As some of you from the pre-Starcraft 2 days will remember, I am a big fan of looking at numbers. Unfortunately there isn't enough of that these days, and what is around is merely forum threads with incredibly lackluster presentation. With GSL running, now we have a real league to bring back that style of verbose stat-based prose.

With the finals coming soon, of course the most obvious statistic anyone wants to see is overall race matchup numbers. Here at TL we are dedicated to giving the people what they want. We even did one better and broke everything up by map, thanks to TLPD.



A few things are going on here. You can see that the tournament has been mostly PvT, followed by TvZ and ZvP (not shocking to anyone). You can tell that Zerg on the whole isn't doing great by ZvZ being a nearly non-existent matchup. However, its intriguing that TvZ has shaken down to even footing, ZvP shows the Zerg at a slight disadvantage.

I thought it would be interesting to take it a step further and look at how much a race is winning across both of its non-mirror matchups combined.



Now now, what do we have here? Looking at it this way, it seems like its not Zerg that is in trouble as a race, but Protoss. This probably isn't a fair representation of total racial strength though, Fruit Dealer has been tearing it up (11-1 going into the finals) despite all his overmind brethren being weeded out several stages earlier.

The natural question here is "What does it look like without Fruit Dealer?" Without him ZvT is 4-14 and ZvP is 9-15, a certainly noticeable difference. It seems unfair to exclude solely him if we're going to play that game though, as Rainbow (I'm refusing to aknowledge the existence of the ID HopeTorture) is doing just as well at 11-1. What about if we decide they're both outliers?



Interestingly, without those two Terran is somehow winning more. Intuitively, I feel like this is a lot more representative of the "true" winrates for each race across the tournament playing population, but one event really isn't enough to tell.

This certainly helps the "Terran too strong" bandwagon keep momentum, but overall its not significant enough to be evidence on its own. The PvT or TvZ numbers on their own look like a disaster, but I can't help but feel like while watching many of those games the Terrans playing were simply stronger players than their Zerg or Protoss opponents (this is particularly true with TvP). Even not including Rainbow or FruitD (FDealer? FD?) it could still be a case of Terran player quality simply being higher than Zergs or Protosses.

On the flip side, LiveForever making it as far as he did is perhaps evidence of a lesser player riding on the back of his race. We'll know better once Zergs start to emulate Fruit Dealer's style. It should make GSL Season 2 qualifiers very interesting in terms of race qualifying statistics.

Enjoy the finals!