FBH vs Stork - GomTV2 MSL Semi#2

Today's match, the 2nd semifinal, will be one of the rather rare occurances of team mates having to play each other in the late stages of a major tournament.

Both players, Firebathero and Stork are part of Samsung KHAN, the team which - as you may know (check!) - has been leading the rankings of the Shinhan Bank Proleague Round 1 for the longest time. In fact, along with their constantly winning 2v2 teams, they have been the key players of Samsung this season. Just look at this: out of Samsung's 34-25 stats in 1v1 22-5 can be attributed to Firebathero and Stork.

And now those two have to face each other to battle out who is going to join Bisu in the finals, this could be very, very interesting.

Both players have obviously been on a roll. While FBH's Proleague games have almost exclusively been against Terran players (9-1 stats overall, 8-1 of them in TvT and one single TvZ game) he had the chance to prove himself against Zerg in the quarter finals of this MSL and he did so with bravery, eliminating the favourite Savior from the tournament with a 3-2 victory. A victory he followed by his controversial victory dance

Stork is obviously neither Terran nor Zerg though and FBH hasn't had much chance to show us what his TvP is made of, so he really does have a lot to prove, not only to the audience, but also to himself (and to Etter).

FBH isn't the only who has something to prove - so does Stork. Back in 2005 experts labeled him one of the three hopes of Protoss, alongside with Anytime and Pusan. However, out of those only Anytime only managed to actually win something big so far, he took down Boxer 3-2 in the finals of the So1 OSL 2005 and also placed 2nd behind Nada in the Shinhan 2 OSL 2006.

It doesn't mean that Stork did nothing, he won some impressive games back then. The ace match of Samsung vs GO in the playoffs of the 2005 Sky Proleague Round 2 season comes to mind as well as the famous, almost 1 hour long game against Gorush on Requiem! But afterwards he kind of dropped from the scenery, failing to make it to the major leagues.

But he's back and stronger than ever. Four players made it to the quarters of both Starleagues - Stork, Bisu, Hwasin and Savior. Hwasin lost in both. Savior lost in both. Bisu lost in one. And well, Stork won in both, making him the only player still in both leagues. If you take into account how well he has been doing in Proleague this is really an impressive feat. Did you know that he played five ace matches for Samsung this season and won them all? That's right.

His style isn't as flashy or impressive as Bisu's PvZ or Nal_rA special builds though, it's mostly smart, well timed straight-up play and he is incredibly successful with it.


Map order and predictions

Game 1 Stork vs FireBatHero @ Loki
Game 2 Stork vs FireBatHero @ Monty Hall
Game 3 Stork vs FireBatHero @ Desperado
Game 4 Stork vs FireBatHero @ Python
Game 5 Stork vs FireBatHero @ Loki

The map that is going to be played twice (if the series gets this far) is Loki. Only 6 PvT games have been played on it so far, with 5-1 stats in favour of Protoss. Given Stork's incredible form in PvT lately I do believe FBH will have a really hard time to come up with something effective against Stork on it, unless he is capable of designing good 1 time builds.

The same goes basically for Monty, while it hasn't shown any major imbalanced in favour of P in PvT the stats are still in favour of Protoss. FBH's hope for Monty Hall likes in a special build as well and we have seen quite of few of those on it.

Personally I think Desperado and Python are must wins for FBH and those are heavily dependent on starting positions, making possible outcomes hard to predict.

Overall the maps are somewhere between balanced and slightly favoured for Protoss, combined with Stork's incredible PvT and FBH's lack of TvP in official games this really should lead to Stork winning the series.