to other zergs that compete on a daily basis.
This. Larva used to be the goat until a few years ago, but then he stopped playing and lost all of his skills. Lately he's been improving, but he's still a shadow of his former self.
The goat ? He basically won a very close ASL vs Mini and retired lol. I dont ever remember him dominating everyone. Him like Soulkey was getting eliminated at early ASls cuz of zerg vs zerg. Then he beat Jaedong and few others on his way to the final. Larva was Known for playing 1000 games vs FlaSh and taking 20 lol.
Btw Game 1 What he did with the mass sunkens if Bisu just put 4 reavers to shutdown that shit.. But instead Bisu doing Bisu things decided it was more optimal to attack up ramp.
Larva was extremely strong. In my view he was the clear favorite against everyone other than Rush, who failed to stop him. After that I was almost 100% convinced he'd win the tournament, although Mini shocked us with his impressive skills. He made it a close final match.
If Larva had kept practicing after that, I'm convinced he would've destroyed everyone for years to come. Other players were very lucky that he went on a hiatus, because no other zerg player had such a strong macro game. He was the reason why Flash stopped doing mech transitions in every TvZ, as Larva proved that zerg was actually a clear favorite against that strategy. Towards the end of their rivalry, Flash could only beat Larva with heavy early/mid game aggression, and so the TvZ meta reverted back from mech to bio.
So actually. Terran stopped doing the mech switch hardcore after the new 1-1-1 Build of FlaSh.Then Soma introduced real counters to it and terrans started doing it again but less cuz the maps werent the most apropiated to play that style. Instead going 4`barracks +1 into 2 starports like we still see was the build of choice. Mech Switch died cuz of the mass Queens style. For a while if i remember correctly Mong was the only guy that stick to it. Now i have to admit something. in 2021 i wasnt following starcraft. I kinda lost interesting after blizzard not upgrading the terrible mappool of Benzene/eclipse/optimizer/Plasma/Ringing bloom etc.
In fact i only recall seeing the finals from that ASL and i tuned in cuz im actually friends with Larva so i was curious if he could beat Mini lol. If Larva actually had year of domination in 2021 like Snow and Soma are doing then my bad.Genuinely didnt know. About Macro. Call me crazy but Effort macro is kinda insane too.There is this famous game between him and FlaSh before going to military that everyone was freakin out.
Larva was the player who kept working on the broodling counter strategy to Flash's mech switch. He was the one who figured out that it is a hard counter. It developed over many dozens if not hundreds of games between those two players. Then Flash realized it wasn't working anymore and started relying on a repertoire of marine centric strategies, which included all kinds of older high aggression builds that he knew from his long standing career. This put Larva back in his place for quite a while until he also started to learn to deal with that aggression. He wasn't good at that stuff, and he got much better at it during his rivalry with Flash. This all preceded his ASL victory. Flash is basically responsible for much of Larva's later success. And their rivalry is responsible for the meta changes that destroyed the TvZ mech switch.
You talk as if larva actually had decent win rate. Larva would win 5-2 flash randomly and people just remember that but fail to remember larva overall record was like 20-152 lol and larva always lost vs flash/bisu even at end. Larva was never the dominant zerg online too. He wasn't the goat.
Larva's overall record against Flash improved from 10% to upwards of 30% after countless battles. Perhaps what you're referring to is the fact that Larva's winrate fell off again the moment Flash stopped relying on mech transitions. He had to learn to survive the early/mid game to reclaim his 30%+ winrate. That's why I'm saying Flash is a big reason why Larva became so goated.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
Yes, and Bisu only camped and moved out at 150 supplies and 1a2a3a'd and won. Feels like something a B rank player can do too.
Nothing to do with having a lead with Nexus first and a executing 2 base timing while Zerg took his 4th base at 9:30 (game 2), holding off an all-in attempt with just Zealots and Probes while not even losing the Gate (game 3), a base trade that could have gone Larva's way if his execution was better and he didn't forget his Lurker in the Overlord (game 4), or hitting a timing right before Zerg's sneaky base kicked in, plus Zerg decided to fight the Protoss deathball by having his small groups of army going in one by one (game 5).
Btw, out of curiosity, what chokes do you consider wide? Polestar chokes don't seem wide to me. Neither are Metropolis. Knockout's double bridges and high ground 3rd aren't narrow enough for you? The only one I can say has wide chokes is Radeon. You want chokes like Fighting Spirit's?
Chokes like polypoid is fine. Metropolis is a bit weird because you practically have to place your units in 3 places but it's somewhat "ok" for current meta What is crazy is that Bisu pylon scouted/made pylon vs larva's 11h on polestar and THEN proceeded to make 3 cannons (overreaction). Bisu also lost a free DT and he STILL had 170 PSI vs larva's 119 PSI at 11 min mark. That's a big joke tbh and it's such a slap for current pvz meta. You cannot defend that in maps like polestar where chokes are so wide your lurkers need to be spaced out and can't target multiple units effectively like you can on maps lik FS/polypoid
for the record i dont play anymore so i dont know what my mmr is. regardless, based on your assessment of game 2 im just gonna come to the conclusion that you have no idea what youre talking about.
bisu started off with a bo win on polestar. 13 nexus vs 11h is a bo win for protoss. convenient of you to overlook that. also bisu never built 3 cannons so i dunno wtf youre on about there? he built 2 and the rest came after larvas mutas came out. also the dt cost nothing? its not like he invested in a shuttle for a dt drop. the dt replaces what would have otherwise just been a zealot. you talk like that dt death was massive. bisu rolled larva that game because: 1. he got away with a 13 nexus, 2. its bisu and hes a production god, 3. he cut corsairs in favour of gateways and didnt get punished for that either and 4. larva was STILL droning at the 11min mark because he was greedy. larva did literally nothing to slow bisu down after the bo loss from basically the 2nd minute of the game. and that is completely typical of larva because he doesnt prefer to play aggressively like soma does.
youre looking at the absolute best protoss at optimising production given the absolute best case circumstances to play to his strengths and youre crying that this is how all pvz games go in the current meta. jesus christ
On October 02 2025 00:02 WombaT wrote:
On October 01 2025 23:33 Shinokuki wrote:
On October 01 2025 17:51 evilfatsh1t wrote:
On October 01 2025 07:27 Shinokuki wrote:
On October 01 2025 03:02 TMNT wrote:
On September 30 2025 23:58 Shinokuki wrote:
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Again, what's your mmr and have you actually seen BO9 for zvps recently? Soma's macro is actually top tier. its just that his macro game is not close to his mind tricks and build trickeries.
Evil is guilty of slightly exaggerating, I mean no ASL Ro4 player or potent Proleague(s) player has a shit macro game, even relatively speaking.
I think their point that Soma’s strength is getting into an early/midgame advantage and riding that out, versus being good at playing from deficits and grinding it out probably does have some validity though.
It’s not as extreme, and it’s not all build gambles, some of it is his hyper-optimisations too, but it’s a bit reminiscent of how Mini plays.
Sure Mini can play a good macro game, but his stock approach is to try and play his macro games with a big initial advantage. Something that can bite him in the ass too.
Speaking of Soma, I don’t religiously follow the non-ASL stuff, how’s his matchup shape overall and how’s he stack up versus Bisu?
I’m a big Bisu fan, obviously some here are bigger :p But I’ve been rooting for Soma to win an ASL for ages despite not really being a Zerg enjoyer. Think it would be cool that like a (relatively) new player who wasn’t a previous frontline Kespa player and improved, innovated and optimised wins one of these things.
yes you are correct in your understanding of my point. somas game is all about early game control. thats what hes known for amongst the korean sc community. he quite clearly favours 9 pool/overpool over 11/12 hatch, and he favours leg speed over lair. all of those tendencies favour aggression and priority on the map rather than econ. thats just how soma likes to lay foundations for his games. you will almost never see soma play like larva or hero or action or even soulkey. zergs that dont mind being on the defensive and letting the game go to hive stage
soma actually comes out ahead of bisu in head to head in online matches. like 55/45. says a lot about how somas style is more of a natural counter to bisu. blocks early game vision and goes back and forth between hydra and muta comps to put bisu behind.
edit: i see the bisu vs soma comparison was already answered. different sample size to my one though
Larva didn't do anything wrong and he droned hard on 6 lings too. The fact that PSI difference widened this much is obviously due to build order advantage that bisu has and the fact that bisu is a god. What I'm saying is that it's almost impossible to defend such 170 PSI army on modern maps like polestar. Look at the game snow played vs soma yesterday and almost all games were standard. It was crazy to see soma lose 30-40 psi while snow remained largely the same when they were fighting. Soma was trying to defend at wide choke, covering his main/nat with 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurks and expanded twice in that time, leaving soma to be behind economically. I'm also saying is that it doesn't even matter if bisu was at 170 psi. He still would've busted at 145/150 PSI (normal supply if no build order advantage) because its polestar. This is why you see so many zergs opting to not get to this stage in the first place.
dont know about the snow vs soma game youre referring to, but queen did just fine against best in the group stages on polestar.
On September 30 2025 21:23 TMNT wrote: Yeah, I can feel the pain of Zergs during that 10-13th min power spike of Protoss when they have that kind of a death ball army and you can't be sure whether they'll hit the natural or the 3rd to put your defence.
It seems like the benefits from that sneaky 4th base of Larva didn't kick in yet for him though. Bisu probably hit the only timing for him.
This is why zergs are all inning so hard early game to either get ahead or outright kill protoss. It gets really hard for zerg to snowball into solid macro game onwards from 11 min and forward on these maps.
On the topic of maps, it is interesting but probably not meaningful due to miniature sample sizes that some maps have seen wild swings in win rates from ASL season 19 to 20.
In ZvP: Metropolis - 50% -> 16.7% Pole Star - 60% -> 25% Radeon - 50% -> 20%
There's a common theme here. Wide chokes. See larva vs bisu games? It felt pretty one sided on these maps. Bisu can just 1a2a3a4a into it or into narrower point, if larva put 80% of his army in wide chokes.
Yes, and Bisu only camped and moved out at 150 supplies and 1a2a3a'd and won. Feels like something a B rank player can do too.
Nothing to do with having a lead with Nexus first and a executing 2 base timing while Zerg took his 4th base at 9:30 (game 2), holding off an all-in attempt with just Zealots and Probes while not even losing the Gate (game 3), a base trade that could have gone Larva's way if his execution was better and he didn't forget his Lurker in the Overlord (game 4), or hitting a timing right before Zerg's sneaky base kicked in, plus Zerg decided to fight the Protoss deathball by having his small groups of army going in one by one (game 5).
Btw, out of curiosity, what chokes do you consider wide? Polestar chokes don't seem wide to me. Neither are Metropolis. Knockout's double bridges and high ground 3rd aren't narrow enough for you? The only one I can say has wide chokes is Radeon. You want chokes like Fighting Spirit's?
Chokes like polypoid is fine. Metropolis is a bit weird because you practically have to place your units in 3 places but it's somewhat "ok" for current meta What is crazy is that Bisu pylon scouted/made pylon vs larva's 11h on polestar and THEN proceeded to make 3 cannons (overreaction). Bisu also lost a free DT and he STILL had 170 PSI vs larva's 119 PSI at 11 min mark. That's a big joke tbh and it's such a slap for current pvz meta. You cannot defend that in maps like polestar where chokes are so wide your lurkers need to be spaced out and can't target multiple units effectively like you can on maps lik FS/polypoid
for the record i dont play anymore so i dont know what my mmr is. regardless, based on your assessment of game 2 im just gonna come to the conclusion that you have no idea what youre talking about.
bisu started off with a bo win on polestar. 13 nexus vs 11h is a bo win for protoss. convenient of you to overlook that. also bisu never built 3 cannons so i dunno wtf youre on about there? he built 2 and the rest came after larvas mutas came out. also the dt cost nothing? its not like he invested in a shuttle for a dt drop. the dt replaces what would have otherwise just been a zealot. you talk like that dt death was massive. bisu rolled larva that game because: 1. he got away with a 13 nexus, 2. its bisu and hes a production god, 3. he cut corsairs in favour of gateways and didnt get punished for that either and 4. larva was STILL droning at the 11min mark because he was greedy. larva did literally nothing to slow bisu down after the bo loss from basically the 2nd minute of the game. and that is completely typical of larva because he doesnt prefer to play aggressively like soma does.
youre looking at the absolute best protoss at optimising production given the absolute best case circumstances to play to his strengths and youre crying that this is how all pvz games go in the current meta. jesus christ
On October 02 2025 00:02 WombaT wrote:
On October 01 2025 23:33 Shinokuki wrote:
On October 01 2025 17:51 evilfatsh1t wrote:
On October 01 2025 07:27 Shinokuki wrote:
On October 01 2025 03:02 TMNT wrote:
On September 30 2025 23:58 Shinokuki wrote:
On September 30 2025 23:51 TornadoSteve wrote: When im allinin, its usually to outright kill my opponent, or get ahead. This sounds about right
The issue is that they are "forced" to because if they don't protoss is usually ahead in these macro games. It gets real easy for protoss to just macro up to 140-150 psi and expand to 3 bases if z also tries to do the same. P can 1a2a3a4a5a into wide chokes on these modern maps and get some really good engagements and snowball into 4/5 base protoss with 2/2 upgrades. This is why soma has worked so hard on mineral optimization and crafted a well thoughout builds to kill protoss in early mid games or mind trick protoss into being defensive.
No bro. I don't know how you got it in a total opposite way like that.
Protoss is only ahead during the 10-13th minute if they do some damage to Zerg in the earlier phases, or by a BO luck. Like a sneaky Zealot getting some Drone early on, or a pre-storm Zealot timing that deals some damage, or a good trade between Corsairs vs Muta/Scourge, or a failed Hydra bust attempt from Z. Basically, race A is ahead of race B at the x minute because because player A deals some damage to player B y minutes earlier, which is true in every matchup.
There's no games where Protoss and Zerg both play safe, just macro up, and no one does anything to the other, and Protoss can naturally get ahead like you described. If that were the case, why would Protoss players even bother with Gate expand? Just FFE, build Cannons to be safe, camp and macro until you get 150 supplies and push out lol. And the global PvZ win rate would be ~55% instead of ~45% like currently lol.
You're just so tunnel visioned into those games where Protoss crushes Zerg at their power spike, because well, you're a Zerg supporter and can only see the difficulties of Zerg in the matchup, like the problem with maps you always claim. Why can't we have mineral lines that don't allow Zealot to hide? Why can't we have narrow chokes to defend? Basically, why mapmakers don't make the matchup easier for us?
I'm really curious what your mmr is and how you keep refuting what every z pros are saying right now. You really don't seem to understand zvp that well. The games where they go 50:50 are games that z/p cross spawn and constantly scout each other and z ends up making only 6 lings and protoss goes straight to stargate before cannon.
See the games snow played vs soma today (FYI snow destroyed soma 7-2 as soma seemed to purposefuly go standard to get ready for bisu matches. Soma did say he will play 30 games every day until the day of the match to increase his mechanics and he has ALWAYS said he lacks standard macro game. It's crazy how many mineral lines allow for zealots to hide and let's not even mention wide choke points which is the biggest culprit.
You see effort, larva, and soma all doing crazy styles to not let it get to standard macro game. Foreigners think soma played so well but the sad reality is that he needed to do this in order to be ahead because it sure is easy for protoss to 1a2a3a into wide chokepoint and get insane advantage. For example, see game 7 or 8 of snow vs soma BO9 (forgot which game it was but it was on polestar). Snow lost 2 DTs for FREE in the beginning and then soma opted to go standard and soma lost so much at wide chokepoint, attempting to defend both his nat and 4th with like 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurkers and expanded twice. Soma had no answer for such eco disadvantage and the fact that he lost all his gas heavy units. It's really crushing as zerg to play like this where the other race can play macro standard game, stress free while zerg has to be the one initiating the variance play so that it doesn't fall into typical standard game.
somas standard macro play is indeed his weakest part of his game, and yet you rely on that as evidence that protoss is generally favoured in a macro race against zerg and zergs just crumble to protoss deathball? ok mate.
soma plays like that because his standard game is shit. he tries mind games or weird builds and tries to greed as much leverage he can get out of any lead in order to snowball his game, because once again, his standard macro game is shit. and when the benchmark for a good toss in a standard macro game is bisu, then yeah, its understandable that zergs try to punish protoss earlier. but the reality is, no other toss has a standard game as clean as bisus anyway. snow and mini arent known for optimisation and macro, and best doesnt have bisus unit control. also zvp will never change in that priority is pretty much always with zerg and the onus is on protoss to find out what zerg is doing at all times and respond perfectly. its far easier to make a mistake as a protoss or straight up die to a build you didnt even see coming. stress free is the last thing i would say to describe a protoss playing a zvp.
Again, what's your mmr and have you actually seen BO9 for zvps recently? Soma's macro is actually top tier. its just that his macro game is not close to his mind tricks and build trickeries.
Evil is guilty of slightly exaggerating, I mean no ASL Ro4 player or potent Proleague(s) player has a shit macro game, even relatively speaking.
I think their point that Soma’s strength is getting into an early/midgame advantage and riding that out, versus being good at playing from deficits and grinding it out probably does have some validity though.
It’s not as extreme, and it’s not all build gambles, some of it is his hyper-optimisations too, but it’s a bit reminiscent of how Mini plays.
Sure Mini can play a good macro game, but his stock approach is to try and play his macro games with a big initial advantage. Something that can bite him in the ass too.
Speaking of Soma, I don’t religiously follow the non-ASL stuff, how’s his matchup shape overall and how’s he stack up versus Bisu?
I’m a big Bisu fan, obviously some here are bigger :p But I’ve been rooting for Soma to win an ASL for ages despite not really being a Zerg enjoyer. Think it would be cool that like a (relatively) new player who wasn’t a previous frontline Kespa player and improved, innovated and optimised wins one of these things.
yes you are correct in your understanding of my point. somas game is all about early game control. thats what hes known for amongst the korean sc community. he quite clearly favours 9 pool/overpool over 11/12 hatch, and he favours leg speed over lair. all of those tendencies favour aggression and priority on the map rather than econ. thats just how soma likes to lay foundations for his games. you will almost never see soma play like larva or hero or action or even soulkey. zergs that dont mind being on the defensive and letting the game go to hive stage
soma actually comes out ahead of bisu in head to head in online matches. like 55/45. says a lot about how somas style is more of a natural counter to bisu. blocks early game vision and goes back and forth between hydra and muta comps to put bisu behind.
edit: i see the bisu vs soma comparison was already answered. different sample size to my one though
Larva didn't do anything wrong and he droned hard on 6 lings too. The fact that PSI difference widened this much is obviously due to build order advantage that bisu has and the fact that bisu is a god. What I'm saying is that it's almost impossible to defend such 170 PSI army on modern maps like polestar. Look at the game snow played vs soma yesterday and almost all games were standard. It was crazy to see soma lose 30-40 psi while snow remained largely the same when they were fighting. Soma was trying to defend at wide choke, covering his main/nat with 20 lurkers. Snow killed 20 lurks and expanded twice in that time, leaving soma to be behind economically. I'm also saying is that it doesn't even matter if bisu was at 170 psi. He still would've busted at 145/150 PSI (normal supply if no build order advantage) because its polestar. This is why you see so many zergs opting to not get to this stage in the first place.
dont know about the snow vs soma game youre referring to, but queen did just fine against best in the group stages on polestar.
You should check it out. It's right on snow's youtube yesterday. It's the perfect series to dissect what's wrong with standard macro game without any trickeries in zvp. Soma seems like he went macro game to prepare for bisu
On October 02 2025 02:14 Shinokuki wrote: You should check it out. It's right on snow's youtube yesterday. It's the perfect series to dissect what's wrong with standard macro game without any trickeries in zvp. Soma seems like he went macro game to prepare for bisu
After watching said game (Snow vs Soma on Pole Star, game 9 of the series), I think it's fair to say you have a heavy bias that you can only see what you want to see.
That game is a macro game yes, but it's far from a standard one. Evidence one: Snow never built a Stargate for the entire game.
He opened Nexus after 1 Zealot (17 Nexus) and the probe only went out to scout after that. Then he tech'd all the way up to Citadel before dropping the first Cannon. Later, somehow Snow's probe just walked right pass 6 Lings in front of Soma's natural, seeing a Lair morphing and a finished Hydra Den. It was 4:40 in the game that he saw this, which means if Soma went for a Muta switch bullshit, Snow had to start 3 Cannons in his main at the latest around 7:10 (might even be sooner than that, depending on the progress of the Lair). He started ONLY 1 Cannon in his main at 7:20.
Probably Snow identified Soma wouldn't go for a Muta switch and played like that. And combined with his opening, he was able to sit on 9 Gates, with 4 HTs and storm research already done, plus 1 DA morphing in, at 8:00. He cut corners left and right and took so many risks to get to that state, also partly because he was up 6-2 at that point already and given the way Soma only played macro in this series (like you said). Needless to say, such opening allowed Snow to outfight, outmanoeuvre Soma's army for the rest of the game.
If Protoss is allowed to skip Stargate tech in PvZ and that being considered standard, we'll never say a word about the matchup again lol.
You can even say Snow treated that game like a risk-free one on ladder and Soma treated it like a practice session for his Defiler tech macro game (because the series already had a winner at that point and they are likely facing each other in finals)
On October 02 2025 02:14 Shinokuki wrote: You should check it out. It's right on snow's youtube yesterday. It's the perfect series to dissect what's wrong with standard macro game without any trickeries in zvp. Soma seems like he went macro game to prepare for bisu
After watching said game (Snow vs Soma on Pole Star, game 9 of the series), I think it's fair to say you have a heavy bias that you can only see what you want to see.
That game is a macro game yes, but it's far from a standard one. Evidence one: Snow never built a Stargate for the entire game.
He opened Nexus after 1 Zealot (17 Nexus) and the probe only went out to scout after that. Then he tech'd all the way up to Citadel before dropping the first Cannon. Later, somehow Snow's probe just walked right pass 6 Lings in front of Soma's natural, seeing a Lair morphing and a finished Hydra Den. It was 4:40 in the game that he saw this, which means if Soma went for a Muta switch bullshit, Snow had to start 3 Cannons in his main at the latest around 7:10 (might even be sooner than that, depending on the progress of the Lair). He started ONLY 1 Cannon in his main at 7:20.
Probably Snow identified Soma wouldn't go for a Muta switch and played like that. And combined with his opening, he was able to sit on 9 Gates, with 4 HTs and storm research already done, plus 1 DA morphing in, at 8:00. He cut corners left and right and took so many risks to get to that state, also partly because he was up 6-2 at that point already and given the way Soma only played macro in this series (like you said). Needless to say, such opening allowed Snow to outfight, outmanoeuvre Soma's army for the rest of the game.
If Protoss is allowed to skip Stargate tech in PvZ and that being considered standard, we'll never say a word about the matchup again lol.
You can even say Snow treated that game like a risk-free one on ladder and Soma treated it like a practice session for his Defiler tech macro game (because the series already had a winner at that point and they are likely facing each other in finals)
I like how you never mention snow lost 2 dts practically for free and THEN still made DA which is a huge sunk in gas and resources. Soma had equal PSI vs snow and got obliterated. You talk as if snow had some sort of 180 psi vs 120 psi advantage. Soma had around equal ground power and still got rolled over and then snowballed into snow's insane eco advantage. You're missing the point here. The macro game on POLESTAR/etc is very hard for zerg when z needs to set up their 4 base with 65 drones and p can pressure and z cant drone up as usual.
I checked polestar stats and it stands at 50.6% win rate for zvp while at 39% win rate for zvt. Looks like zvp win rate is going down as protoss is figuring out trickeries and how to deal with all ins. It used to be at 52%. Goddamn this kinda map is horrible for zergs
On October 02 2025 02:14 Shinokuki wrote: You should check it out. It's right on snow's youtube yesterday. It's the perfect series to dissect what's wrong with standard macro game without any trickeries in zvp. Soma seems like he went macro game to prepare for bisu
After watching said game (Snow vs Soma on Pole Star, game 9 of the series), I think it's fair to say you have a heavy bias that you can only see what you want to see.
That game is a macro game yes, but it's far from a standard one. Evidence one: Snow never built a Stargate for the entire game.
He opened Nexus after 1 Zealot (17 Nexus) and the probe only went out to scout after that. Then he tech'd all the way up to Citadel before dropping the first Cannon. Later, somehow Snow's probe just walked right pass 6 Lings in front of Soma's natural, seeing a Lair morphing and a finished Hydra Den. It was 4:40 in the game that he saw this, which means if Soma went for a Muta switch bullshit, Snow had to start 3 Cannons in his main at the latest around 7:10 (might even be sooner than that, depending on the progress of the Lair). He started ONLY 1 Cannon in his main at 7:20.
Probably Snow identified Soma wouldn't go for a Muta switch and played like that. And combined with his opening, he was able to sit on 9 Gates, with 4 HTs and storm research already done, plus 1 DA morphing in, at 8:00. He cut corners left and right and took so many risks to get to that state, also partly because he was up 6-2 at that point already and given the way Soma only played macro in this series (like you said). Needless to say, such opening allowed Snow to outfight, outmanoeuvre Soma's army for the rest of the game.
If Protoss is allowed to skip Stargate tech in PvZ and that being considered standard, we'll never say a word about the matchup again lol.
You can even say Snow treated that game like a risk-free one on ladder and Soma treated it like a practice session for his Defiler tech macro game (because the series already had a winner at that point and they are likely facing each other in finals)
I like how you never mention snow lost 2 dts practically for free and THEN still made DA which is a huge sunk in gas and resources. Soma had equal PSI vs snow and got obliterated. You talk as if snow had some sort of 180 psi vs 120 psi advantage. Soma had around equal ground power and still got rolled over and then snowballed into snow's insane eco advantage. You're missing the point here. The macro game on POLESTAR/etc is very hard for zerg when z needs to set up their 4 base with 65 drones and p can pressure and z cant drone up as usual.
I checked polestar stats and it stands at 50.6% win rate for zvp while at 39% win rate for zvt. Looks like zvp win rate is going down as protoss is figuring out trickeries and how to deal with all ins. It used to be at 52%. Goddamn this kinda map is horrible for zergs
The two DTs means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things thanks to the advantages he got from the corners he cut and the risks he took. In fact I like how that's the only thing you mentioned while the rest of Snow's build doesn't matter. On top of skipping the entire air tech tree, the early Nexus and early Citadel not only allowed Snow to afford 4 DTs + 4 HTs + 9 Gates, it also allowed him to have them much sooner than usual and can contest Zerg before they grow out of control. He achieved that at the risk of dying any time to a Ling rush or Mutas because that game didn't matter to him at 6-2 already. It's not a standard game at all and it's stupid to use it as an example of a macro game.
It's also funny that you're complaining about a ~50% win rate. Maybe devote that energy on the 39% ZvT. Imagine how Protoss players feel when their win rates in both matchups are always below 50% on most maps all these years lol.
Plus, I didn't see Soma's supplies, but if he was on equal supplies with Snow and lost the battles then maybe he should look at his army control before blaming the map. I mean, well yeah Polestar may be harder than FS or Polypoid but we're talking about going from 53% to 50% ffs. If you complain about a matchup that your race has 50% win rate, might as well ask the referees to hand the win to you already.
On October 02 2025 02:14 Shinokuki wrote: You should check it out. It's right on snow's youtube yesterday. It's the perfect series to dissect what's wrong with standard macro game without any trickeries in zvp. Soma seems like he went macro game to prepare for bisu
After watching said game (Snow vs Soma on Pole Star, game 9 of the series), I think it's fair to say you have a heavy bias that you can only see what you want to see.
That game is a macro game yes, but it's far from a standard one. Evidence one: Snow never built a Stargate for the entire game.
He opened Nexus after 1 Zealot (17 Nexus) and the probe only went out to scout after that. Then he tech'd all the way up to Citadel before dropping the first Cannon. Later, somehow Snow's probe just walked right pass 6 Lings in front of Soma's natural, seeing a Lair morphing and a finished Hydra Den. It was 4:40 in the game that he saw this, which means if Soma went for a Muta switch bullshit, Snow had to start 3 Cannons in his main at the latest around 7:10 (might even be sooner than that, depending on the progress of the Lair). He started ONLY 1 Cannon in his main at 7:20.
Probably Snow identified Soma wouldn't go for a Muta switch and played like that. And combined with his opening, he was able to sit on 9 Gates, with 4 HTs and storm research already done, plus 1 DA morphing in, at 8:00. He cut corners left and right and took so many risks to get to that state, also partly because he was up 6-2 at that point already and given the way Soma only played macro in this series (like you said). Needless to say, such opening allowed Snow to outfight, outmanoeuvre Soma's army for the rest of the game.
If Protoss is allowed to skip Stargate tech in PvZ and that being considered standard, we'll never say a word about the matchup again lol.
You can even say Snow treated that game like a risk-free one on ladder and Soma treated it like a practice session for his Defiler tech macro game (because the series already had a winner at that point and they are likely facing each other in finals)
I like how you never mention snow lost 2 dts practically for free and THEN still made DA which is a huge sunk in gas and resources. Soma had equal PSI vs snow and got obliterated. You talk as if snow had some sort of 180 psi vs 120 psi advantage. Soma had around equal ground power and still got rolled over and then snowballed into snow's insane eco advantage. You're missing the point here. The macro game on POLESTAR/etc is very hard for zerg when z needs to set up their 4 base with 65 drones and p can pressure and z cant drone up as usual.
I checked polestar stats and it stands at 50.6% win rate for zvp while at 39% win rate for zvt. Looks like zvp win rate is going down as protoss is figuring out trickeries and how to deal with all ins. It used to be at 52%. Goddamn this kinda map is horrible for zergs
The two DTs means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things thanks to the advantages he got from the corners he cut and the risks he took. In fact I like how that's the only thing you mentioned while the rest of Snow's build doesn't matter. On top of skipping the entire air tech tree, the early Nexus and early Citadel not only allowed Snow to afford 4 DTs + 4 HTs + 9 Gates, it also allowed him to have them much sooner than usual and can contest Zerg before they grow out of control. He achieved that at the risk of dying any time to a Ling rush or Mutas because that game didn't matter to him at 6-2 already. It's not a standard game at all and it's stupid to use it as an example of a macro game.
It's also funny that you're complaining about a ~50% win rate. Maybe devote that energy on the 39% ZvT. Imagine how Protoss players feel when their win rates in both matchups are always below 50% on most maps all these years lol.
Plus, I didn't see Soma's supplies, but if he was on equal supplies with Snow and lost the battles then maybe he should look at his army control before blaming the map. I mean, well yeah Polestar may be harder than FS or Polypoid but we're talking about going from 53% to 50% ffs. If you complain about a matchup that your race has 50% win rate, might as well ask the referees to hand the win to you already.
Losing 2 DTs is nothing? That's kinda crazy and you'd know if you played zvp at high level and idk why you consider this not a standard macro game. It's a perfect game to show why these maps suck "MACRO" wise because if it gets to this point and supplies are similar toss has an upper hand advantage due to widechokes It's also crazy talk how you "assume" that since snow was already 6-2 it didn't matter.. Every win is $100 for snow man. Z has many ways to all in protoss but cannot do a standard macro game and it will seem to be that way, moving forward and that's what we're arguing. Why should we be cheesing when we just want to braindead macro like protoss/terran? It's hard for non pros to execute a certain micro/strats 20 different ways. It gets tiring.
You're missing my point man. I'm not complaining about zvt. I'm complaining about the macro set up for zvp on these modern maps like polestar. That's my entire argument.
Soma himself said it too! It's crazy how you refute this. Soma said in proleague today "This map sucks for defense against Goon/ht timing" and even stork agreed to it lol. Stork also said "Honestly if both z and p macro up without making lings or p going to fast tech, its good for P." Watch the game queen vs snow on polestar and soma/stork commentate on it lol
On October 02 2025 17:39 TMNT wrote: It's also funny that you're complaining about a ~50% win rate. Maybe devote that energy on the 39% ZvT. Imagine how Protoss players feel when their win rates in both matchups are always below 50% on most maps all these years lol.
Plus, I didn't see Soma's supplies, but if he was on equal supplies with Snow and lost the battles then maybe he should look at his army control before blaming the map. I mean, well yeah Polestar may be harder than FS or Polypoid but we're talking about going from 53% to 50% ffs. If you complain about a matchup that your race has 50% win rate, might as well ask the referees to hand the win to you already.
To be fair, with the sample sizes we're talking about, a map's balance shifting towards 50% from imbalance is achieved by the losing side now winning more than 50% of games. e.g. ZvP going from 53% to 47%. The sample sizes are also so small that only a handful of games going the other direction would also have maintained the previous balance.
Your point about Zerg players being whiners is absolutely correct. They complain about Protoss because they know Terran will jump in and agree because if Protoss wins 10% of games, that's 10% too high.
On October 02 2025 17:39 TMNT wrote: It's also funny that you're complaining about a ~50% win rate. Maybe devote that energy on the 39% ZvT. Imagine how Protoss players feel when their win rates in both matchups are always below 50% on most maps all these years lol.
Plus, I didn't see Soma's supplies, but if he was on equal supplies with Snow and lost the battles then maybe he should look at his army control before blaming the map. I mean, well yeah Polestar may be harder than FS or Polypoid but we're talking about going from 53% to 50% ffs. If you complain about a matchup that your race has 50% win rate, might as well ask the referees to hand the win to you already.
To be fair, with the sample sizes we're talking about, a map's balance shifting towards 50% from imbalance is achieved by the losing side now winning more than 50% of games. e.g. ZvP going from 53% to 47%. The sample sizes are also so small that only a handful of games going the other direction would also have maintained the previous balance.
You're point about Zerg players being whiners is absolutely correct. They complain about Protoss because they know Terran will jump in and agree because if Protoss wins 10% of games, that's 10% too high.
Just because TMNT brought up zvt win rate, I'll just mention this. We don't complain about zvt because it is what it is. The reason for such abysmal win rate in zvt is that unless you're top tier zergs like soulkey/soma you're going to suffer a lot vs terran but the main key point is that terrans are able to simcity and tech/eco on low marine count which is very good for terran. They are able to do this because of the wall.
You may argue "why not remove this simcity then?" But that would destroy zvp and make it so zvp favored because protoss now has to work with bad simcity and because of such reason, protoss cannot be greedy anymore. Zerg can all in a lot more and snowball this into a more favorable game and make this match up 60% win rate. We don't want that to happen here. What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return. Look at maps like knock out.. It's like telling zergs not to 973... while also giving protoss mineral lines for zlots to go in and gain lot of advantages.
It's pretty suffocating and not fun when zerg has to be the one needing to perform some trickeries/all ins in order to "prevent" the game from flowing to your standard macro game. Zergs just want to be able to turn it off and get into nice groove of macro game and this matters especially when it's not a tournament like ASL lol and most games are played outside of ASL. Same goes for us normal zerg players. We play hundred of ladder games. Do we really want to all in all day long like zelot? Why can't we just braindead macro like P/T. Have a 2/3 set build orders we can hit our eco and play a nice macro game rather than play some gamble risk game. Players like Eon would understand this and any zergs 2200+ will probably understand it
What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return.
Bruh, wide chokes would completely destroy protoss. They rely on narrow choke points to defend their bases against the mass onslaught of hydras and zerglings and whatnot. Wide choke = good for zerg.
What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return.
Bruh, wide chokes would completely destroy protoss. They rely on narrow choke points to defend their bases against the mass onslaught of hydras and zerglings and whatnot. Wide choke = good for zerg.
Ok I really don't know what to say to this. What's your mmr? Have you actually played zvp? Are you trying to refute soma and stork's argument here? Idk why you're even trying to argue about wide chokes. This was the most backseater comment I've seen. This tells me you know nothing about modern day zvp. Zerglings and hydras?? Are we in 2007 era? lol
wide chokes screw zerg, terran, and protoss over tremendously. all three races rely heavily on the narrow chokes. protoss does not rely on it more than terran or zerg. all three races have situations where they need them or die.
Yes, there's not a single rule as to wide/narrow chokes benefit which race more. It depends on the specific situations.
In PvZ, narrow chokes are better for the defensive side, whether it's P or Z, because noone wants to shove their army through a choke to eat storms or lurker/sunken spines. I reckon the reason Shinokuki is so vocal about wide chokes is because of the power spike of the 2-base Protoss around 130-150 supplies at 10-15 minutes, before Defiler is out, which corresponds exactly to the period of the game that gives P the most wins. Basically, he wants the FS/CB/Eclipse type chokes with the bridges and the invincible 3rd base, so Zerg can have an easier time surviving this period.
What I wonder is, even with that power spike, the PvZ win rate is still around 47%, so if you nerfs it, what would P become? You're asking to have all the Zerg shenanigans in the early to mid game that can kill a vulnerable Protoss immediately, plus an easier time during the Protoss power spike, and the powerful late game with dark swarm, plague, cracklings and the insane economic power. Poor Protoss is only allowed to have fuck all. Maybe what Rogue said is correct: if Protoss wins 10% of games, that's 10% too high.
What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return.
Bruh, wide chokes would completely destroy protoss. They rely on narrow choke points to defend their bases against the mass onslaught of hydras and zerglings and whatnot. Wide choke = good for zerg.
Ok I really don't know what to say to this. What's your mmr? Have you actually played zvp? Are you trying to refute soma and stork's argument here? Idk why you're even trying to argue about wide chokes. This was the most backseater comment I've seen. This tells me you know nothing about modern day zvp. Zerglings and hydras?? Are we in 2007 era? lol
This is simply not in dispute. The wider the choke, the more space hydras have to shoot and move around, the more space zerglings have to sneak through gaps and attack from every angle. I'm sorry but that's not something anyone can deny. Protoss doesn't have an answer to that, which is precisely why every natural base ever in the last several decades has been made the perfect size for gateway+forge.
On October 03 2025 06:03 Uldridge wrote: Or Barracks supply depot wall or zerg sim city. What are you smoking MP.
I don't know what you mean. I was talking about PvZ from the protoss perspective. The wider the area leading into the protoss main/nat, the more trouble they have defending against zerglings and hydras. This has always been the case and it's the main reason why natural bases have been designed like this for decades. The map makers know exactly what they're doing. Narrow natural choke points are in service of protoss in PvZ.
What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return.
Bruh, wide chokes would completely destroy protoss. They rely on narrow choke points to defend their bases against the mass onslaught of hydras and zerglings and whatnot. Wide choke = good for zerg.
Ok I really don't know what to say to this. What's your mmr? Have you actually played zvp? Are you trying to refute soma and stork's argument here? Idk why you're even trying to argue about wide chokes. This was the most backseater comment I've seen. This tells me you know nothing about modern day zvp. Zerglings and hydras?? Are we in 2007 era? lol
This is simply not in dispute. The wider the choke, the more space hydras have to shoot and move around, the more space zerglings have to sneak through gaps and attack from every angle. I'm sorry but that's not something anyone can deny. Protoss doesn't have an answer to that, which is precisely why every natural base ever in the last several decades has been made the perfect size for gateway+forge.
wait we aren't talking about natural chokes... we're talking about here.... where z needs to defend vs 12 min pvz push
I was actually in favor of the narrow chokes for natural... again, showing your ignorance
On October 03 2025 05:44 TMNT wrote: Yes, there's not a single rule as to wide/narrow chokes benefit which race more. It depends on the specific situations.
In PvZ, narrow chokes are better for the defensive side, whether it's P or Z, because noone wants to shove their army through a choke to eat storms or lurker/sunken spines. I reckon the reason Shinokuki is so vocal about wide chokes is because of the power spike of the 2-base Protoss around 130-150 supplies at 10-15 minutes, before Defiler is out, which corresponds exactly to the period of the game that gives P the most wins. Basically, he wants the FS/CB/Eclipse type chokes with the bridges and the invincible 3rd base, so Zerg can have an easier time surviving this period.
What I wonder is, even with that power spike, the PvZ win rate is still around 47%, so if you nerfs it, what would P become? You're asking to have all the Zerg shenanigans in the early to mid game that can kill a vulnerable Protoss immediately, plus an easier time during the Protoss power spike, and the powerful late game with dark swarm, plague, cracklings and the insane economic power. Poor Protoss is only allowed to have fuck all. Maybe what Rogue said is correct: if Protoss wins 10% of games, that's 10% too high.
Except... it will eventually lead to a favorable win rate over time for pvz the longer it is played just like how we are seeing.. Protoss is guaranteed ultimate early game set up while leaving zerg with none nowadays. You can't expect normal/non top tier zergs to perform how soma/soulkey/hero/queen are playing. Where are you getting this 47%? Again, we need to dissect more into this win rate. is this including eclipse? FS? Polypoid? CB?
On October 03 2025 06:39 Uldridge wrote: So the terran wall in and zerg sim cities are just a happenstance byproduct for this tremendous service the mapmakers did for protoss in PvZ?
Balance has to be achieved in all match-ups, I was only talking about PvZ because that was the point of contention. Wide entrance = bad for protoss. The fact that a wide entrance can also cause an imbalance in other matchups doesn't change that fact, it only further supports the concept of narrower choke points. PvZ is a very illustrative example because it's so heavily impacted by it. The matchup would literally break without narrow choke points. Zerg would practically always win.
On October 03 2025 06:39 Uldridge wrote: So the terran wall in and zerg sim cities are just a happenstance byproduct for this tremendous service the mapmakers did for protoss in PvZ?
Balance has to be achieved in all match-ups, I was only talking about PvZ because that was the point of contention. Wide entrance = bad for protoss. The fact that a wide entrance can also cause an imbalance in other matchups doesn't change that fact, it only further supports the concept of narrower choke points. PvZ is a very illustrative example because it's so heavily impacted by it. The matchup would literally break without narrow choke points. Zerg would practically always win.
Again, this is somethign even 1600 mmr nowadays knows. We're not talking about this.
What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return.
Bruh, wide chokes would completely destroy protoss. They rely on narrow choke points to defend their bases against the mass onslaught of hydras and zerglings and whatnot. Wide choke = good for zerg.
Ok I really don't know what to say to this. What's your mmr? Have you actually played zvp? Are you trying to refute soma and stork's argument here? Idk why you're even trying to argue about wide chokes. This was the most backseater comment I've seen. This tells me you know nothing about modern day zvp. Zerglings and hydras?? Are we in 2007 era? lol
This is simply not in dispute. The wider the choke, the more space hydras have to shoot and move around, the more space zerglings have to sneak through gaps and attack from every angle. I'm sorry but that's not something anyone can deny. Protoss doesn't have an answer to that, which is precisely why every natural base ever in the last several decades has been made the perfect size for gateway+forge.
wait we aren't talking about natural chokes... we're talking about here.... where z needs to defend vs 12 min pvz push
I was actually in favor of the narrow chokes for natural... again, showing your ignorance
Choke points outside of the natural - lets say for the third or fourth base - also have to be narrower to help protoss, not zerg. The fact that zerg players can also benefit from narrow choke points doesn't mean it's designed specifically to help them win more games against protoss. Narrow choke points are clearly better for protoss than for zerg in PvZ. This is because protoss has fewer units and thus benefits from narrow spaces to not get surrounded all the time. This is true for both the protoss army and for protoss expansions.
Zerg doesn't benefit more from sim city than protoss does. Never has, never will.
What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return.
Bruh, wide chokes would completely destroy protoss. They rely on narrow choke points to defend their bases against the mass onslaught of hydras and zerglings and whatnot. Wide choke = good for zerg.
Ok I really don't know what to say to this. What's your mmr? Have you actually played zvp? Are you trying to refute soma and stork's argument here? Idk why you're even trying to argue about wide chokes. This was the most backseater comment I've seen. This tells me you know nothing about modern day zvp. Zerglings and hydras?? Are we in 2007 era? lol
This is simply not in dispute. The wider the choke, the more space hydras have to shoot and move around, the more space zerglings have to sneak through gaps and attack from every angle. I'm sorry but that's not something anyone can deny. Protoss doesn't have an answer to that, which is precisely why every natural base ever in the last several decades has been made the perfect size for gateway+forge.
wait we aren't talking about natural chokes... we're talking about here.... where z needs to defend vs 12 min pvz push
I was actually in favor of the narrow chokes for natural... again, showing your ignorance
Choke points outside of the natural - lets say for the third or fourth base - also have to be narrower to help protoss, not zerg. The fact that zerg players can also benefit from narrow choke points doesn't mean it's designed specifically to help them win more games against protoss. Narrow choke points are clearly better for protoss than for zerg in PvZ. This is because protoss has fewer units and thus benefits from narrow spaces to not get surrounded all the time. This is true for both the protoss army and for protoss expansions.
Zerg doesn't benefit more from sim city than protoss does. Never has, never will.
Do you understand the current zvp meta? or are you just saying things you don't know? Anyway done arguing here. Why should i argue with 1300 mmr player
What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return.
Bruh, wide chokes would completely destroy protoss. They rely on narrow choke points to defend their bases against the mass onslaught of hydras and zerglings and whatnot. Wide choke = good for zerg.
Ok I really don't know what to say to this. What's your mmr? Have you actually played zvp? Are you trying to refute soma and stork's argument here? Idk why you're even trying to argue about wide chokes. This was the most backseater comment I've seen. This tells me you know nothing about modern day zvp. Zerglings and hydras?? Are we in 2007 era? lol
This is simply not in dispute. The wider the choke, the more space hydras have to shoot and move around, the more space zerglings have to sneak through gaps and attack from every angle. I'm sorry but that's not something anyone can deny. Protoss doesn't have an answer to that, which is precisely why every natural base ever in the last several decades has been made the perfect size for gateway+forge.
wait we aren't talking about natural chokes... we're talking about here.... where z needs to defend vs 12 min pvz push
I was actually in favor of the narrow chokes for natural... again, showing your ignorance
Choke points outside of the natural - lets say for the third or fourth base - also have to be narrower to help protoss, not zerg. The fact that zerg players can also benefit from narrow choke points doesn't mean it's designed specifically to help them win more games against protoss. Narrow choke points are clearly better for protoss than for zerg in PvZ. This is because protoss has fewer units and thus benefits from narrow spaces to not get surrounded all the time. This is true for both the protoss army and for protoss expansions.
Zerg doesn't benefit more from sim city than protoss does. Never has, never will.
Do you understand the current zvp meta? or are you just saying things you don't know? Anyway done arguing here. Why should i argue with 1300 mmr player
From the start you've been attacking me as a player. If this is how you want to debate things with people, I'll stop responding to you and start reporting all of your inflammatory comments.
What I'm arguing here is that wide chokes are the very problem of modern day zvp. They keep giving help to protoss while giving zerg nothing in return.
Bruh, wide chokes would completely destroy protoss. They rely on narrow choke points to defend their bases against the mass onslaught of hydras and zerglings and whatnot. Wide choke = good for zerg.
Ok I really don't know what to say to this. What's your mmr? Have you actually played zvp? Are you trying to refute soma and stork's argument here? Idk why you're even trying to argue about wide chokes. This was the most backseater comment I've seen. This tells me you know nothing about modern day zvp. Zerglings and hydras?? Are we in 2007 era? lol
This is simply not in dispute. The wider the choke, the more space hydras have to shoot and move around, the more space zerglings have to sneak through gaps and attack from every angle. I'm sorry but that's not something anyone can deny. Protoss doesn't have an answer to that, which is precisely why every natural base ever in the last several decades has been made the perfect size for gateway+forge.
wait we aren't talking about natural chokes... we're talking about here.... where z needs to defend vs 12 min pvz push
I was actually in favor of the narrow chokes for natural... again, showing your ignorance
Choke points outside of the natural - lets say for the third or fourth base - also have to be narrower to help protoss, not zerg. The fact that zerg players can also benefit from narrow choke points doesn't mean it's designed specifically to help them win more games against protoss. Narrow choke points are clearly better for protoss than for zerg in PvZ. This is because protoss has fewer units and thus benefits from narrow spaces to not get surrounded all the time. This is true for both the protoss army and for protoss expansions.
Zerg doesn't benefit more from sim city than protoss does. Never has, never will.
Do you understand the current zvp meta? or are you just saying things you don't know? Anyway done arguing here. Why should i argue with 1300 mmr player
From the start you've been attacking me as a player. If this is how you want to debate things with people, I'll stop responding to you and start reporting all of your inflammatory comments.
EPT
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