EPTGOMTV Hot6ix Cup
Hot6ix Cup Ro8 Day 1
sKyHigh vs Bbyong
sOs vs INnoVation
Brackets and standings on
Liquipedia
sKyHigh vs Bbyong:
An Unlikely Teamkill
Don't Look at Me, I'm the Janitor
CJ.
Bbyong’s oeuvre is not impressive. For a player described as exciting, innovative, and a model of smart gameplay, he has never generated much success out of those qualities: by success I mean the great dichotomy reserved for Korean players, win it all or go home. He is a perpetual Ro16 menace, certain to advance out of the first group stage only to flop in the next one. He’s a decent menace in online tournaments but never wins any of them. His career is one long record of mediocrity, from his all-time best showing (finishing third place in his Ro16 group back in GSL Season 1) to his meltdown at IEM Sao Paulo. Within the grand pantheon of Korean Terrans, Bbyong rightfully receives more comparisons to Ensnare and Clide than Mvp.The main difference between Bbyong and older gatekeepers is his propensity to pull out strange, wild strategies for the hell of it. The CJ Terran is best known for exploiting the Gangnam Terran ruse on Habitation Station, but his assortment of builds range from grimy timing attacks to impenetrable armies in lategame TvZ. His main claim to fame is utilizing mech builds regardless of the opponent’s race. He dares to try mech against unsuspecting Protosses (and gets away with it!), battle-tested terrans, and zergs more preoccupied with fears of MMM. Even his losses have that special roguish charm to them. Unfortunately, his style has not paid off in terms of praiseworthy finishes.
That could all change soon. The quarterfinals of Hot6ix Cup represent the best placement in Bbyong’s SC2 career as well as his strongest run. In total he’s 6-0 in series with a 12-1 record, only dropping 1 game to Creator in the qualifier. What’s more impressive are his successive 2-0 victories against Soulkey, PartinG, and Zest. Bbyong has beaten top players before, but his overall success against them is more like a staccato rhythm than a consistent beat. After alternating between wins and losses so often, it’s an encouraging sign that Bbyong defeated them one after the other. After nuking Zest and PartinG to get out in first place, the sky is the limit.
Or the End of the Road
When did CJ.
sKyHigh get good?That was the question yelled at many screens last week when the CJ Terran upset
Classic and Flash to advance into the Round of 8. To say it came out of left field would be an insult to baseball stadiums; sKyHigh’s advancement was more like a ramshackle satellite crashing into the mound. In a group with perennial fan favorite Flash, a resurgent 
Soulkey, and the ever dangerous Classic, sKyHigh’s chances should have been a smidge above 0%. At that point he had no accomplishments and the barest minimum of hype behind him. His greatest boast he could muster was going through the qualifiers undefeated. If he could finish the group without getting embarrassed, it would be the highlight of his SC2 career.Instead, he turned it into a highlight reel. After losing to Soulkey in some lackluster games, sKyHigh finally demonstrated how he beat
Maru and ByuL to reach the group stage. His tactical approach was reminiscent of his old mentor Iris, a comparison that formerly earned sKyHigh the affectionate moniker “Neo-Berserker”. Like Iris at his best, sKyHigh grinded out wins with suffocating multitasking and positioning. His victory over Classic on King Sejong Station was a motley assortment of drops, bad and good and everything in-between. Whether they were wise or foolish choices, he irritated his opponent to the point of exhaustion and blunder. sKyHigh’s series against Flash was even more nostalgic. The way he outmaneuvered Flash brought back comparisons to his legendary BW TvT, a matchup that was also Flash’s bane back in the day.Fortune is still fickle, and sKyHigh must translate this initial success into something more lasting. StarCraft II has a long history of players with brief moments of fame, and many of those greenhorns immediately lapsed back into obscurity. We’ve known too many
InCas and Seeds to give sKyHigh the benefit of the doubt. Being a teammate and practice partner, Bbyong will be well-acquainted with any potential mindgames. Unlike his scattered encounters with Flash on ladder, sKyHigh won’t have the luxury of unfamiliarity. He’ll have to be even more devious and aware of his opponent’s line of thinking. Luckily for sKyHigh, his recent success doesn’t seem to be a complete fluke. If you’re nominated as the strongest player on your team by your team, that has to count for something. Predictions
For all the brouhaha raised over sKyHigh’s TvT, his SC2 record has been forgettable. Only 40-39 (50.63%) since his introduction, sKyHigh’s experience and reliability is questionable when compared to Bbyong’s 58-48 (54.72%) performance. Furthermore, Bbyong’s win distribution has been fairly stable after October 2013. Most of sKyHigh’s wins came during 2 huge spurts, once in the MvP Invitational and the other extending into this match. In fact, his recent TvT run didn't start until he start playing in the Hot6ix qualifiers. While his unremitting confidence in the mirror matchup will be a great help, one wonders whether it exist to shroud his doubts.
As we’ve seen multiple times in the past, surviving the first 10 minutes is a prerequisite skill in TvT. This series could easily devolve into a game of Russian roulette, where victory is rewarded via proper build order and trigger finger. Both players are confident in their lategame skills, and will likely intersperse long macro games between marine/hellion elevators and 1/1/1 timing attacks. However, it’s sKyHigh that stands to benefit the most from such an approach. Many of Bbyong’s TvT losses come against players who rely on highly aggressive styles defined by multitasking, which sKyHigh seems to relish. Bbyong himself can excel in crazy situations, but his teammate will be constantly looking to force them. In the end sKyHigh's swell of confidence should let him barely overcome Bbyong.
sKyHigh 3 - 2 Bbyong
sOs vs INnoVation:
The Ground that Shakes
At every moment of every day, in a way that can’t be seen, tectonic plates are slowly moving and building up pressure below the surface. Ideally there would be a continuous tremor so that the pressure never builds up. But in reality the longer between quakes the greater the eventual damage.
sOs is like an earthquake. At every free moment sOs is finding and refining unpredictable strategies to catch his opponents off guard. Ideally for INnoVation, sOs would have a long list of recent games to study so that sOs’s pocket strategies wouldn’t build up to a critical, overwhelming force. The problem for INnoVation is that sOs has been relatively dormant for the last 6 months. In fact despite winning a $100,000 tournament, 2014 has been a quiet affair for sOs. Lackluster performances combined with the terran drought earlier this year has meant that sOs has not played a single PvT in Code S this year. But it’s unlikely that this is due to a major lapse in form. sOs still managed to tie for the most wins in the Proleague regular season with a 20-9 record. The most likely scenario is that sOs is playing at the same pace he’s always been playing at, simply waiting for the perfect opportunity to once again shake the ground we stand on and change our understanding of the game.
After a silent first half of the year INnoVation returned to finally fulfill his destiny. The foreign venture on team Acer was only a detour for the player many thought would dominate the GSL. Ever since Seed’s fall from the heavens every new GSL winner has had their ability questioned. But after INnoVation lifted his GSL trophy the same question wasn't asked. INnoVation had already won a title in 2013—WCS Season 1 Finals— to confirm his potential, and this championship was just confirmation of what we already knew.The only question was who would meet INnoVation in the grand finals of Blizzcon.
With hindsight and the help of Taeja we were reminded that INnoVation does lose... occasionally. In the last Code S season INnoVation played 5 TvP series which most of the time ended as a 2-1 score. One of those 2-1 series was a loss to MyuNgSiK who exclusively used a phoenix-colossi strategy, which is a strategy sOs showed successfully against TY.
Whether PvT is still sOs’s worst matchup is impossible to know; his 2-1 win against TY earlier in the tournament wasn't very enlightening. In all 3 games sOs opened up with early oracles and one of those games was a simple build order win for sOs. A reliance on oracles is typically a sign of lacking confidence in the matchup. The other possibility is that sOs is hiding strategies for the latter stages in the tournament. sOs is the type of player to hide strategies until the very end; it was against INnoVation in the very first WCS season finals that sOs showed us a tempest PvT build after falling behind 0-3.
Even against oddball strategies, INnoVation was able to win his first championship with a 4-0 against sOs . Additionally it was against INnoVation that sOs won his first broadcasted SC2 game. Despite this storied past they haven't played each other even once in 2014 and yet there is just as much on the line as ever before. sOs wants to prove that he can still unleash his inner $O$ from the shadow realm and INnoVation wants to prove that he can stay at the top after a GSL championship.
sOs is in the same place that INnoVation was in 3 months ago: a drought of individual results, a monster teamleague performance and now a chance to return to the top. A win for INnoVation is just a drop in the sea but a win for sOs could be the initial tremors of another wave of success.
Prediction:
Innovation’s TvP varies between best in the world and world class and he can be expected to bring his A game whether that be SCV pulls or otherwise. sOs is the only variable in this match; if he truly wants to catch INnoVation off guard he’ll have to bring more than just an array of proxy oracle openers. Even if sOs reveals all his tricks it will still be an uphill fight for the Jin Air protoss.
sOs 1 - 3 INnoVation
