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On December 22 2010 01:46 Elroi wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2010 00:19 TwoToneTerran wrote:On December 21 2010 15:36 Mortality wrote:
To be honest, I've always felt JD was better at adapting than Flash. With Flash, a number of his more noteworthy losses have been from players using his own timings against him. When he's pressed to the wall he relies too heavily on his superior fundamentals to keep him in the game. But that's not what I'd call "adaptation."
Not that either is "bad" at adaptation.
But if you want to talk about adaptation within a game the answer is Boxer. Full stop. There should be no debate on that. I'd also rank NaDa and Savior ahead of Flash and Jaedong. Not sure about Oov though. I honestly don't think you can look at the sheer number of mind boggling comebacks and say that anyone has ever been better than Flash at adapting within a game. Boxer and Nada were definitely the most adaptive to the game as a whole considering how long they remained relevant, but Flash is easily the best player ever at taking an uncomfortable situation and making all the right calls to fix it. It's basically the hallmark of his bonjwa reign to pull off those comebacks. You can't say that comeback=adaptability. In his comebacks Flash relies just as heavily on his superior mechanics as on his adaptability. Besides, it would be unfair because it is more or less impossible for a zerg to do a comeback, atleast in early game. Lose 10 scvs ? No problem just survive and turtle if you are better than your opponent. If you lose 10 drones early in the game it would be impossible even for a top zerg to beat an icup player. Then again, if that is the "hallmark of a bonjwa", it is not that strange that all bonjwas have been terran. So most of the time when JD doesn't adapt it is, I think, because he would be screwed if he didn't follow through the attack. On the other hand he sometimes looks too stubborn, like in the game vs Sea last season when he refused to build lings. This was not the case with the game against light though.
The way Flash comesback = adaptability. I mean unless you just haven't been paying attention for the last year. I'm absolutely sick of people bringing up turtling as why Flash comes back from hugely disadvantageous positions. He does absolutely everything you can imagine to comeback in his games: harass, defend, push, drop, double expand, completely changing his build and unit composition on the spur of the moment, anything you can think of Flash has done sometime this year. I can't believe people are arguing this otherwise and doing so with the absolutely inane "well he turtles alot" argument.
It's a weird world where the most aggressive player this side of Kwanro gets labeled with turtle.
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On December 22 2010 00:19 TwoToneTerran wrote:Show nested quote +On December 21 2010 15:36 Mortality wrote:
To be honest, I've always felt JD was better at adapting than Flash. With Flash, a number of his more noteworthy losses have been from players using his own timings against him. When he's pressed to the wall he relies too heavily on his superior fundamentals to keep him in the game. But that's not what I'd call "adaptation."
Not that either is "bad" at adaptation.
But if you want to talk about adaptation within a game the answer is Boxer. Full stop. There should be no debate on that. I'd also rank NaDa and Savior ahead of Flash and Jaedong. Not sure about Oov though. I honestly don't think you can look at the sheer number of mind boggling comebacks and say that anyone has ever been better than Flash at adapting within a game. Boxer and Nada were definitely the most adaptive to the game as a whole considering how long they remained relevant, but Flash is easily the best player ever at taking an uncomfortable situation and making all the right calls to fix it. It's basically the hallmark of his bonjwa reign to pull off those comebacks.
Firstly, you are confusing what it means to stage a comeback with what it means to be adaptable. As I said, Flash relies heavily on his skill at fundamentals to keep him in the game. How many times have I seen 2-3 well placed tanks and superior multitasking allow Flash to break an attack and then suddenly he's actually ahead in supply, knows it, and throws down a quick third to secure the advantage?
That's not adaptability. That's just winning on skill.
Secondly, you have admitted yourself in prior discussions to not following progaming back when Boxer was top dog. Boxer had this nasty little habit of turning around a game not by relying just on his superior micro (which he did do sometimes), but by completely changing strategies and pulling off plays nobody had even thought of before.
And by the way... comeback victories are pretty much a hallmark of any bonjwa, although maybe Oov least of all the bonjwas.
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oov didn't need combacks! :D
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On December 22 2010 02:19 TwoToneTerran wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2010 01:46 Elroi wrote:On December 22 2010 00:19 TwoToneTerran wrote:On December 21 2010 15:36 Mortality wrote:
To be honest, I've always felt JD was better at adapting than Flash. With Flash, a number of his more noteworthy losses have been from players using his own timings against him. When he's pressed to the wall he relies too heavily on his superior fundamentals to keep him in the game. But that's not what I'd call "adaptation."
Not that either is "bad" at adaptation.
But if you want to talk about adaptation within a game the answer is Boxer. Full stop. There should be no debate on that. I'd also rank NaDa and Savior ahead of Flash and Jaedong. Not sure about Oov though. I honestly don't think you can look at the sheer number of mind boggling comebacks and say that anyone has ever been better than Flash at adapting within a game. Boxer and Nada were definitely the most adaptive to the game as a whole considering how long they remained relevant, but Flash is easily the best player ever at taking an uncomfortable situation and making all the right calls to fix it. It's basically the hallmark of his bonjwa reign to pull off those comebacks. You can't say that comeback=adaptability. In his comebacks Flash relies just as heavily on his superior mechanics as on his adaptability. Besides, it would be unfair because it is more or less impossible for a zerg to do a comeback, atleast in early game. Lose 10 scvs ? No problem just survive and turtle if you are better than your opponent. If you lose 10 drones early in the game it would be impossible even for a top zerg to beat an icup player. Then again, if that is the "hallmark of a bonjwa", it is not that strange that all bonjwas have been terran. So most of the time when JD doesn't adapt it is, I think, because he would be screwed if he didn't follow through the attack. On the other hand he sometimes looks too stubborn, like in the game vs Sea last season when he refused to build lings. This was not the case with the game against light though. The way Flash comesback = adaptability. I mean unless you just haven't been paying attention for the last year. I'm absolutely sick of people bringing up turtling as why Flash comes back from hugely disadvantageous positions. He does absolutely everything you can imagine to comeback in his games: harass, defend, push, drop, double expand, completely changing his build and unit composition on the spur of the moment, anything you can think of Flash has done sometime this year.
It's damn hard to take a massive econ and army disadvantage, and turn it into a victory against a person who plays the game for a living. And Flash is to be applauded for doing so many times.
But his 'insane comebacks' would be impossible in PvT, PvP, or ZvZ, because his opponent would roll up to his base and kill him. Not even Flash can harass, push, drop, double expand, completely change his build on the fly and swap unit compositions in the 30 seconds it takes to get 1a2a3a'd when your army is 50+ food behind and you're not playing Terran. (Or Defiler ZvT.)
Flash has vastly more space to stage sick comebacks than Bisu/Stork/Jaedong because his is the race against which "GO FUCKING KILL HIM" is least viable.
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On December 22 2010 02:24 Mortality wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2010 00:19 TwoToneTerran wrote:On December 21 2010 15:36 Mortality wrote:
To be honest, I've always felt JD was better at adapting than Flash. With Flash, a number of his more noteworthy losses have been from players using his own timings against him. When he's pressed to the wall he relies too heavily on his superior fundamentals to keep him in the game. But that's not what I'd call "adaptation."
Not that either is "bad" at adaptation.
But if you want to talk about adaptation within a game the answer is Boxer. Full stop. There should be no debate on that. I'd also rank NaDa and Savior ahead of Flash and Jaedong. Not sure about Oov though. I honestly don't think you can look at the sheer number of mind boggling comebacks and say that anyone has ever been better than Flash at adapting within a game. Boxer and Nada were definitely the most adaptive to the game as a whole considering how long they remained relevant, but Flash is easily the best player ever at taking an uncomfortable situation and making all the right calls to fix it. It's basically the hallmark of his bonjwa reign to pull off those comebacks. Firstly, you are confusing what it means to stage a comeback with what it means to be adaptable. As I said, Flash relies heavily on his skill at fundamentals to keep him in the game. How many times have I seen 2-3 well placed tanks and superior multitasking allow Flash to break an attack and then suddenly he's actually ahead in supply, knows it, and throws down a quick third to secure the advantage? That's not adaptability. That's just winning on skill. Secondly, you have admitted yourself in prior discussions to not following progaming back when Boxer was top dog. Boxer had this nasty little habit of turning around a game not by relying just on his superior micro (which he did do sometimes), but by completely changing strategies and pulling off plays nobody had even thought of before. And by the way... comeback victories are pretty much a hallmark of any bonjwa, although maybe Oov least of all the bonjwas.
I didn't follow progaming back then but every amazing game by boxer has been linked on this forum ad infinitum (or atleast it was before SC2 popped up). Point is, Flash has done exactly what you said several times, most notably in TvZs (vs Calm on Fighting Spirit and Kwanro on Roadrunner as my two biggest examples), but there's no end to his TvT victories that make no sense. I'd say his TvP is rather tacit in comparison, but there's still examples of those, too (Flash vs Movie on HBR, that one game I'm forgetting where, right as carriers come out to break his army, he kills 3 of the Toss's bases within 2 minutes). I'm sure there's plenty I'm missing since I don't have a perfect memory, but Flash has done crazy shit no one had seen before in every matchup to win in hopeless situations where he had been previously outmaneuvered. If that isn't adaptability then I don't know what is.
Maybe Boxer was comparable, the game was really new back then and doing something no one had ever thought of was a regular occurrence for him, but adaptive within a game means something different than that -- the stuff boxer did was innovative but very, very planned. Adapting to a situation is the exact opposite of that.
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Flash vs Calm was an amazing game, but I'm hesitant to call it "adaptation" when it's Flash's standard lategame scenario when he has good mid-map control but the Zerg has 4-5 gas and he's unable to break the Zerg's positioning. I don't remember or didn't see Flash vs Kwanro so I'll check it out later.
His TvT victories actually make much more sense than you think. The massive replay leak that happened a while ago (a year? longer?) featured a ton of Flash TvT's in which Flash would often get behind in very similar situations to what we've seen on TV. Pause game, click on Flash's stuff, click on opponent's stuff. The opponent never holds more than about a 10 supply advantage ever. Flash will often look like he's in a totally inferior position because he has so few units, but he has more coming out and they're always magically ready before his opponent can reinforce. He breaks the attack. Suddenly he's even or ahead in supply and starts another expansion and/or moves on the offensive. It's like clockwork. It's a masterful display of skill and I don't doubt that Flash is the greatest TvT player ever (only NaDa during a "brief" ~18 month period looked anything like that, nobody else ever came close, and Flash has been doing it for longer now... granted, the game is changing more slowly now than back then, but still...), but it's not so much "adaptation" as just raw skill. No matter how pressed he is, Flash just doesn't make those positioning errors everyone else makes.
Although to be honest, I don't think TvT is the best place to talk about adaptation because it's too easy to confuse "adapting" in the sense of playing a better game of chess without really doing anything "new" and "adapting" in the sense I am interested in... which is...
Adaptation, from my point of view, means -- in a general context -- evolving in order to deal with a new and unexpected threat. The core of what it means to adapt within a game means addressing a new problem by changing your thinking about how to deal with your opponent over the course of a game. There's a lot of gray area in terms of what constitutes this, but what I'm really looking for more than anything is throwing the playbook out the window and improvising a new strategy (not just a tweak on an old timing, as we see Flash so often do, but an actual whole "new" strategy, at least "new" in the sense that nobody has used it before in that kind of situation or alternatively thought it possible to use in such a way when everything was at stake). This can mean playing defense when conventional wisdom of your prior strategy was offense, or offense when wisdom suggested defense, or making a particular choice in where or how you attack that is new and different to deal with something new, or suddenly using an unexpected unit combination as an unrehearsed response (the term unrehearsed is crucial, yet this is a sticking point since we can't actually read the minds of the players), or it can mean, yes, a "pimp play," for instance Nal_Ra's mass hallucination would count because the strategy had been used before but until then never performed at that level, always staying at the theorycrafting or newb bashing on US East level.
By definition, any prepackaged plan for dealing with a similar threat fails to qualify when we talk about adaptation within a single game. For instance, Flash really likes that early/midgame press attack in TvP and TvT and he can adjust that timing as needed to what he sees. NaDa actually had a tendency to do something similar and Midas also pioneered in that direction. It's a great feat of skill but... It's a prepackaged deal and tweaking that timing isn't what I'm referring to unless the press is altered in a way it wasn't meant to be altered. It's a form of "adaptation" in a different sense of the word, but if that's what you are referring to, then you're just saying Flash has the best timing sense of anyone ever. Well... duh! I would expect him to have better timing sense than players from previous generations who were not benefiting from modern knowledge and especially better than players from the early years when timing wasn't even a buzzword yet!
But I don't think that's what this conversation is all about and it's certainly not what I'm about.
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You know, I stopped reading the comments here a long time ago because the only thing it contains is Flash fanboy vs Jaedong fanboy vs anti-fans or either or both player.
It seems like time hasn't changed a thing. Doesn't it ever get boring folks?
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Hmm, I just noticed: Flash didn't win a single game in the MSL.
I think he meant to say that no player that he can beat in the MSL exists.
+ Show Spoiler +
Also, Shine vs Stork may be pretty important for ELO this time around.
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FREEAGLELAND26781 Posts
Potentially a rank changer, yes. Definitely going to be the game to watch for tonight.
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JD is now in a very good spot to overtake Nada this season.
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Hyuk, you are awesome.
Now I just hope afrotoss is willing to take one loss for the team.
+ Show Spoiler +
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LOL, Flash: Number 1 PR NOT coming to a theater near you!
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This certainly got more interesting.
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Now we get Flash-JD(17 points off) then Bisu, Stork(6 points off), Shine(2 points off), then Fantasy(5 points off).
Things just got interesting. Flash dropped maybe 19 points from that Hyukking.
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FREEAGLELAND26781 Posts
My life is going to be hell next month writing this.
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What's up with Fantasy, he was on a 12 wins streak and now he keeps loosing :-(. You make your fans sad. Although I guess for a non-fan seeing the top players doing so bad makes things more interesting.
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On December 22 2010 23:23 flamewheel wrote:
My life is going to be hell next month writing this.
There's still the off-chance that Paralyze does the impossible and Flash tears up OSL + PL. You should have a much easier time writing your PR then.
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On December 22 2010 23:23 flamewheel wrote:
My life is going to be hell next month writing this.
Yea, I guess you're on for some severe headache. I feel for you. Whatever PR you will write will be controversial. Maybe we will have 1000+ replies like last summer. But at least it makes things a lot more interesting isn't it?
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On December 22 2010 23:23 flamewheel wrote:
My life is going to be hell next month writing this.
1. Bisu
2. Jaedong
3. Shine
4. Stork
5. Fantasy
6. Flash
7. Hyuk
8. Ssak
9. Classic
10. Kal
ezpz
But seriously, I don't think you can give Flash the 'benefit of the doubt' anymore. Losing 1 SL can be a fluke, losing 2 means there's something wrong.
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On December 23 2010 00:55 Mooncat wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2010 23:23 flamewheel wrote:
My life is going to be hell next month writing this. There's still the off-chance that Paralyze does the impossible and Flash tears up OSL + PL. You should have a much easier time writing your PR then.
No even if paralyze beats Kal and flash is in he should not be #1 next month.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/678/4hat.gif)
