Team Liquid Greatest of All Time Contest - Page 61

On June 16 2019 09:57 Nakajin wrote:
Alright now that we are done with the placement matches time to get back to the main event!

Match 1 TaeJa vs Solar


TaeJa highlight : TaeJa vs Zest IEM Toronto group stage match. Game 3
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One of the best move of TaeJa, a great read on what Zest was doing and a rather good try at defend it (a zealot immortal rush very well executed by Zest) followed by an amazing basetrade scenario where in the spand of maybe 30 second TaeJa goes from a un-winable situation to putting Zest in check mate. He seemed to have known exactly what he needed to do to win it (ignore a probe transfer caught mid-map to focus the production, give the main to lure Zest away from the ramp and sneak everything away, harass the new base from TaeJa


Solar highlight: Solar vs PartinG Dreamhack LOTV championship. Game 5
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A fairly enjoyable game leading Solar to his first LOTV championship, an expension that seemed perfectly tailor to his set of skills as he keep up his good result at the end of Hots to dominate early LoTV.

I will not lie it is not exaclty the best game ever, but as someone who passed nearly 2 hours trying to win a meaninfull game of Solar that was not him either him doing an all-in or getting all-in, or just dominating the game from A to Z not a lot of them exist.
Solar vs sOs game 5 at DH Stockolm 2015 is also a strong contender for his highlight.




Match 2 INnoVation vs Classic

INnoVation highlight: INnoVation vs ByuL 2014 GSL season 3 final. The entire series
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Now the next two do not really work without at least a little write up
Throught all of 2015 INno was destroying every zerg but never managed to win vs BuyL amazing macro mechanics, including an almost 3 hours series of pure macro mech game in the SSL round of 8. In his final INnovation really pulled all of the move and mind game openning up with six very different builds and while still losing two out of the three macro game he won the final easilly.

It was amazing to see that INnovation recognizing that he had in front of him someone who was as good if not better than him at the standar macro game despite a favorable meta and exploiting his predictability to the fullest, him catching ByuL trying to rush into the standard game with bio fake out or hellbats all-in showed a great adaptability.

Classic highlight: Classic vs Polt Blizzcon 2014 round of 16. Game 5
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Like INno this one is more for his significiance than the quality of the game (altought it is a great game), when Classic faced Polt at Blizzcon he seemed like the biggest GSL champ bust we had seen since Seed. A quick (and humiliating) elimination in GSL, failling his team in the round and then the Grand Final of Proleague and finally an elimination by the hand of Jaedong in the round of 16 of a Dreamhack that also saw him losing to soO made his GSL run (where 4 of his last 5 matches were played against fellow SKT player) look like an anomaly.
Polt could have been the final nail in Classic career as he came back from 0-2 to tie it up and had a good final map to take it.
The match itself is a great showing of Classic ability to play multiple styles, going for a kind of macro chargelot-storm build with pheonix defense that turn out to be the right call to keep up with Polt agression as he ended it falling back to colossus to counter the ghost Polt made in response to his initial composition. His eventual semi-final at Blizzcon reassure us that he was not a one trick phoney while it would take until his dual IEM and SSL victory to really assert himself as a legit elite player in the eyes of many.
It was also a great showing of Classic determination and capacity to win series from behind (something we saw notably when he reverse sweep sOs and Dark)



Polls are open until Wednesday June 19 arround 8pm EST

On June 16 2019 10:29 Morbidius wrote:
That Taeja game vs Zest shows perfectly why he was so good.
He made like 10 perfect strategical choices in a ro2.Once he went for the base trade, every move them on was perfect: He sent half pf his production to the top left and the other half to the bottom right, both bases with a ramp for easy defense and left Zest the exploitable bases, if Zest went to kill one of his bases Taeja would kill Zest's probes and macro up on the other side of the map. Zesr realized that and tried to defend on his base, maybe trying a run by or two. But Taeja exploited the position of his old main to not let Zest mine from his old natural. Zest ended up pinned and Taeja's superior economy allowing him to roll him. My favorite Taeja game. Its not a 40 minute macro affair but shows so many of his strenghts, i think OP made the perfect choice.

I'll write about and post VODs of my favorite Inno games later. That series vs Byun was very well played, but it was a very boring meta.

On June 16 2019 07:30 Wombat_NI wrote:

I think the point of Serral’s approach this game was to give himself breathing space and neuter battlemech’s strength in the midgame by forcing them to continually have to defend

I think an attempt to transition to tanks, or hellbat/Thor Serral is happy enough with. Instead of being aggressive to force a tempo based style backwards, he can just stop trading as aggressively and transition to other comps vs whatever the Terran is swapping to off battlemech. He doesn’t have to force an aggressive style to be defensive, he’s dealing with more passive compositions by default and can react accordingly.

Especially given Terran’s difficulty in changing gameplans drastically.

It’s definitely an interesting approach to that particular problem from Serral, I haven’t seen much play of this kind and I assume most pros haven’t either, so I imagine there are definitely better ways to approach it than Clem did, but it looks pretty strong in the hands of someone as mechanically good as Serral.

On June 16 2019 13:20 Morbidius wrote:
I think this is Inno at the best he's ever been in my opinion, even if the Zerg response to MMMM wasn't optimized back then. He stomped THE group of death like he stomps Armani and Losira in the RO32 nowadays.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4Nwm2htTS0

Here we see Innovation putting on a clinic on offensive bio play on daybreak. Perfect micro, perfect micro, dropships always flying perfectly, finding tiny holes in the Zerg's defense. Life opened well and entered the mid game ahead of Innovation, but the machine's macro and micro completely overwhelm even the best Zerg of all time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JES37p9yWWY

This one is a bit more funky, Life plays far more agressive and goes for more desperate counter attacks, we can see Inno macroing perfectly, while controlling his attack, and defending massive counters. And the best hellion micro you'll ever see. I think Tastosis usually build up a lot of false hype and narratives but i think they were completely awed by Innovation here.
Not fancy games with crazy endings but probably some of the finest Terran you'll ever see.

On June 16 2019 13:42 pvsnp wrote:


I think a better example of 2013 Inno would be his match against Soulkey in the Proleague finals. Soulkey's preemptive attack killed a ridiculous number of scvs, but he still couldn't stop the parade push. On cross spawns Whirlwind, no less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piJRs9bRmiw

On June 16 2019 13:51 Morbidius wrote:

''You macro like you have a hidden base.''

On June 16 2019 14:02 pvsnp wrote:


I seem to remember Inno saying during an interview that his mechanics have weakened since 2013, even though he's a better player overall. Soulkey in 2013 was nothing to sniff at either. Their OSL Ro8 game on Newkirk was another great one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vBHjW2pIKs

On June 16 2019 20:03 Ej_ wrote:
Cant believe Rain ended up so low. The recency bias is real.

On June 16 2019 20:03 Ej_ wrote:
Cant believe Rain ended up so low. The recency bias is real.

On June 16 2019 20:33 Morbidius wrote:

Rain was kinda robbed, players who were very good in HOTS have it the worst in these discussions. They don't have multiple premier tournaments to boost up their resumé, nor do they have the recency bias.

On June 16 2019 20:36 Pandain wrote:


I don't think it's about this at all.
It's the format of the tournament.

Rain lost to Stats, who at the very least I think you would say is equal to Rain, and debatable as to who is better.

It's like a regular SC2 tournament where the #1 player could take out the #2 player very early in the tournament. That doesn't mean the #2 player suddenly sucks way more than everyone else who made it farther, just that he got unlucky with who he picked.

I bet most people would say he beats Solar, Classic, and Nestea, for instance, who are still in the tournament.