The Snute Fan Club - Page 11

GLSnute
Overview: Snute has been capable of winning EU weekly cups and taking games from good players for a while now, but he's never been up with the elite in Europe. Yet month after month, Snute has steadily worked on his game, and in the last two months, he has been improving alarmingly fast. Already Norway's clear champion with thrree major domestic LAN wins in the fall, Snute qualified for ESWC but posted disappointing results in his first international LAN. Soon after, his stream was defeatured as part of the TL cleanup. Instead of responding to these setbacks negatively, Snute rolled up his sleeves and got stronger. With a host of impressive weekly cup results—including sweeps of viOlet and DIMAGA—and a Ro16 performance at WCG that included a win against MorroW, Snute found himself back in the featured column, and on the radar of quite a few more people. Although he missed out on qualifying for IEM Kiev, Snute's recent results seem to suggest we'll see him a lot more on the international stage.

The Upside: At first glace, Snute looks like just another is a macro zerg. He has strong mechanics, but neither his micro, macro, or management are superlative. What sets him apart is his versatile box of tricks in every match-up. In the summer, Snute first found success by abusing infestors in all match-ups, and developing a lot of techniques that other players would become more famous for. After the infestor nerf, Snute hit a period of rocky results, but resurfaced with smarter, cleaner, and more deadly gameplay. Burrowed infestors, and baneling worker assassinations are two staples of Snute's style, which punishes opponents who are slow to react or poor at multitasking. As an added bonus, Snute has made baneling busting into a fine art, keeping opponents on their toes at all times. Interestingly however, his best match-up, ZvZ, is much more fundamental, but backed up by a superb understanding of the MU. Beyond his dynamic style, watching Snute's practice is reason enough to think he's destined for bigger and brighter things in the coming year. A compulsive replay watcher, and adept commentator on his stream, Snute has become one of the better players in the scene at diagnosing and addressing his own mistakes, as well as constantly questioning his own play.

Room for Improvement: Snute has difficulties that are not unique, especially to zergs, but represent the difference between the merely good and the great. Sometimes aggressive to a fault, Snute commonly loses won games by overextending and trading inefficiently. Mech terran play has occasionally been an issue as well. More generally, Snute, like many other zergs, has room to improve with scouting, and can be taken by surprise by early protoss and terran pushes. Snute has wide experience dominating large Norwegian LANs, but his international league experience is quite limited, and after missing the cut for IEM Kiev, he'll have to look for an invite to an event like Assembly Winter to get on the map.