By l10f
Free warps in at the 7 o'clock position while Light starts at the 1 o'clock position. If Free falls here, Zero will be forced to take on the whole MBCGame team by himself. Both players opted for a standard opening; Free went 1 gate core, and Light went 1 fac expo. However, Free put down his nexus after only 1 dragoon to put himself ahead economically. Light put down his command center at his natural as soon as he scouted this, while laying mines in both his and Free's entrance.

Free then put down a quick citadel of adun, preparing for a fast arbiter build. Light, without seeing this, went straight for the science facility after making 1 dropship from his starport. Free was able to block the 4 vulture drop without losing many probes. Light then made a wraith and a vessel to snipe the observers around his base while adding 2 factories in his main.



Both players expand to their mineral only expansions, but Free slows down Light's expansion by killing the SCV making the command center. The first big move comes from Light: he moves all of his tanks towards 6, and sieges on the back of Free's natural. Using his vessel to give himself vision, Light is able to drive back Free's army and probes with only 3 vultures because Free has only dragoons. Free tries to counter Light's 3rd but is driven back by one tank and good sim city.



Free, after getting zealot speed and an arbiter, kills Light's force with the help of a mine drag. Although Light lost a lot of tanks, he is able to stop Free from mining his natural for a long time. Light also harasses Free's 11 o'clock expansion, killing many probes before dragoons come to help. Free, in response, sends 4 goons to 5 o'clock and cancels the command center that almost finished.



Economically ahead, Light once again pushes out to the center, this time with a lot of vultures and few tanks. Light is able to get the high ground in front of Free's mineral only, but Free clears out the force once again using stasis field and dodging EMP. Knowing that he has a much smaller army, Light tries to slow down Free's attack by harassing 11 o'clock again while expanding to 5 o'clock.

Free tries to recall, but his arbiter is EMP'ed, so he expands to 6 o'clock. After Free fails another recall, Light moves out with his tanks towards 6 o'clock. Free uses stasis to freeze almost half of Light's army and then destroys the push for the third time in the game. Free then attacks 5 o'clock, but two very well placed tanks seem to hold off the push, until a recall from Free takes out Light's tanks and his command center.



Free seems to be completely in control of the game at this point, and when Light attempts to retake 5 o'clock, Free pushes through the center. However, he is forced to pull back due to tanks and mines being very well placed. Free tries to attack through another way, using hallucinated arbiters to trick Light while he recalls. Light EMP's the hallucinated arbiters and the real one recalls directly on top of Light's tanks, killing all of them.



Light is now mined out except for his 5 o'clock expansion, while Free is mining from two bases. Free tries to do another hallucination and recall combo, but this time Light EMP's the real arbiter, along with a few hallucinated ones. Free then attacks light's high ground, but is pushed back after killing the command center at Light's mined out mineral only expansion. Light takes the 12 o'clock expansion while stopping Free's 6 with a couple of tanks.

Light now seems to be back in the game with his 3-3 mech army. Free moves a few units to lift Light's 12 o'clock and builds a nexus there right away. Light's units at 6 o'clock is also cleared out. Light uses one dropship and two tanks to try and harass 12 o'clock, but Free's is able to freeze everything using his arbiters. Free recalls at 6 o'clock, which is quickly killed by mines and tanks, but the toss replenishes his army quickly with the money from both 12 and 6 o'clock expansions.



Light desperately tries to kill 12 o'clock expansion using as few units as possible, but Free has too much stasis. Light moves out towards 6 o'clock after his 5 o'clock expansion mines out, and kills it, but Free had already mined the expansion out. Light continues to try and kill 12 o'clock using the dropship and the tanks, but comes 2 hits shy of killing the nexus. Free's first person view shows that he has over 7000 minerals stacked up with a 200/200 army, and he simply overwhelms Light's army for the victory almost 40 minutes into the game.



Free manages to stop Light's rampage while setting himself up for the next game.

By snowdrift86


F = (d/dt)(mv)

      Newton's Second Law

Momentum -- the driving force of the Winners League. The product of the mass and velocity of a player. While a weaker player may lose outright, or peter out after his first game, the stronger player's impetus will carry over multiple sets. After the high fives, the bow and whatever flourish he can come up with to celebrate his first win, the player retakes his seat in the booth and, momentum being a conserved quantity, keeps on going unless resisted by an outside force. If no such force is present, the laws of physics give way to the laws of nature -- the strong crushes the weak, the predator eats his prey, the progamer all-kills. Bloodletting ensues.

Momentum -- Flash's momentum. Flash's momentum was the initial impulse, awarding him an 80% win rate over the past few months and a 19-3 record in this Winners League. His momentum has snowballed into a broader Terran momentum that saw the meteoric rise of Light (26-8 record), the presence of six Terrans among this round's top ten killers, and an overall 63.5% TvZ win rate. Only a year ago, during the previous Winners League, Jaedong led the pack, the Park brothers terrorized Medusa's mineral lines with their 2 hatch mutas and the TvZ win rate had settled at a meager 46.5%. The pendulum has swung in the opposite direction and the current round has become a Zerg graveyard, as ultralisk bones gleam under the harsh suns of Neo Moon Glaive and New Tornado.

This momentum has brought the two Terran-dominated teams of Proleague together in the finals. Not to feast and rejoice at the demise of the Swarm, but to reclaim the glory of their predecessors. Lay your mines, siege your tanks and load your dropships as two momentums collide.


MBCGame HERO

"Ah... Hero. So young, so brash, so giddy. A team that always looks like it's having fun, never afraid to wear its emotions on the sleeve. Hero's best players are barely legal, and they are the ones who set the mood for this gang. So when they fly, Hero giddily soars. When they dip, Hero crashes and burns."

      -- HonestTea, Tribal Colors

That was MBCGame HERO in mid-2007. Momentum -- they had it in spades. At the time, the team could still count on JulyZerg, the aggressive, idiosyncratic player who was the first Zerg to win a starleague, by toppling iloveoov then beating Reach in the finals. Bisu had recently burst onto the scene, slaying the seemingly invincible Savior with apparent ease. Pusan's headstrong play was still being put to good use. Sea was their child prodigy. And earlier that year MBC triumphed in the proleague, defeating SKT in the Grand Final.



This was to be the team's high point. Over the following months, MBC was stripped of its brazen coach and top players as July, Bisu and Park Yongwoon were lured away to the wealthier and more prestigious SKT, and the team's performance suffered. With the loss of the impetuous Zerg and the smooth Protoss skirmisher, ace duties would eventually fall onto Sea's shoulders. At his side, the discreet and efficient Light. The Terran duo which would become the backbone of the team was in place. But the old MBC spark wasn't there anymore. The unruly insolence that had allowed them to pull the rug from under the venerable SKT or the stolid CJ hitmen was gone. Sea wasn't getting anything done in the starleagues, where the high-flyers could showcase their brilliance. Light for his part was dubbed the Invisible Terran. Hardly a compliment. For a team that was all about highs and lows, being consigned to mediocrity seemed to be the cruelest fate.

But something has changed. What precisely? There's no obvious answer as to whether it's Sea overcoming his poor showing in the first half of 2009 and beasting his way through the current proleague season, or the clarion call of a new Terran age, or even Hyungjun's antics -- it's tempting to dismiss them as purely a media stunt, yet they've definitely had a therapeutic effect on the team's spirits. One thing is clear, however: the insolent, roguish MBC is back. They're once again soaring the heights with Light's three Winners League all-kills, and plumbing the depths of progaming with Jaehoon's play. The Woongjin crew, quite a cocky bunch themselves, didn't stand a chance. Now MBCGame HERO is knocking on Flash's door, pulling open the curtains and shaking the proscene's bedstead. The cutthroats are back with a vengeance.



KT Rolster

"The most careful ask today: 'How is man to be maintained?' Zarathustra however asketh, as the first and only one: 'How is man to be surpassed?'
The Superman, I have at heart; that is the first and only thing to me."

      -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The KTF MagicNs once flaunted what was arguably the most loaded roster in progaming -- Reach, Yellow, Nal_rA, Sync, Chojja. The team's clash with the other progaming powerhouse, SKT, formed the centerpiece of professional Starcraft; the equivalent of Real Madrid and FC Barcelona's rivalry in Spanish football -- do the other teams really matter when you have these two going at it? But KT never triumphed over its rival; the Terran duo of Boxer and iloveoov, with solid backing from Midas and Kingdom, proved too formidable. A last shot at glory was snuffed out by MBC in the 2006 Proleague.



All the money in the world, yet victory slipped from their grasp. KT's star players, signed onto the team with six figure contracts, faded away, while promising rookies proved to be inconsistent. All but one -- Flash. KT's history is now irrevocably tied to Flash's story, as he has carried the team through the proleague seasons since his debut, to the point of faltering in the starleagues. Teammates provided occasional assistance, but their inconsistency prevented his labor from paying off.

Undeterred, Flash kept trudging down that solitary road that is the way to greatness, and eventually, something clicked, the pieces fell in place, the Ultimate Weapon's inner machinery was fully repaired, and the long, hard slog has now turned into a full-blown sprint -- Flash has a whopping 41-6 record in the proleague. I was talking about momentum, but this may well be a whole new field of physics that is opening up before us. Light stole some of his thunder in the Winners League, but Flash is hot on his heels, with a 19-3 record and a reverse all-kill of SKT (how's that for revenge served freezing cold?). Rest assured that he intends to take the top spot from Light's cold, dead hands.

Last week I went over how every team did against each race. I was wondering later how easily I could break down overall race win-loss numbers by team, and it dawned on me that I could use the same spreadsheet to find it. In retrospect, it was kind of backwards to not present this first.

Think of this as an unveiling, the first numbers for a feature that will find its way into the Proleague Results & Standings thread (once I overhaul the thread to be current and go back to weekly updates with round 4). Here it is!



Pretty fun, isn't it. Like last time, this doesn't include any playoff games (so if you use TLPD to get the data it might be ever so slightly off). This confirms a lot of things you can guess if you followed the league, MBC and KT have good terrans and hite's zergs are struggling.

You might notice the two 0% ratings in there. Between WeMade and Oz, there wasn't a single protoss win. Each team only played 1 protoss all round long, and neither of them managed to win a game (Pure for WeMade going 0-3, and PerfectMan going 0-2).

I find it amusing that SKT's protoss lineup is doing worse than their zerg lineup. HyuK, SoO, and S2 managed to achieve mediocrity between them while Bisu/BeSt are well below average. Frozen seems to have sunk STX's terran lineup, going 0-3 and turning their overall percentage from one that was respectable a year ago to the lowest of the pack.

Then, I wanted to know how big the difference was between the best and worst races of each team but didn't want to do any subtraction on my own so I copied the chart from last time.



Its fascinating that over half the teams have their best numbers coming from the terran lineup. With protoss players in general being worse lately than normal, I would have expected even less teams to have P be their best but STX (Kal, Shuttle) and Stars (Guemchi, free) put up good numbers and kept the dream alive for the race. WeMade's zergs every so slightly edged out their terrans and eSTRO's Action/hyvaa combo fared better than Really/UpMagic to get the best race title for their teams. KHAN overall had the most event numbers (something I doubt anyone anticipated going into WL) with their toss doing the worst (also something no one would have guessed 2 months ago).

Expect to see this continued in our R&S corner in the coming days, months, weeks, and proleague rounds. Enjoy, my fellow stat f(r)iends.