The Business End of Round 1

We’ve reached the last week of Round 1. KT are now confirmed for the playoffs, while SKT have already secured 1st place with their unassailable 5-0 record and +10 map record. At the foot of the table, MVP and CJ are out of the running. That leaves three teams in a fight for two spots—and importantly, Samsung aren’t playing this week, after completing their set of six matches with last week’s double. Join us for a quick wrap-up of last week’s results, followed by a preview of our climactic three matches.

Five Conclusions

1. Samsung got the best possible start to Week 5, 3-0’ing their fellow playoff contenders in Afreeca. They then shot themselves in the foot by getting 3-0’d by their fellow playoff contenders Jin Air. Overall, this felt like the scene returning more and more to the HotS landscape—coming off last year, you’d roughly expect Solar / Reality / Dear to beat Curious / Billowy / Super, and for Maru / Cure / sOs to beat Dear / Reality / Journey. Still, Samsung sit in a relatively comfortable position, albeit one where their fate is completely out of their hands.
   
   
2. Essentially, everything is on Afreeca this week. The standings currently are:
   
   
   • Jin Air 3-2 (+2)
     
   • Samsung 3-3 (0)
     
   • Afreeca 2-3 (-2)
   
   For Afreeca to overtake Samsung, they need at the very least a 3-1 win if Proleague are settling tiebreakers by an ace match, and a 3-0 sweep if standings are decided by head-to-head due to their loss last week. Otherwise, they have to rely on Jin Air losing to SKT—they do have the advantage in head-to-head there. All in all, it’s a precarious position that they sit in right now, and they’ll need to fight for every map point on Tuesday.
   
   
3. Meanwhile, could Week 5 have been the true turning point for Jin Air? They’ve been a bit off all season, with Rogue and sOs both struggling in particular in both individual and teamleague competitions, but a confident 3-0 over rivals Samsung puts them in pole position for the ‘Best of the Rest’ fight that’s coming to a close this week. Barring a monumental meltdown, they will successfully qualify for the playoffs after their dodgy start—they just need to avoid a 3-1 or worse to guarantee a playoffs spot. Up against an SKT lineup with a distinctly B-team feel (Zoun and Impact in for their 2016 debuts, and MyuNgSiK looking for his first Proleague win for SKT), it would be a huge shock if they failed now.
   
   
4. Oh MVP. Just when you thought they’d nabbed their first points of the round, KT mounted a comback to reverse sweep from 0-2 down. Ace matches are nothing new for KT—four out of five matches have gone to the ace, and their 3-1 record in the fifth set arguably conceals some of the weakness they’ve shown so far this round. Should we be praising their resilience and power in the clutch? Or doubting whether reliance on their ace streak is sustainable? Their performance in the all kill format will be interesting to watch. On MVP’s side though, it was another case of ‘close, but not close enough’. It was their second ace match loss of the round, and they’ve got a few players who have put in assorted good performances spread across the past few weeks—they just need to string a few together. I said at the start of the season that they don’t look like an 0-6 team on the scale of Prime last year, and I’ll stick with that (despite the high likelihood of that coming to fruition this week). While they're clearly the weakest team in terms of firepower, they've got a blend of smarts and experience that means that their 0-6 record is a harsh representation of their play this round. Let’s hope that they can raise their consistency next round.
   
   
5. Finally, I guess I have to mention for a fifth consecutive week that SKT did well again. Yet again, they dropped a set though—Dream losing the revenge match against herO after his GSL win—but I doubt oov cares too much given the lineup he’s sent out this week. It’s a sign that once again, all he cares about is picking up the win come Grand Finals day; win streaks are nice, but get you nowhere by themselves. If you’re confident about making the Season Playoffs, all that matters is developing the talent to fill out the six spots required in the BO7 format. It’s a lesson that KT look like they’ve learnt, given that they’re blooding SpeeD this week—it’s certainly a bit more progressive than their stale roster picks at the end of last season. However, it’s another sign that Jin Air and CJ need to think a bit more about the coming months. Picking 6 starters from their 6 man rosters is going to be the wrong sort of easy choice.
   

CJ Entus vs KT Rolster

herO <Ulrena> Stats

PvP craziness continues with two so far unbeaten mirror-players meeting each other on the field of battle. herO has taken wins over Seed and most recently sOs, while Stats was able to beat down Blaze and MyuNgSiK, making PvP their most solid match-up in Round 1 of Proleague. Stats having to focus on his hard match with ByuN in SSL last week might become a deciding advantage for herO—one he really needs, because over the course of StarCraft 2 herO has only won a single series against the KT player, losing six out of seven duels between them, including their first LotV match. With CJ’s morale at the bottom of the barrel anyways, Stats is the slight favourite here. Also worth to note: Keep an eye out for another duel between herO and his staunchest enemy of the recent past—the computer problems. They have already cost CJ a penalty point, getting another one would be beyond embarrassing.

ByuL <Lerilak Crest> SpeeD

Already locked in second place KT feel like they are able to give young SpeeD a bit of room to gather experience and show his skill—a strategy widely and successfully used in Proleague to build up newer players. You have to ask yourself however, if a match this uneven is really the right way to go at it: ByuL is an accomplished player and even though LotV hasn’t been kind to him thus far, he’s probably going to make short work out of SpeeD, which wouldn’t be all too beneficial for his mental strength. Of course we’ve seen enough upsets in this round alone to not count SpeeD out. DeParture was able to kill Zest last week. And even last year we had close matches between uneven players, such as Life vs BrAvO, which was kind of a similar constellation to this game. If SpeeD can somehow emulate what aLive was doing against ByuL—disrupt his play with strong timings, such as marine tank pushes—he might have a shot at hurting his opponent.

Hush <Dusk Towers> Zest

Oh boy, speaking of uneven match-ups: Hush has to take on Zest, who already took two ace matches for KT and hasn’t had anything else to prepare for than SPL for some weeks now. If SpeeD at least has a string of hope he can hold on to—ByuL being vulnerable to terran timings—Hush faces a hopeless situation against this gargantuan opponent that is the Chisel Toss. Zest’s loss to DeParture last week may indeed fuel Hush’s confidence, but the zerg has shown in the past that he has a hand in upsetting protoss gods. Doing the same thing to Zest in PvP is considerably more challenging, especially as we see more stability in the game, which benefits the KT protoss way more than his opponent.

Bunny <Prion Terraces> TY

With Bbyong being out of business at the moment because of health reasons it seems that Bunny will keep the job of the first choice terran at CJ for a while. He might have surprised people in Code S with his solid TvZ, but in Proleague he just can’t catch a break, being matched against Maru, INnoVation (and being defeated decisively by both) and now TY—basically the triad of the world’s best terran players. TY should have an easy time here.

Ace: <Orbital Shipyard>

If herO can repeat the success he had against sOs and Dream in the last weeks, and if ByuL doesn’t trip against SpeeD, CJ might force an ace match and get the chance to regain some honor in this abysmal first round of SPL. In that case we’d probably see a pretty good pairing of players, with either of herO and ByuL going up against Zest or TY.

Predictions

herO < Stats
ByuL > SpeeD
Hush < Zest
Bunny < TY

CJ 1 - 3 KT

Jin Air Green Wings vs SK Telecom T1

sOs <Orbital Shipyard> Zoun

Like their telecom rivals at KT, SKT bring out some players against Jin Air, who might not get many opportunities to show themselves otherwise. One of these is Zoun, picked up by SKT from the team which shall not be named after a decent performance in SPL. Indeed, the young protoss hasn’t played an official game yet this year, so it should be really interesting to see what level he reached while training under T1 for some months. Going up against sOs in this huge match for him will certainly be challenging. At least the Jin Air toss lost to both herO and Zest recently, perhaps giving Zoun some ideas. Nonetheless the odds are stacked against him.

Maru <Ruins of Seras> INnoVation

One stable part of the line-up is fielded by SKT: INnoVation. And what an opponent he meets in Maru! Both these terran powerhouses are still unbeaten this round, so one’s record surely breaks after the day is done. But who can get the perfect round? Both have shown really solid TvT games so far, not revealing any significant weaknesses. When they met each other in HotS INnoVation would normally go for the mech play, but this option seems impossible to use at the current state of the game. We’ll hopefully see some fireworks being burned, when these two multitasking machines try to confuse, deceive and outperform each other. Ruins of Seras has given us a great TvT between aLive and TY recently, so the stage is perfectly set for this duel.

Rogue <Prion Terraces> Impact

After his abysmal performance in Code S Rogue has managed to bounce back into a more solid form recently, having some online success as well as defeating ByuL in Proleague. Especially this last win should give him some confidence for the next match against Impact—someone we also haven’t seen much of. Indeed, his only series this year so far was the close loss to Solar in Code A. With how unstable Rogue has been in the last weeks, I wouldn’t count out Impact, especially as there’s lots of room for crazy stuff in ZvZ.

Cure <Ulrena> MyuNgSiK

Both Cure and MyuNgSiK have destroyed their respective Code S groups in the Round of 32 to advance first place—but this particular match-up is not exactly their strength. While Cure has shown fast-paced, multitasking-oriented games against protoss, MyuNgSiK hasn’t lost anything of his unpredictability on SKT. This should be an explosive match, but I’d give Cure the advantage, seeing how he dismantled Stork in their series and how hard of a time MyuNgSiK had against CJ’s Bunny.

Ace: <Dusk Towers>

SKT is already qualified for the finals, Jin Air needs this win to advance—so sending a weaker line-up is certainly merciful by SKT. However a weaker line-up in SKT-terms still means a very dangerous roster of players, so this very will might result in an ace match. Here SKT have an abundance of players to choose from, while Jin Air surely would go for Maru or sOs to close this out.

Predictions

sOs > Zoun
Maru < INnoVation
Rogue > Impact
Cure > MyuNgSiK

Jin Air 3 - 1 SKT T1

Afreeca Freecs vs MVP

Super <Ruins of Seras> GuMiho

Super is a stable part of the Afreeca roster and gets sent out again and again, but so far we have neither seen anything impressive from him, nor a sign of improvement. GuMiho kind of shares that spot with him, being unsuccessful in individual tournaments, but at least he’s had some Proleague wins, so this should be his game.

Curious <Prion Terraces> DeParture

Probably the most interesting match of the bunch is between Curious and DeParture. The Afreeca player may have lost to Solar last week, but this man has taught us to never count him out of a match, especially in a match-up such as ZvZ. The main question of the day however isn’t about Curious, it’s about DeParture: Can he stabilize? Can he take another win after beating Zest and prove that he is more than a sniper? MVP really needs him to become a solid option, which performs will every week.

Bomber <Lerilak Crest> Forte

We didn’t get to see Bomber play last week as Afreeca lost 0-3, but we’ll finally see him again this week. TvT has traditionally been a fine match-up for him and he’ll probably be happy to not face any adepts against Forte, so his morale should be doing well. Forte has been developing since LotV came out, but couldn’t really get any results to back this development up—to make it short: No one knows how any of these guys is going to play, so anything could happen.

KeeN <Dusk Towers> Ryung

Ryung, the old TvT master, had to bow down to TY last week—as most people these days—so KeeN doesn’t have to look far for some ideas on how to defeat his opponent. And he’ll probably really need these, as he has lost to several foreign terrans in online cups recently, which really doesn’t help build confidence in his abilities. So if we get here, Ryung might finally take a win and ruin Afreeca’s round.

Ace: <Ulrena>

This match could really go anywhere, so an ace match is a likely outcome. So far Afreeca have used aLive as their ultimate player, while MVP have sent out DeParture and GuMiho as the final representatives—none of the three was able to triumph yet. While Afreeca will probably go for aLive or even Curious, Coach Choya has always been unpredictable in regards to ace players. For example he likes to send out players who haven’t been in one of the regular matches before. We could see anyone on MVP’s side from a prepared Seed snipe to the more solid choice of GuMiho.

Predictions

Super < GuMiho
Curious > DeParture
Bomber > Forte
KeeN < Ryung
aLive > GuMiho

Afreeca 3 - 2 MVP