GSL Season One
Code S

Group F Recap
Classic and Maru advance

Group G Preview
Dear, Dark, Life, Yonghwa

Brackets and standings on Liquipedia

VODs on Twitch

by Waxangel

The good news for Terran players: JinAir_Maru advanced!

The bad news for Terran players: It was a struggle all the way.

Maru started his night off by getting dominated by SKT_Classic, who put on a solid defensive performance and fended off all of Maru's relentless attacks. Once Maru's ghostless style rant out of steam, it was all too easy for the SKT Protoss to sweep up the pieces with his templar backed armies. Classic had little trouble taking out CJ_Hydra in the proceeding match, able to strike just before Hydra was able to establish a turtling position with swarm hosts and brood lords.


Despite a discouraging loss to Classic in his first match, Maru was able to take a 2-1 victory against Symbol to earn a shot at second place against Hydra.

Maru barely escaped elimination at the hands of Hydra in the final series, dropping game one and very nearly losing game two to a big muta-ling attack as he attempted to take his third base. Despite going down forty supply, Maru was able to rally back in an intense back and forth game tie the series 1-1. With everything coming down to just one final game, Maru did not hesitate to pull out his trademark two-rax all-in card. The risk ended up being well worth it as Maru easily finished Hydra off to advance to the Ro16.

Ro32 Group G: Dark, Dear, Life, Yonghwa

Countdown:

by Waxangel

The high level of play in Code S means that every group is going to be unpredictable and that ever player has a chance to win. However, this is the group that truly deserves to be called the group of chaos. Here we have gathered four players who are either inconsistent, heavily shrouded, or a combination of both.

Let's begin with the player who is mysterious because we know so little about him. SKT_Dark was once a SlayerS player who showed us a few good games in the GSTL and NASL, after which he got signed to SKT as a practice partner. He was invisible for nearly of 2013 until December when he finally broke out, fighting his way to Code S and earning a spot on SKT's Proleague roster.

That said, he got through what was arguably the easiest Challenger League group (Pet, Dark, Rogue, Seed) where he played entirely ZvZ's. So while he'll probably be even or better against Life, we can't really say much about his other match-ups. He's yet to earn a start for SKT in the Proleague, but that hardly means anything when Soulkey and soO are starting ahead of him. For what it's worth, Dark did have a nice run in the IEM Sao Paulo qualifiers. Whatever level of play Dark shows in his Code S debut, we wouldn't be surprised.

Dark's opponent will be mouz.Dear, the player in Group G who had by far the best year in 2013. It bears saying this over and over: Dear's back to back wins in Code S and the WCS Season 3 Finals were an insane achievement. We have absolutely no qualms calling him the best Protoss of 2013.

2014 however... We've seen players affected by a move to an international team in a variety of ways. Some like INnoVation and MC declined slightly from their peaks but still retained championship form. Others like Jaedong and TaeJa had their best results with international teams. In Dear's case, it seems like joining mousesports has stripped him of his soul. His second place finish at ASUS ROG Winter was one of the most deceptive tournaments runs ever, as he made mistake after sloppy mistake in disappointing games. Those mistakes went punished at IEM Cologne where he was eliminated in the Ro16 by jjakji.

That's not to say Dear is finished. He might just have been in dreadful physical condition before or been suffering from a mental lapse after successfully signing with a foreign team. Almost all players go through ups and downs. You can't expect every strategic trend to work in favor of a player, or for them to be able to maintain full concentration every single month of the year. It's the guys like Soulkey who are weird. However, there's no doubt that Dear's recent play has been very worrisome, and we're not convinced that he will have recovered his form just in time for this group.

This is the perfect time to bring up ST_Life, another player in this group who once won consecutive tourneys and was considered the best player in the world. Life is the cautionary tale for Dear. He's who Dear will become if he can't get out of this funk: A once great player who has settled at being 'pretty good' for over a year.

Life hasn't got any worse since he won three championships in 2012. It's just that other players have improved faster than him. Life's ling micro was once unparalleled, and opponents simply could not keep up with his constant runbys. While Life's play hasn't exactly become commonplace, it's just not anywhere near as special as before.

Unlike Dear, we have more reason to believe this is who Life is going to be for the rest of his career. Like any once-great player, he occasionally shows glimpses of his old form. Hell, he even won IEM New York. But even so, we know he's not the dominant force he was before. And we definitely know he's a player who can drop out in the Ro32.

Finally, we have this group's greatest enigma in IM_YongHwa. We're on year four of calling Yonghwa a talented player who suffers from a terrible individual tournament jinx. While it's a little depressing to see Yonghwa fail to make it beyond the Ro32 of Code S for this long, the silver lining is that he technically has been making progress. Though that the speed of progress has been so slow as to be almost imperceptable, Yonghwa has moved up from being stuck in Code B to being stuck in the Code S Ro32.

For all of Yonghwa's stagnation in individual leagues, he's always been a crucial part of IM's line-up in team leagues and is no stranger to scoring all-kills against far more accomplished players. With Protoss being the strongest it has ever been, this is a prime opportunity for Yonghwa to make another break through and reach the Ro16. It's almost as if the universe knows this and has finally decided to help him out for once: the balance patch won't go live until after his group is played out.

Overall thoughts and predictions

You know, we could have set up a channel called "TwitchPlaysTeamLiquidPredictions" and got a reasonable prediction for this group. Every guy in this group has the ability to "PLAY LIKE A GOD TASTELESS!" or just flop miserably. Literally no outcome would surprise us. Ah well, let's give it a shot.

Dark > Dear
Yonghwa > Life
Yonghwa > Dark
Dear > Life
Dark > Dear

Yonghwa and Dark advance.

Writers: Waxangel.
Graphics and photos: GOM eXP, Kevin Florenzano/ESL
Editor: Waxangel.