This week was all around less even than the last few weeks, with fewer teams treading water to a 1-1 record. STX, WeMade, and Oz all won both their matches, while KT, Stars, and ACE all two straight.

The week opened with one of the more entertaining terran vs terrans recently, with Midas defeating MVP. It was a drawn out affair, becoming yet another terran mirror that ended in a split map and battle cruisers galore. FOX went on to win 3-1 (taking down Stars twice in ZvZ games). Shine seemed especially proud in his post game interview.



That same day, STX took down ACE 3-1 in mostly uninteresting games. The standout moment in that series was the one the Air Force team took down, with Anytime showing great PvZ form and stopping Calm soundly.

The following day, Oz showed at least a spark of what they once were, crushing KHAN in a 3-0 victory that included Lomo beating Stork with a marine and medic attack. SKT did the same, edging out KT 3-2 when fantasy overtook Flash in an ace game. With a lineup of Bisu, fantasy, BeSt and HyuK the latter two were the ones to bring the series to a final game, making this one of the more interesting SKT series this season.

The middle of the week had two clean sweeps at the same time. eSTRO got their third win of the round over hite, with the highlight being a fast paced ZvT between Action and go.go (of secondary note is that Flying finally got arbiters to work PvZ against YellOw[ArnC]). Meanwhile, CJ showed what they were made of and stomped on MBC with Snow dominating Sea and Iris showing Light what real TvT is.

As the week continued, WeMade stomped on the proleague whipping boys of ACE (3-1, Reach broke down Major's defense early with a dragoon bust). STX got revenge on stars, winning 3-2 although they were still unable to beat Neo.G_Soulkey (perhaps he would have been a better choice for an ace match this time).

Finally, we reached a conclusion when KHAN beat KT 3-2, bringing KT to an overall 3-4 record for the round. This marks the first time all year they have more losses than wins in a round, though their gigantic headstart from earlier in the season still leaves them in first place in the standings by a nice margin. Flash was nowhere to be seen this entire match, an upset Stork expressed his thoughts on it in the post game interview.



Oz once again played a fine series in the last games of the week, against SKT. Jaedong won twice to bring them to a 3-2 victory, with their other win being Lomo containing the former protoss leader Bisu.

An interesting and entertaining week overall.

"Q:Are you usually good at late game?
A:-My management when Defilers come out is pretty good, so I hope to be able to drag it to the late game always."

      -- Action, 2010 Proleague eSTRO vs Hite SPARKYZ Interview

"Else, if thou wilt not let my people go, behold, I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thy houses."

      -- Exodus 8:21

Units plagued in Action vs Hwasin game on New Tornado, March 2010:

• 84 marines
  
• 21 science vessels
  
• 14 tanks
  
• 10 medics
  
• undetermined amount of firebats

Woongjin Stars' Kwanro best represents the aggressive Zerg archetype, with his relentless aggression and uncompromising all-ins. No mere Shine, his rushes come with a flourish, with love and passion. Kwanro knows every one of his zerglings on a first name basis. But who is the anti-Kwanro? 2 hatch mutalisks as a standard opening for over a year has left its mark, and which Zerg can currently be said to embody the defensive management style, that old tear-in-our-eye-at-the-beauty-of-it play where the Zerg holds on by the skin of his teeth while slowly building up his late game behemoth, like a painter pulling back the cloth and unveiling his masterpiece?

Zero comes close, hero used to be a contender, but today's most characteristic practitioner is Action. The only thing he shares with Kwanro is his small size and misaligned eyes. eSTRO's jowly, Chojja-like rookie only became a regular on the lineup during the current season. He earned his spot thanks to his fearsome four gas hive play, as any Terran foolish enough to let Action reach the late game uncontested, while his marines twiddle their thumbs and enjoy their R&R, is soon cornered by heavy clouds of dark swarm and a fierce hail of plagues. However, Terrans nowadays bring the pain early and hard, so Action's challenge is to survive until hive tech without taking too much damage. Easier said than done, and a bad start has lost him the game more than once.



In a way, Kim Seongdae is used to bad starts. After participating in the Minor League from May to July 2008, where he went a solid 8-4, he played his first televised game in February 2009, during the eSTRO vs SK Telecom Winners League match. A rookie's first game with the big boys is already guaranteed to be a stressful event, but Action's debut was far more nerve-wracking than usual: with the score at 3-3, he was sent out as the team ace on Andromeda against the still monstrous Bisu of early 2009, who had just torn hyvaa apart with storms in the previous game.

“Who the fuck is that kid?” one spectator wondered, while other predicted he would do some sort of prepared strategy designed to snipe Bisu. Action even then was above such things, and he played straight up. Bad decision. If there ever was a game where he should have channeled the Kwanro that lurks within the heart of every Zerg, it was this one. Even if he had lost, he would have spared us the debacle -- one of the most one-sided games in Starcraft history, where Bisu utterly demolished Action with a dual shuttle sair/reaver, d-webs galore, followed by a mass carrier, corsair and reaver assault. “I bet the guy is thrown straight into the C team after this,” was one onlooker's unforgiving verdict.

Yet Action wasn't demoted. Apparently big fans of shock treatment, the eSTRO coaches sent him out twice more against Protoss, and he lost both games, including one against Jaehoon. After this thorough whipping, the spring Minor League season was a welcome relief, and Action went an impressive 18-9, with a surprising 6-1 record vP. He looked solid enough to secure a spot in the lineup against ACE later on in the season, but once again he put up a sad display against Xellos on Neo Medusa, with a feeble defense against 2 port wraith, no attempts to expand or contain the one base Terran or otherwise abuse his lack of ground army -- no, better to overthink things and suicide your units by repeatedly dropping them onto the opponent's defenses.



Action was clearly being affected by his bad nerves. He was visibly shaken in these first appearances, hunched over and muttering to himself as he fell to pieces ingame. He tried to be cute, by burrowing his hydralisks to ambush the corsairs and shuttles in his game against Bisu -- except he missed the air units and never unburrowed as they flew directly overhead. He missed high templars with his mutas versus Jaehoon, let a dark templar rack up 8 kills in his mineral line, and somehow managed to trap drones between an extractor and a cliffside on Colosseum II. In all of these games he was far behind by the time he reached hive tech and could only throw up a few useless swarms before typing out. His late game was a mystery, and he was dismissed as just another scrub.

Action reappeared in October 2009, at the start of the current season. He won his first game, an unremarkable ZvP against hite's Horang2. Nothing special in the grand scheme of things, but finally taking a game after a 0-4 record in the previous season could only have a positive effect on his mental state. His next game, against firebathero on New Tornado, was the first display of his late game ability -- consume finished just in time, the classic first swarm saving the natural went up, and from that point onwards Action was swarming, plaguing and pushing FBH back as he took a fourth, defending it with more swarms and plagues. Ultralisks arrived, and though FBH was able to take out a base with persistent drops, he was losing control of the middle of the map as every force pushing out was met with the voof of a swarm and the weird buzzing of a plague. There was nothing he could do as Action steadily closed in, finally ending the game with a push into FBH's last mining base. There would be no dancing.

Other victories would follow. The two most impressive were both on New Tornado, against Mind in January and Hwasin in March. Even with an uncontested 14cc opening, Mind was unable to break into the Zerg natural before the first swarms were out, and once again Action seized control of the game. He denied multiple drops and even a simultaneous drop and ground attack on his third and fourth with swarms, plagues and scourge swooping in. Mind's every push was countered and pushed back, and once ultralisks arrived his forces started melting under the constant barrage. Hwasin also opened 14cc, but that only encouraged Action to morph three hatcheries before the pool and set himself up for a long macro game. Defilers once again ruled the day, and a proxy hatch and nydus to take out an expansion added insult to injury. As Action grabbed more expos and Hwasin started building tanks, Action used one of Starcraft's sexiest unit combinations, hydralurker backed by defilers. With nearly the whole map in his possession, Action closed in on the tank army and smothered it with swarms and plagues.



No strangers to hype, the MBC commentators roared in approval as Action resisted Mind at every turn, and in the climax of the game, as ultralisks began closing in and it became clear that Mind was going to lose, one of them declared that it was like watching a fusion of Savior and Chojja. High praise indeed, and expectations have now risen quite dramatically for Action. With Upmagic and Sangho demoted to eSTRO's B team, he has taken his place in the team's top tier along with Really and Flying. Despite the limelight, Action's play is still fragile. He has shown that he can win in the early game, with a zergling runby and a 2 hatch muta harass that crushed Piano in the MSL Survivor, but what is a win against a scrub, especially when Action can also lose to scrubs such as hite's Puma, who went for an aggressive, barracks-heavy pressure build to prevent mutalisk harassment and simply streamed his marines into Action's base?

Overall, Action's epic victories over firebathero, Mind and Hwasin, while certainly impressive, have one thing in common: they were achieved against veteran players who are past their prime, and who haven't adopted the newer forms of TvZ. The same can be said of his win against Canata. When confronted with aggressive mnm movements and third base denials, Action has crumbled -- against fantasy and especially Light, in a textbook new school TvZ. If Action hopes to rise in the rankings, advance deeper in the starleagues and truly become the heir to a glorious lineage, he'll have to adapt his Savioresque management to the new realities of Zerg versus Terran. In other words, finally tap into his inner Kwanro.

Hi folks, flamewheel91 here with your Proleague Round 4 Week 5 previews! This has been a part of PL coverage that has gone missing as of late with the start of the most recent round, and I'm here to bring it back.

In previous rounds and years, preparing for a Proleague match meant that the lineups were known. The players, the coaches, the viewers, would know full well in advance that Bisu would be playing Jaedong, or that Sea would be playing Flash. When you practiced, you practiced for one matchup, one game, against one opponent. Obviously, differences in skill levels factored into winning or losing, but many matches were decided by the practice one put into his upcoming match. Proleague matches were the chance for the swiftest, the most daring, to race forward, to pull ahead of the pack. Glory lay beyond the mountains, beyond the sunset, past the boundaries of mere mortals.


With the advent of the 2009-2010 Round 4 those days are gone. With the match-fixing scandal gripping Korean ESPORTS, changes have been made to the way games are done. No longer are the lineups decided beforehand, they are now made up on the spot. Not even starters are known, only the maps. While there has been much discussion on this point already, one thing that we all can be sure of is that now it's much less a contest of practice. Sniping will still occur, but with each player being announced on the spot, Proleague matches and victories will on average, like the matches in Winner's League, go to the player that plays on a higher, more consistent level than his opponent. The one-per-race rule has been eliminated as well, meaning that some teams may be able to fix their weaknesses. No longer does OZ have to rely on Perfectman, Woongjin can field three zergs (as they did against ACE in Week 3), and WeMade can show off its terran tank lineup. With this new format, teams that are deeper should and, for the most part, have been the victors, and I see no reason for that to change.

Without further adieu, here are the ten matches scheduled for next week (Week 5):

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All in all, are the teams leading the pack going to be able to maintain their spots? KT has been having a bit of a shaky start, though they have won a few games without Flash in the ace. This week, KT will play ACE... well, I guess they're keeping their first place spot, but how safe of a throne is it? STX and MBC, sitting in 2nd and 3rd, will be playing head to head this week, and with another match against Hite that they should win, STX (27-13) is looking to close the gap between KT (30-10) and itself, and it only needs a few more wins to do so. Stars in fourth has one match this week against OZ, and as long as the Tyrant can be avoided, they should be fine, and if MBC can't pull out the two tough matches they have this week against STX and WeMade, Stars could overtake it for third, and 6th WeMade and 7th place CJ are looking to jump past SKT. However, Stars needs to watch its back, for SKT, WeMade and CJ are all right on their heels. Every week, the race for playoff spots grows more fast-paced, and more frantic, and the gaps are starting to close. The difference between 4th-ranked Stars and 9th-ranked KHAN is only two wins now, albeit with a huge point differential still. With there still being 10 weeks of regular Proleague left though, it's still too early to say who's going to make it past the edge of the earth first, but this coming week will be decisive.

Oh, and the two Khan matches should be worth watching as well, if only for the sight of this.