The IdrA Fan Club - Page 1415

I might as well take this opportunity to write a brief history of Idra's results over the past year or so.

By "slumping" I mean that Idra fell quite far from being able to claim that he was the best foreigner. He was "King of the Beta," quite literally, and showed such good results in Korea that he and Jinro were the clear top foreigners for a while. His MLG DC win and that fact that the stars sort of had to align to knock him out of MLG Dallas (Kulas vs Nazgul, close LT positions vs Select) reinforced that position.

The slump began shortly after he left Korea in February. His terrible showing in the IEM V World Championship (0-2 Ace, 2-3 Squirtle, both 2nd-rate Protosses) was a sign of things to come. Suddenly he was losing to random Protosses all over the place. 1-2 Cruncher. 0-2 Socke. 1-2 Minigun. 0-2 Kiwikaki. And 0-2 MC in the month of April, a result that would be repeated a lot. He lost his last match in MLG Dallas to TLO in games that showed that he still couldn't handle Terran cheese reliably.

At this point he won IPL 1 against purely NA players. He could claim to be the #1 American, since his competition in that regard was extremely weak, but Thorzain/Naniwa were considered to be the best foreigners, with Thorzain's victory in TSL and Naniwa's MLG Dallas win.

He continued to show disappointing results to his fans, going 0-2 in the highly anticipated Zenio rematch. That series, along with a 1-2 loss to Sen, largely destroyed what had been a perception that Idra's ZvZ was invincible. His cheese woes continued with a 1-4 loss to dde, a player who had not accomplished much before winning vs Idra and has not accomplished much since.

Columbus was interesting. In that tournament, it became obvious that Idra had some mental issues that needed to be worked out. Idra 2-0ed MC in the first series of the tournament, only to lose 0-4 in an extended series in games that were simply disgraceful. Columbus was also the setting for the infamous "early GG" game vs MMA.

After Columbus, things settled down a little bit. Idra went 0-2 against Boxer, but was showing OK results elsewhere. 0-2 losses to MC and Zenio solidified the idea that Idra simply couldn't win against Koreans. At Anaheim, he showed OK results, losing only to Boxer 0-2 (again) and Naniwa 1-2. He got pretty far in IPL 2, failed to qualify for Blizzcon, and bombed out of Raleigh (losing to Trimaster; this was probably the low point of the last 8 months).

Anyway, that was the setting in which Idra won IEM China and did really well in Orlando. It was such a massive shift in perception towards Idra when that happened. Before those two tournaments, Idra couldn't win against Koreans; his ZvP was god-awful; he couldn't defend cheese if his life depended on it; there was a list of about 5 foreigners for whom you could make a much better case for the title of "best foreigner"; he had unsolvable mental problems.

Those perceptions of Idra are now all in the past.