On maps where your natural is difficult to take, Terran players have generally opted to play 2fac builds. Leta decided that this was a nice trend to continue and open 2fac. Leta used his units to full advantage and take his natural fairly quickly and then follow that up with a nice macro game. BestGod played alright, but I’m really getting sick of this Shuttle-DT play. Eventually Leta pushed out with a decent sized army and just ran all over BestGod; a dominating performance from one of the best Terrans around.

This wasn’t Leta vs Bestgod, this was Leta vs Medusa. Medusa is incredibly Protoss favoured; check the stats if you don’t believe me. Leta opened with a dropship build and BestGod with DT drop again. Both players played a really unorthodox drop game from here trying to jostle for the advantage. In the end the advantage settled with BestGod and Leta was forced to play economic-catch up. BestGod just rode the imbalance advantage from here on by teching up and getting arbs and proceeded to macro/recall Leta into oblivion.

This game was justice for the loss on Medusa. Leta simply opened 2fac against BestGod’s lame DT-Drop play and completely destroyed him. Leta set up camp just outside BestGod’s natural and slowly pushed in and won with little difficulty – a tribute to how much better Leta really was in this series, and how many times the imbalance on Medusa amplified BestGod’s ability.

This was a high level TvT, and the map made it that much more interesting. Leta opened up 2fac while Sea opened fac/port but the game progressed well into the midgame and had some really nice TvT action. In the end, Leta was able to claw his way to an advantage which he rode to victory over Sea

This game showed the difference between Sea and Leta right now. Leta was always able to gain position over Sea and on Medusa, having the best position is imperative. In addition to that, he played a near perfect game whereas Sea made a number of mistakes including sloppy unit control/decisions which lost a lot of ground. In the end, Leta left Sea thoroughly outclassed and won the series 2-0.

Leta advances to the OSL Round 2!
Leta 2-1 BestGod
Leta 2-0 Sea

Very impressive game from Miracle, seeing as he is still only a fresh face on the scene. Nevertheless there were some glaring mistakes in his play. Notably his decision to take his third very very late, and then taking the central expansion instead of one of the expansions around the edge with gas. Miracle’s unit ratio was also way off, and that cost him the first major battle in the game. Miracle had made far too many tanks, and didn’t have enough vultures to defend from Zealots – and Kal had reacted to this by creating a lot of Zealots which allowed him to bust the push relatively easily. Miracle applied some really strong pressure against Kal, and Kal looked a little stretched to defend at times, but Kal came through and demonstrated that he is worthy of being one of the Dragons and claimed victory.

Rape, pure rape. Kal exploited Miracles inexperience and played a nice pressure build which forced a number of micro errors on Miracles part. Once Kal had killed off most of the marines in Miracle’s army there was nothing Miracle could do to prevent the game from slipping out of control. Way to easy for Kal.

Let’s face it, Thezerg hasn’t looked very impressive since he’s moved to SKT. With Kal on fire, and a renowned PvZ master, this was always going to be difficult for Thezerg to win. Despite all of Kal’s experience in this matchup, he opted against the standard openings like FE, 2gate or 1gate Sair/DT and instead opened with a fake stargate into 3 Gate citadel. This ancient PvZ hasn’t been used in years and is really devastating when the Zerg isn’t prepared for it. Thezerg was nowhere near ready for 3 Gate, and was appropriately steamrolled. With that said, the fact that Kal chose to play an unorthodox build tells me that he has big problems with PvZ on this map; my guess is that Zerg are going to be strong here vs Protoss after all.

This was a fairly good encounter between the two; and showcased pretty good anti-sair/reaver play from Thezerg (which included building a Queen; +1 bonus point for that). Ultimately, it was Thezerg’s decision to expand to 7 as his third base which ended up costing him the game. The base is harder to defend because the Zerg needs to have map control to defend it properly; and that’s really difficult against a midgame Protoss. Once Kal was able to isolate the expansion and get off some really serious damage there Thezerg just fell apart. The fact that Kal killed about 8 Overlords in one raid right at the end of the game was just icing on the cake. Kal advances 4-0; an impressive night of BW from Kal.

Kal advances to the OSL Round 2
Kal 2-0 Miracle
Kal 2-0 Thezerg