What a crazy week. While some of the results may be a bit shocking, at the very least the quality of the games has jumped a fewfold, making them markedly better than those played in the Survivor Tournament. With the "groups of death" still to come, hopefully we'll be seeing some very high-level Starcraft that progresses on into the later stages of this Starleague. Either way, let's take a quick look at what transpired for the first three groups of the Round of 32. Oh yes, and you can check the full results here in the R&S thread.

See, there were two titles to choose for this week's article--the main title and the title for this sub-article. I toyed with a few others before choosing the two that I did, since I wanted to capture the right feel for this news post. Other worthy contenders included included the likes of the sensationalist "Flash in the Pan", the metaphorically blasé "Falling Star", and the playing-on-Engrish-and-bad-puns "Crashing [Frashing] Down". While all those titles sounded nice to me at the time of their inceptions, I [obviously] did not feel comfortable in using them. There is a fundamental difference between the two titles chosen and those that are listed above. Can you see why?

Take note: what comes next is a short opinion piece, backed up by some statistics. Perhaps these statistics aren't all-inclusive, but that's what makes opinion opinion, right? If you do decide to flame me, be warned that depending on your stance, you will be targeted by logical people, illogical people, fans, anti-fans, fanboys, and anti-fanboys. In short, what I'm trying to say is flame away.

I am not a sensationalist. While in times of frivolity (read: Live Report threads) I may yell random things like "SLUUMMMPPP", but when it comes down to it I prefer logic over impulse. Going on impulse, Flash losing to two "random" players and dropping out of the MSL is a sign of something deeper than just two singularly bad occurrences. In the same vein, Flash facing elimination in the OSL due to losses to Kal and Hyuk shows that, well...


Lo and behold though, is this the case? After watching those four games and the Proleague game against Really, I did start to wonder whether or not Flash was facing some sort of downturn. Perhaps, as is so often in the Greek myths of old, this was a case of hubris?

Lately, I've been trying to parameterize the world in terms of plausibilities and implausibilities, so I decided to use statistics to look at this phenomenon, taking a trek to the Teamliquid Database and going straight to Flash's page. The first thing I saw? 70.54%. However, as all rigorous mathematicians know the overall picture is not always the best one. Therefore, I decided to take a trip back in time.

Basically everybody knows Flash suffered a "slump" through 2008 and into 2009. As a handy point of reference, I took the date of Flash's first EVER 2009 game (against HoGiL) as my starting point. The numbers? 150 to 47. I went back three more games, and that became 153-47, or 76.5%.

Oh, his last ten games? 5-5, with four losses in individual leagues and a loss to Light in Proleague, breaking a 12-game Proleague win streak. While 5-5 is average for the progaming world, it's definitely far below Flash's 70%, or expected 7-3. But how far below? Using my primitive knowledge of Statistics, I went back in those 200 games, ten at a time.

Now, with a mean of 7.75 and a standard deviation of around 1.48, Flash is still (barely) within the 95% range. While this doesn't really say anything in Starcraft, it still tells me enough that this isn't too weird, right?

Just...

Well... Flash is facing elimination in both leagues, having been knocked out of one with the other a very likely option. Losing a random Proleague game is far more trivial than losing an OSL/MSL game, not to even consider being knocked out of an individual league. Even if Paralyze beats Kal (that would be a feat in itself) and Flash manages to win the tiebreaker, that would still be... odd. It really all boils down to this though: Flash is out, and after a full year of winning pretty much everything, it seems that he's finally slowed down a bit.

Alright, I didn't want this to become very long-winded. Having read this far, you're probably saying at this point "flamewheel has said nothing that I didn't already know." So let's get down to the nitty-gritty. In losing these four games in an individual league, Flash has lost a match (or two, in one case) in every matchup. It's not as if he lost all four games in TvT, where one would then be saying "well, Flash seems to be having problems with TvT / his opponents have figured him out and have responded appropriately"; this either says that Flash has gotten worse or his opponents, in general, are catching up. And really, besides his questionable play against Hyuk (where I really don't doubt Flash for wanting to be safe, at least) it's not as if Flash played terribly in his other games. Kal straight up outplayed him in terms of both preparation and execution. You might say the game against Classic was a build order loss, but in TvT it's much easier to come back from a build order loss than in the other mirrors, especially when one has Flash's mechanics. In the game against Ssak, Flash pretty much had it won--but decided to gloat a bit too early, allowing Ssak to recognize and pull the comeback needed to win. In essence, I can't fully attribute Flash's loss to his own failures, but in the same sense, I can't say that his opponents beat Flash. It was a mixture of both: in a way, I guess you could say that Flash assists others in beating himself. A sort of... Hyuking? Of course, not as extreme, but you still get the point.

Face it anti-fans/anti-fanboys, anti-Flash builds exist and sometimes Flash just gets outplayed. And in the same sense, fans and fanboys have to acknowledge that sometimes Flash doesn't play perfectly. While these last couple games have been anomalous, they are still probably the product of a combination of the two factors. After all, if you know you're going to play Flash, what are you going to do? You bet you're going to try as hard as possible, since you have more play time and more games (since Flash plays more than you do) to work with. And with your coaching staff and your team behind you, you've got the build, you've got the hope. You just have to make sure Flash messes up. And Flash isn't truly a god, for he still messes up. 60% is considered pretty A-class, but that means you're still losing 4 out of 10 games. 70%, 3 games out of 10. So?

Look, on the subject of matchups again: do you remember when Jaedong hit his peak in ZvZ, then in ZvP? He was able to do so because he found something that others did not, allowing him to pretty much "break" the game for a short period of time. And while Jaedong is still ridiculously scary in both matchups, others have started to show they can catch up. It's only a matter of time. While Flash relies more on his mechanics and sense (which cannot be altered by an opponent) than Jaedong does, he still has to start somewhere at the beginning of each game. We've all seen and discussed the games where Flash comes back from a massive early-game disadvantage. In those games, Flash knew that if he just held on, he would be able to use the massive difference in mechanical skill to eventually come back. Well, the same still happens now, and it happened in these games. The opponents, through build tailoring and execution, got off to a good start. Flash hung on, and tried to get back in... But it wasn't enough. Somewhere down the line, everybody else starts catching up. I suppose the phrase that ]343[ used ("what goes up, must come down") isn't totally true in this case: perhaps it's not Flash going down. Perhaps others have started coming up.

Ah, being on break these past few days have granted me the liberty of watching some old games. I started with the classics, the finals, then went onto the ELO-peaking games for each player. Incidentally, watching Jangbi's game made me sad. Anyway, after watching Boxer's and YellOw's games from back then one can really realize the massive skill increase (on average) between then and now. This much is obvious, and can be extrapolated into saying that the rookies and new players of today are better than their counterparts of yesteryear. While Flash has been able to ride this wave of improvement far longer and far... farther... than everybody else, there comes a time where you simply must slow down.

So, in conclusion, everything I've written can be summarized into one sentence. I think Flash is still bonjwa. Can you disagree with me? Of course, I might be wrong--the coming days, weeks, and months will prove or disprove me. Though I never agreed with the term "god", I would say that Flash, through a combination of arrogance and competition, has been knocked off the highest pedestal.

Hah, for those of you who read this poorly organized ramble, thanks. While I don't hope to completely dictate your train of thought regarding this situation, it's something else to think about, right?