Match B - Savior 3 - 1 Free Game 1 - Savior > Free on Python Game 2 - Savior > Free on Blue Storm Game 3 - Savior < Free on Loki II Game 4 - Savior > Free on Zodiac
Thursday’s match was quite an intriguing match to watch. I found it difficult to easily pick out a winner. Less than a year ago I would have easily voted Savior without giving it a second thought, but his performance over the last few months was less than impressive. But his recent triumph over Stork only last week showed that savior still had his senses in tact. Perhaps not as stable as once before, but it’s definitely there. Free one the other hand, is a rising protoss who seems highly confident of his PvZ skills, despite results.
Game 1 - Savior vs. Free on Python
This game showed insane timing sense on Savior’s part. Free decides to play a little different on this map, opening with a 1 gate corsair build. Savior responds with a 2 hatch hydralisk rush build, opting to pressure Free while protecting his own overlords. Free decides on a 3 gate speed zealot counter, nearly catching Savior off guard. But Savior’s calculations were perfect as he morphed lurkers in time, even having the leisure of morphing a hydralisk away from the battle, and sneaking it into Free’s base unharmed.
Savior easily dismantles any form of detection with his hydralisks as his lurkers forces Free’s units back. Savior’s answer to free’s 1 gate build was indeed, perfectly played.
Game 2 - Savior vs. Free on Blue Storm
Blue Storm is said to be toss favored. Perhaps this is why Savior decided on an all-in build. The minute Free’s scouting probe is surrounded and scrapped, all of savior’s larva’s, which were crawling aimlessly, immediately morphs at once. Seconds later zerglings race down the map, positioning themselves away from free’s vision as a small group prevents any additional scouting. With only 2 photon cannons and a couple of zealots for defense, Free’s natural turned into a wasteland.
Here’s a lesson Free would like to give to all Protoss gamers: Never stop scouting.
Game 3 - Savior vs. Free on Loki II
The map is Loki II. Both players open with a regular expo and double expo build. Savior makes the first move as mutalisks take flight, to which Free answers with corsairs and cannons. The balance of the game seems to teeter back and forth as both introduce different units with each passing second, until Free unleashes himself. With reavers, templars, zealots, goons, sairs as his mixed force, Free takes the offensive. Savior decides to try another route and attack Free’s base, but fails to do any critical damage while Free delivers a critical blow to Savior’s expansion.
Drops and cracklings fly around the map, Savior desperately trying to level the field again, but Free finally proves why he remains confident in his skill, and receives each blow with a powerful blow of his own. Savior’s forces slowly wither away, and as Free adds Arbiters into his unit mix, Savior admits defeat.
Game 4 - Savior vs. Free on Zodiac
Encouraged from the triumph of his last battle, Free opens with a forge build, while Savior answers with a double expo. But this time Savior has a different plan. Taking 2 more additions expansions, Savior stretches his creep to the far corners of the map, while teching to spire once again. Free answers with corsairs like the previous game, but is unaware of Savior’s greedy fingers taking expansions left and right.
Instead of switching techs, savior sticks with one unit, the mutalisk. With 4 gases, Savior’s mutalisks number reach a critical mass quickly, forcing free to gather archons and corsairs. When Free moves out, he’s certain his archons and corsairs are more than enough for the mutalisks, but what he does not expect is the city of sunken colonies waiting for him at each expansion. Using sunkens to aim at archons while the mutalisks sweep away the zealots, Savior denies Free’s attacks again and again, while using the massing mutalisk forces to destroy Free’s bases one by one, avoiding the floor-bound archons, leaving a trail of destruction in his path.
In the end, Free’s failure to prevent Savior’s expansions or do any real damage while sustaining all sorts of damage to mutalisks cost Free the game, set, and the ticket to MSL’s top 4.
Overall Analysis: I’m happy that Savior won. After his embarrassing loss at WCG 2007, he really needed something to prove that he’s still a man with frightening ZvP. On the other hand, the series against Stork and Free has proven one thing: Savior is still having trouble against the Bisu build.
Taking a closer look at his games vs. Stork, notice that Game 1 had Stork in the lead by a large margin, until a lucky scourge hunted down a shuttle containing 2 reavers. With no splash defense, Savior plays his final card, the hydra wave, and barely steals the game. Game 3 consists of dual gate rush answered by a 1 hatch muta build. Game 2, however, taken by Stork, shows an excellent performace of reaver/sair to reaver/sair/zeal and later templars, which Savior falls to.
His games against Free follow a similar pattern. Game 1 was a 1 gate build vs. 2 hatch hydra. Game 2 was a 3 hatch zergling rush. Game 3 was a regular macro vs. macro game, which Savior lost, and Game 4 was a mass muta build. Notice a trend?
On a positive note, Savior never plays the same card twice. All 4 games today had a different theme. Hydra timing rush, zerglings timing rush, macro intense style, and muta heavy style. Showing multiple different forms of play forces his opponents to rethink things when preparing for a match against Savior. The downside is that now players will not allow themselves to be caught off guard.
As for Free, I am somewhat disappointed. Game 1 I will give props to Savior for playing flawlessly. Game 2 however, I believe was Free's fault for not even attempting to scout a second time. It is cruicial for the Protoss to see the zerg's larva, and what it morphs into. Of course one could argue savior's speedlings would have prevented scouting anyways, but you never know. He coudl have atleast tried. Game 3 showed perfection, while Game 4 showed a sloppy reaction to an unorthodox strategy. Perhaps bit more heavy use of corsair/dt would have helped Free kill the expansions while defending with archons. It seems to me that Free was just not playing up to his capabilities.
I don't know if free would have won the second game even with scouting. If you look at the mini map, savior just randomly spread his lings so that Free wouldn't see a cluster of say, 20 lings, he would just see bits and pieces of his army (maybe see 4 lings at a time) and I think the only way Free woulda scouted it would be to send 3 probes at once and noticed that each one of them runs into 4 lings.
That game was really a dice roll for both players. Free could have either assumed all-in ling (After seeing gas) or assumed 3 hatch after gas (I think he scouted that mineral expo). He guessed the wrong way and lost
And that 4th game was just total domination. I just simply could not believe it was Free playing that game, Savior just makes P players look stupid. It's amazing how thoroughly Savior destroys any Protoss not named Bisu (Free, nal_rA, Stork, I think that's a pretty good list of P's who he just keeps winning against)
Looks like he's underwater, maybe that's how CJ gets their players so good? Shove them underwater if they lose, maybe Savior's PTSD is kicking in after losing game 3.
In fact, ZvP on Zodiac worries me greatly. If zerg maintains perfect timing, he is close to invulnerable to any early game aggression by toss, at the same time taking expansions wildly. The key point is that all the expansions save for the natural are ramped and quite close to the main, thus zealot harassment is very limited. Both corsair/reaver and corsair/DT display their primary weakness here: you can't be everywhere with sair/anything, whereas a zerg that starts with early hatching everywhere will have token overlord/hydra by the time sairs come at every expo. Again, zerg is able to do so due to the proximity of his expos, mutalisk mobility and ramped expansions, therefore being more safe vs any kind of speedzeal timing attack than on any other map. Savior's build played out perfectly - he stopped sair/DT by hatching an overlord at his expo right before the DT came and he traded his bottom expo for time - he was still left with 4 bases, but the point is that toss forces are relatively slow-moving and slow-killing - you can afford to lose one hatch to buy yourself time to fortify your other bases and still stay ahead economically. Timings seem abit broken on Zodiac, but don't forget it was perfect execution (I mean absolutely perfect, every zerg should learn from that game) and Free might have been abit careless.
I hope Bisu will prove me wrong and find the answer to Zodiac PvZ in the finals. There's been 3 PvZ at Zodiac at this point and the only one where P thiumphed was was Yarnc playing 3 hatch hydra vs Free that is absolutely not suited for this map.
Btw, time and time again I see how PvZ is being decided by the way you handle your first corsair - if you kill 1-2 overlords, you're at a great advantage in timings, if you lose it, a skilled zerg has his victory already in his hands.
On October 27 2007 15:39 strongwind wrote: looks like Free's biggest enemy was himself that day. He really needs to have more confidence in himself. If he only knew how much potential he has...
Yes, of course you are more aware of Free's potential than himself. That makes complete sense.
On October 27 2007 21:36 alffla wrote: nice write up... yeah i dont get why savior being the zerg genius he is can still fall to bisu build
maybe a well executre bisu build is just imba in pvz lol. lame!
I'll explain it to you breifly. You really should read Bluzman's excellent write-up on neo gen PvZ. His write up basically will say the same thing as me but much much better and more in depth. The reason zerg used to be considered so strong against p not too long before Bisu came along is because zerg used to essentially have map hack. Using early game overlords well and later a blanket of speed lords all over the map, watching every expansion and all troop movement. In those days people had little fear for their overlords. With speed upgrade you could have your ovies right in the path of enemy units and you would only lose a few per game. Bisu's sair usage changed all this. All of the sudden the zerg map hack was removed. Against a skilled sair using protoss all overlords not protected will be shot down. Zerg could no longer respond perfectly to their protoss opponents. Could no longer see the exact troop composition/expansion timing/troop movement paths and many other details that once gave zerg such an advantage. While protoss, with its superior air power is consistly scouting throughout the entire game. For the first time zerg is the one forced to "guess". While the protoss can react perfectly to the zerg build.
So why does savior lose sometimes to the Bisu build even when he knows its comming? Because even though he knows the general build, he is forced to guess at the details. And at the pro level any time you do this, it's dangerous.
I really liked savior's strat of drone blocking his ramp throughout the series. It basically forced free to go cannon first and slowed down his expo, and allows savior to either go agressive or macro, with no ability of free to scout (slower zealot due to the expo).
Combine this with his tendency to go pool > pool finishes > 3 larvae > 3 eggs > 3 drones (OMGWTF??!).
And savior has the ability to deny protoss scouting to either go for super aggressive early game builds or super macro heavy builds, with basically a free hand until the protoss gets his first corsair.
On October 27 2007 15:39 strongwind wrote: looks like Free's biggest enemy was himself that day. He really needs to have more confidence in himself. If he only knew how much potential he has...
Yes, of course you are more aware of Free's potential than himself. That makes complete sense.
And who are you to say that he understands how good he is? A lot of games he shows such great flair, and others he looks as if he's doubting himself. I don't think I said anything that far-fetched.
But I'm glad you can hide behind your sarcasm without any real argument.
dissapointed that free didnt win interesting to see savior do all this different stuff now i remember watching every savior ZvT(i know its a diff mu) and it was always the same build and timing -_- makes it more fun to watch him now hes doing all this diff stuff :D
You know its nice that we can watch the games live easily, but this is what always made TL TL, the reports from the perspective of the writer with analysis, and I almost stopped visiting TL after they were not here anymore , high five!
Think Free realy didn't play well at all. All props to Savior who were excellent, but Free made alot of mistakes and didn't realy show anything. Think he even was a bit lucky winning game 3, with the misstakes he made.
Looks like the final will most probably be between savior and bisu now. I don't think bisu will be able to win 3-0 this time it should be a lot closer.
aren't we being a little too hard on savior? i think he played excellent esp in game4, even though a better player like bisu might be able stop savior from taking all those expansions, savior showed that he's evolved alot from that old 3 hatch straight into spire build.
plus i think bisu's cannon expo corsair tech is highly vulnerable if the zerg player is alittle more aggressive with lings in the beginning like kwanro vs bisu. (except that kwanro showed his inexperience and couldn't finish bisu off).
I believe if we get to a savior bisu final, bisu will have his hands full
In the first game part 2 vid savior sets rally and a drone comes half way to Free's base. Are they (crowd) laughing at this or what the announcer is saying a joke about it? If so what is the joke?
I don't know why Free gave up so fast in the first game, he was at a disadvantage gut I didn't think it was over yet.
second game lol, wtf was that? First of all why did he make pylon/forge then nexus and not a canon. waste of time.
Game 3, lots of early mistakes from savior and lack of scouting. Later on Free's smashing all over the map making zerglings bleed everywhere. Savior must've lost like 100 lings from Free just randomly moving around on the map alone. Also a lot of bad luck/timing with his drops being at the same time Free's is crushing his bases. Arbiter albeit unnecessary seals the deal.
Game 4, hmm the pylon on the nat with the drones glitching through the minerals to fight the probe. I wonder if it would have been better to let the pylon finish and waste the time of the drones from mining. Free wasting units in small groups vs the mutas throughout the game He should have kepy on with the zealots stopping 6 over and over before defenses were up for it meanwhile using all gas on sairs,cons, and templar/storm. Where the fuck were the storms???? a couple HT's at every base instead of an archon are 2 are much more of a threatening fight from the mutalisk standpoint.
Lol set4 4/4 2:24 Free's face/reaction are priceless to those guardians.
EPT
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