By snowdrift86

Shuttle is this crazy new generation Protoss who is able to combine great hyper-aggression with amazing macro to keep pressure on his opponent the entire game. (...) you too may fall in love with YoonJoong aka BoraDori aka Shuttle aka your new fucking god.

      -- Goosey, A love letter to YoonJoong Part 2, May 2008

Q: When Best was acknowledged as the person with the best macro in the past, you must’ve been disappointed.
A: Best is known for his amazing macro and I have a similar style as him. If I’m given the resources, I’m confident that I can produce units at a non-stop rate.

      -- Shuttle, 2010 Winners League STX SouL vs Samsung Khan Interview

Q: Best friend in STX SouL?
A: Shuttle. Only person that I have personal contact with.

      -- TossGirl, Naver Sports Interview

No longer seen on Teamliquid, the self-styled "#1 Shuttle fan" is missing a historical moment as his idol finally steps into the limelight. As Protoss icons are falling left and right, in some cases even shuttled off to Thailand to try and recapture the old magic, Kim Yoonjoong is one of the most promising tosses in town. Long overshadowed by Kal on the STX roster, Shuttle is finally coming into his own. Sent out as the starting player against Samsung Khan during the Winners League, Shuttle seized the opportunity to display his top-notch PvP by dismantling Stork and Jangbi after having disposed of great and Juni. This put him at a 2-0 record against each of the two dragons.

An impressive performance, but spectators were already jaded. "Shuttle all-kill (...) guess this is standard WL," one dejected Khan fan rationalized. After all, hadn't Guemchi, another middling Protoss, all-killed CJ Entus earlier in the round? And Shuttle has always had a top-notch PvP, so this was just a case of him emerging from his cave to put his specialized talents to good use against a toss-heavy team. He'd then disappear back in the depths of the STX roster. But Shuttle had other plans. He was finally performing, finally delivering in the booth what he could achieve in practice.



Shuttle is not a rookie on a hot streak -- he's been around, defeating Stork in one of his first games back in late 2007. His hot streak happened some time ago, during the GOMTV Classic's first season in mid 2008 (the aforementioned #1 Shuttle fan declared his impassioned love during that event). He reached the semifinals, only to be crushed by Jaedong, who would go on to win the tournament. YoonJoong seemed to have a special affinity with GOMTV's league, as he was able to reach the quarterfinals in Season 3, where he was once again defeated by the eventual tournament winner, Flash.

Shuttle's strength, and the element of his play which draws comparisons to Best, is his macro. Able to consistently pump out massive armies from his gateways, he can ignore tricky play and fancy builds and still gain an edge. Even in losing games, he'll often end the fight in a dramatic battle where his abnormally large army seems on the verge of breaking through. In their Winners League game, Stork warped in a ninja third and thus grabbed a much earlier fourth, to no avail -- Shuttle had gained an advantage earlier by warding off reaver drops without taking any damage, and with his foot on the macro pedal he steadily enlarged his army. Panning over his forces as they marched out, the observer provoked an incredulous cry from commentators and spectators alike. When the climactic battle finally occurred, Stork was crushed.

Macro, however, isn't everything. Shuttle's recurring problem was that, while he had his macro down pat, he was lacking in everything else. If you wonder why he was until very recently underused by STX, direct your gaze towards the previous Winners League. STX was up against SKT1 -- not today's floundering team, but the SKT that would make it to the Winners League playoffs and win the overall season later on. Kal had defeated fantasy and Best, then lost to Bisu, who was fresh off of his GOMTV Season 2 victory (in other words, not today's slumping Kim Taekyong). by.hero managed to take down Bisu, but was then defeated by Canata, who went on to beat Calm.

After a strong start, STX now found itself with one last chance to seal the deal. Shuttle was sent out for the ace game on Colosseum II. What followed was a disaster, an embarrassment, a game that made SKT's mediocre Terran look like a genius. Shuttle was picked apart by vulture drops that killed upwards of twenty probes, and his only answer was a counter attempt at one of Canata's expansions, where he sent his dragoons up a ramp covered by siege tanks. Countless other dragoons were lost to mines, and vultures even managed to take down a nexus on their own while only a few steps away dragoons were having an AI bugfest. Canata finally pushed out and confronted Shuttle's sizeable army, conjured in a last spurt of macro -- the battle looked close, but that was Shuttle's last gasp and he typed out, barely to be seen again for the rest of the Proleague season.



Shuttle, clearly an emotional player as he's cried more than once in both victory and defeat, has put those painful memories behind him. He's smartened up, no longer blindly macroing while throwing his forces away in hopeless counters. After his Winners League all-kill, Shuttle went on to defeat a handful of Zergs, achieving a ten-game win streak vZ in the process -- a rare feat nowadays. His macro combined with his new found smarts allow him to play a solid, confident game that often involves midgame hanbangs with large, reaver-supported armies that overpower the neo-Sauron at crucial timings, in a style somewhat similar to Movie's. Under the probable influence of his teammate Kal, the original Red Shuttle, he can also mix it up with early zealot pressure followed by crazy reaver/dark templar/zealot drops. Shuttle has yet to measure himself against top tier Zergs, but it's only a matter a time before such an epic clash occurs, as current PvZ trends play to his strengths.

Shuttle's remaining weakness is his PvT, and that's another similarity with Movie. He can macro like a god but his multitasking often fails him, and dragoons eating spider mines is the predictable result. While he has mastered the timings of PvZ, he's still regularly caught with his pants down in PvT, and has long relied on greedy macro builds to try and compensate for his poor control. In the Round of 36 of the 2009 Bacchus OSL he met Flash once again. The first game, on Holy World, saw him open with a 12 nexus at his mineral only. After taking his natural he quickly double expanded and grabbed a third and fourth gas, while Flash busied himself with a strong push towards his natural, and, in a typical bout of stubbornness, refused to expand beyond his own natural and mineral only until it was far too late. Although he ate a copious amount of mines and lost most of his expansions, Shuttle was nonetheless able to starve Flash.

The Ultimate Weapon didn't let it happen again. In the second game on the original Outsider, while Shuttle went for an even greedier strategy, double expanding and quickly teching to arbiters after a failed reaver drop (that's a lot of resources tied down in fixed investments), Flash macroed up a devastating timing push that utterly crushed the thoroughly befuddled Protoss. Overall, Shuttle has a meager 1-6 record against Flash. He has a 48% win rate against Terrans, and that number includes wins versus scrubs in the earlier rounds of the GOMTV tournaments. His latest defeat at the hands of Flash took place during the Winners League -- once again, vultures were too much for him to handle, as a small detachment repeatedly sniped the probes sent to warp in his fourth expansion.

But YoonJoong isn't completely powerless. He isn't the clumsy macrobot of yesteryear. And he can get ahold of his nerves. The new and improved Best with brains displayed a brilliant clutchiness against a true macro-into-a-move bot, forGG, in the recent ace game of the KT Rolster vs STX SouL match. forGG opened with an aggressive 2 factory push coupled with a vulture drop in Shuttle's main. Shuttle deflected the vultures and blocked forGG's reinforcements by warping in two pylons under the Pretender's lifted barracks at his ramp wall-in, buying himself just enough time to build up enough forces to defend. He then expanded, macroed up a decent force and under the cover of his arbiters repeatedly poked at forGG's army without foolishly committing before the time was right. Once his forces were in place, he flanked the Terran position, stasised and attacked. forGG was broken and the remnants of his army were pushed back into his natural, where an improvised recall at the top of his ramp ended the game.



For once, Shuttle played a PvT where his decision-making was more remarkable than his macro, and he threw in a pimp play to boot. If he can continue improving in the matchup, bringing it on par with his sublime PvP and his solid PvZ, he'll become a force to be reckoned with, and a beacon of hope for the beleaguered armies of Aiur. Since Kal is still the Protoss of choice on the roster, and because STX has a plethora of average Terrans and Zergs, Shuttle may not see as much action as we would want, but rest assured that when he's sent out, even in ace games, he'll deliver solid play backed by smart decision-making and an occasional ballsy move. He'll probably never be as exciting as Bisu was in his heyday -- then again, which Protoss ever will? -- but there's now a method to his macro madness.

Q: There are comments comparing you to Best in style.
A: I have confidence in my overall gamesense and strategy, but I think Best is still much better than me. July-hyung had also told me that my macro is very good, but I personally don’t think I’m good at macroing, but rather I’m good at knowing when to macro. As a progamer, I need to strive to be the best, so I need to work hard to match and surpass Best.

      -- Shuttle, 2010 Hana Bank MSL Group H Interview

By IntoTheWow & snowdrift86

Week one is done and we have some surprises already! Even though the standings don't say much yet, as some teams have yet to get even in number of matches played, We are still putting them up for history purposes and so snowdrift can get some bragging rights.

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• Woojinx'd
  Two of the teams that seemed like good choices (T1 and Khan) because they were playing ACE got dismantled by the W Stars 3-0 with different lineups. Woongjin was a popular pick and it's already paying off quick. But their players? the lineups for them seem quite erratic and hard to guess. We will see next week.
  
  
• One man band
  The other popular pick, KT Rolster, with an initial cost of 6$ managed to score a whoppin' -1 points, going 1-3 (Flash win) and 2-3 (FireFist and Flash win). Ouch!
  As we feared, now that Flash can only play two games at most, the rest of the team is letting him down. In addition, choosing fOrGG for the ace game vs STX may be a good move to improve players, but KT coaches weren't thinking about FPL players!
  
  
• Hocus Bogus
  Shazam! Only owned by 36 people, STX's little Terran scored 8 points and got a Weekly Value upgrade of +1.42. Will he get more playtime from now on? or is this just another economic bubble, waiting for people to trade before busting?
  
  
• I Sea you! (I'm running out of puns help)
  Another good pick was TL's favourite bosung. With only one MBC match this week, but with a little help of an ace match pick, he managed to tie Bogus with 8 points. After a good winner's league round, he's still looking strong. As long as Light keeps performing, MBC can take it to the ace game and have Sea take it home for the team, even when the rest of the lineup fails.
  
  
• You've got the touch
  After a bounce back into the single leagues, Midas earns 7 points, costing only 2$. Along with Sea, he has the second highest Trade Value Change this week. We never doubted the Bear Terran.!
  
  
• You guys...
  fantasy, Bisu, Leta, EffOrt, Mind, Violet, BeSt, RorO, HoeJJa. Making an anti-team was never easier.
  Seems like match fixing has even reached Fantasy Pro League. Oh noes!

By heyoka

When discussing the differences between winner's league and the normal proleague format, we're often quick to judge that certain teams gain while others lose. The allkill format indeed should let players who are the most skilled add more to their team than normal, and we can see from charts like this or this that it does allow the very top players to contribute more to their team. What, then, about teams as a whole? Does STX really gain from having a lineup that is often considered "more deep" than other teams? KT is often said to be a one man team (and with Flash having nearly 50% of the team's total wins this seems like a reasonable claim) but they cruised through both formats in similar fashion. Overall then, does one format or another favor certain teams?



Here is what the overall win game win percentage is for each team, with both rounds 1 and 2 combined (individual games, not overall match win). Nothing shocking, most teams hover around 50% except for the worst and the best. Its amusing that SKT and WeMade have higher win percentages than some teams above them, but this is sorted by WL standings order so its not indicative of anything. Here is that same chart again, but this time for Winner's League.



KT's game win percentage went down over WL, potentially supporting the typical 1-man-team arguments. Oz, another team generally considered one dimensional, actually did better win WL than the earlier rounds however. This in part because Oz is more of a "two man team" lately (HiyA wins nearly as much as Jaedong), but is probably much more in part because the third round doesn't have the "one of each race" requirement. Oz's protosses in particular have only won a single game all season, and so each normal match they are almost automatically down one game. To look at it a bit easier here is that data sorted by which team gained/lost the most in terms of win percentage.



It looks like the format change doesn't have a huge overall impact on which teams can expect to do well and which can't. I'm tempted to say that at least some of the data fits with common notions, ACE is probably slighted helped by WL (they're bad but they have a team of 10 people of equal skill, they can field people all day with each one of them having a similar win expectancy). The problem is of course, we're looking at a small sample and all sorts of random coincidences can skew the true numbers a reasonable amount.

As mentioned before, I suspect that the "one of each race" rule is the bigger effect of the WL format. Woongjin, Oz, and hite are all teams with one particularly weak race (it has been discussed in past statisfactions and is also kept up to date in the R&S with pictures like this). As we move forward with a standard proleague format that takes away that rule, I'm excited to see if the trend continues and a team like hite does better when they aren't forced to send one of their fledgling terrans.

It is up to you to draw your own conclusions, but in the end I'm not particularly convinced that a shift in formats to Winner's League changes as much as we like to believe as fans. If anything, it looks like the race rules have a bigger effect than the winning-player-stays mechanic.