WCS Korea Season 3
GSL Code S

Ro16 - Group A Preview
Soulkey, Sleep, Dear, DongRaeGu

Brackets and standings on Liquipedia

Woongjin_Soulkey, Azubu.Sleep, Soul_Dear, MVP.DongRaeGu

by Waxangel

After a week's break for Chuseok, Korea's biggest holiday, Code S returns with the Ro16. While all eyes are turned toward Group D for Death including Maru, PartinG, Flash, and KangHo, we start the action with Soulkey and Group A.

Let's begin with the defending Code S champion, Woongjin_Soulkey. By virtue of not leaving Korea, Soulkey is the Korean player who has best preserved his reputation since the early HotS days. Foreign tournaments offer as many opportunities for embarrassment as they do for glory, and playing a few dozen games over the course of the weekend is bound to make you look bad once or twice (unless you're TaeJa).

That doesn't mean Soulkey hasn't looked vulnerable in recent weeks—he lost to the super-hot Sora in WCG Korea qualifiers, while he fell out of IEM New York qualifiers with losses to San and Shine. However, since he hasn't had a Life vs. SjoW moment, we're still giving him the benefit of the doubt: he's a top two Zerg in Korea.

You would hope that the player with the #1 pick in group selections could engineer an easy group for himself, and Soulkey has succeeded at that for the most part. Though his ZvZ record is sparse in recent months, it's his best match-up statistically at 20 - 7 in HotS, and he seemed pleased at drawing a Zerg heavy group.

ZvP is Soulkey's next best match-up at 30 - 20. In the most recent time frame, he's won against PartinG and Pigbaby while losing to Sora and San. The losses are kind of understandable given San's incredible form in online games (he lost to him in IEM prelims), and Sora's status as the hottest rookie in the world, but they don't exactly inspire confidence. Add a lack of data on Dear on top of that (more on him below), and ZvP could end up being the one major complication for Soulkey by the end of the night.

But before Soulkey can worry about that, he'll have to deal with his hand-picked opponent in Azubu.Sleep. Just by making it to the Ro16, the former SlayerS player is the biggest surprise of the tournament thus far. With almost no meaningful results in his entire career and having played in just a single Code A prior to this season, Sleep shocked everyone by making it into his first Code S on the back of three consecutive ZvZ series in Challenger.

It was almost a no-brainer for Maru to use his winner's right to pick the upstart Sleep into his Ro32 group. While Maru was able to dispatch Sleep with relative ease, Sleep gave everyone a second jolt by playing excellent ZvT (his precise widow-mine defusing was particularly impressive) against Bbyong and Dream to advance in second place. Still, even that didn't seem to impress Soulkey, who didn't hesitate to declare Sleep the easiest opponent and drag him directly to his Ro16 group. Given that this is the first time Sleep has ever been good in Korea, I guess you can't blame Soulkey for that decision. Hell, even Sleep's own coach IntoTheRain spent a conspicuous amount of time throwing Sleep under the bus in the last season of GSTL, confusing everyone as to whether he seriously had a problem with Sleep or was using some next level motivational tactics.

Sleep has done nothing but surprise us all tournament, and he might have more surprises in store for us in the Ro16. While he's definitely the underdog of this group, he is a big unknown that brings a lot of upset potential.

As for the other side of the bracket, let's begin with Soul_Dear.

Life after INnoVation has been pretty awful for the robot Terran's former right-hand man. First off, his team lost its main sponsor in STX and then left KeSPA, which presumably means he took a huge dip in salary. Second, SKT decided to pluck Dear's teammate and Protoss co-ace Classic away from the wreckage of STX, which must have felt like a huge snub to Dear. And third, he's been failing in GSTL so far, going 0 - 2 while hyvaa has taken over as Soul's ace.

The one bright spot for Dear right now is that he made it into Code S for the first time ever and advanced to the Ro16. Wins over Swagger, MKP, and Curious got him into Code S to begin with, and a 4 - 0 over SuperNoVa got him past the Ro32. So in the midst of all this trouble, Dear at least has one, very important thing to hang his hopes on.

Unfortunately for us as viewers, none of his results from the past few months help us predict how he might do in this group. Headed into an all-Zerg group, Dear has just played only two broadcasted PvZ games since July. In one game he beat Curious with a lot of zealots and templars, and in another he lost to a speedling all-in from Life. Yeah, not much to go on.

At least over the course of all of HotS, Dear has been a very good PvZ player with a 14 - 8 record, take that for what you will. On top of that, having just one race to practice for will surely benefit Dear, even if his opponents are dangerous. Alongside Sleep, Dear is a dangerous underdog who can't be taken lightly.

Finally, we have Dear's first opponent, the recently revived MVP.DongRaeGu. Normally we don't say things like "He's back!" until a player wins a tournament or at least places very high, but DRG recently attained something that many would say is more difficult than winning a championship: he beat INnoVation in a series. Given that INnoVation hadn't lost a TvZ bo3+ for three months up to that point, you can tell what kind of momentous occasion it was.

So, DRG is back, in a way. However, much like the other players in his group, we don't have as much pertinent data as we'd like headed into this specific group. Our limited sample of games has him at 3 - 0 in ATC playoff games against Scarlett and Bly at least, so he heads in with some ZvZ momentum in live games. On the other hand, we can say with confidence that he's favored against his initial opponent in Dear, with a plethora of ZvP games played and a lot of them wins. While DRG should be able to beat Dear, it's hard to predict what might happen in this group's ZvZs.

Predictions

Well, I think the prediction for most people is obvious here: take the big stars DongRaeGu and Soulkey to go through. However, I'm hedging hard on the side of Sleep, who beat Crazy, Savage, and YuGiOh in his run through Challenger. I like him a lot as an underdog in this Zerg-heavy group. But, you know, just not enough to pick him.

Soulkey > Sleep
DongRaeGu > Dear
Soulkey > DongRaeGu
Dear > Sleep
DongRaeGu > Dear

Soulkey and DongRaeGu advance.

Writers: Waxangel
Graphics: wo1fwood.
Editor: Waxangel.