Results for Week 1-2-3. Check out the full R&S thread here by Simplistik.

Nothing too out of the ordinary except for Round 2's powerhouse Hite Entus going 1-5 in their first 6 games, trying to tie woongjin's abysmal 1-8 Round 2. SKT came back from their mediocre R2 thanks to their really deep team Bisu. Flash also has been rocking WL with a 9-1 record and helping KT comeback from their terrible earlier rounds performance. With their awful 2-4 record, woongjin already beat their round 2 performance

The inevitable encounter between Flash and Fantasy on Benzene starts with Flash @ 1.5 and Fantasy @ 7.5. Both players open with their most commonly-practized builds, 1 Rax CC skipping early gas and 1 Rax Fact, respectively. Fantasy, with the earlier Factory also throws down a CC as his Fact is finished, skipping Machine Shop to squeeze out a quick Vulture and heads his lifted rax immediately to Flash’s base. Flash, meanwhile, lands his rax at the natural to prevent early Vulture run-bies, giving Fantasy a scouting advantage. Fantasy also seems to know this, as he moves the first Vulture immediately to the cliff overlooking Flash’s natural, and abuses its attack range to take potshots at mining SCVs. To his annoyance, Flash’s bunker covering the miners could do nothing to help since Marines don’t have enough attack range to fire back. The bike-riding terrorist causes quite a ruckus in Flash’s SCVs until Flash’s own vultures show up and end the threat, after which his speed upgrade kicks in and Flash routs another group of Fanta’s vultures.


Clever vulture moving pattern into running SCVs. And only now do I realize that the vulture guy bears quite a resemblance to #1 on the US’s Most Wanted List.

However, Fanta has already begun construction of his 5th factory and he soon returns with another group, this time catching Flash’s 4 vultures on the plateau of his side of the map off-guard. Flash hastily brings two vultures to reinforce but eventually decides to use only one to support, while the other goes lay mines at 10 and 10.5. This results in Fanta being able to overpower Flash’s vultures and seize control of the central area of the map. Wasting no time, Fanta rushes his 10 vultures into Flash’s natural, where at the time has only one Tank and 4 vultures to defend. The 10 terrorist bikes make short work of Flash’s vultures, and paying no attention to the Tank at all, they speed into Flash’s main, of which terrible damage is almost certain. But just as the audience on SKT’s side begins to clap their hands in excitement, Flash displays immaculate crisis management and micro. He uses 2 freshly-built Goliaths to block the ramp, while at the same time destroys spider mines like a pro (lol) and traps the remaining vultures into a corner where he is finally able to mop up after they’ve killed a few SCVs. And looking at the other side of the map, the lone Vulture that had once ran from the death of his bike buddies without a fight returns, and shows its worth by mauling the SCV that would build Fanta’s CC at the 10 position, delaying Fanta’s expansion for another time, while his own CC at 4 was already under way.


Sick, sick crisis management. Did I mention he lost no units to mines?

In probably a wrong assessment of situation, Flash took a small force he had at that time to set up a position on the plateau on his side of the map. Fantasy sees this and seizes the chance immediately to attack with Tanks covered by masses of vultures, overrunning his opponent’s tanks even before Vultures could plant Mines to protect them - the way he does it just blows my mind: Seeing Flash’s Barracks floating forward to acquire vision, Fantasy feigns a withdrawal up North, while buying just enough time for additional forces to come from East and Siege Mode to finish. Fanta’s force turns back, and catch Flash’s tanks in the open, with Vultures completely out of position. Flash scrambles to defend, but his tanks just couldn’t withstand the attack. He loses all of his tanks, at the trade of Fantasy’s one.



no chance

At that point the door to Flash’s 4 was half open. Riding the momentum of victory after their first engagement, Fanta moves another force down from the other plateau to crush what little defence remains Flash has near the 5.5 position. Despite a silly mistake involving misclick a SCV to build his CC at the min only that delayed it for another good minute (and caused quite a stir on both the streams as well as the LR thread), Fantasy has gained complete map control. Even if at that moment Fanta’s number of bases is yet to match Flash’s, it’s almost only a matter of time before he cements his lead with more bases to roll Flash. Adding insult to injury, as Flash attempts 2 vulture drops at Fanta’s nat and 10 that only deal minimal damage, Fanta leaves 3 in Flash’s main which racks a good number of SCV kills as the workers had to become reluctant terrorists fighter (and obviously not good ones either). Fangirls have begun to scream in joy, and Fantasy’s teammates have begun to clap their hands in approval. What could possibly be a better way to start Winner’s League with an all-kill that includes the very Flash?


This is it one minute later. Only when Oov exerts his mind-controlling influence does the lazy SCV get back to work. Guess this means no coffee break.

The knowledge of himself in grave danger, however, has pushed Flash’s play to the last level. Previously, Fantasy has had troops at 4.5, but then withdrew them to join his massive mobile force that patrols between 11.5 and 5.5; using this hesitation as much as he could, Flash uses a small force to clear the few turrets and mines at 12.5, then flies a CC that he secretly built in his main over. Then he sets up another position at 4.5, having cleared it of mines.

Fanta obviously doesn’t like the look of this, as he doesn’t want Flash to latch on to another base where he might have a greater chance to comeback. But this is where things start to take a turn for the worse for Oov’s protege. Focusing entirely on the fact that Flash is attempting to get 4.5 up-and-running, Fantasy forgot that 4 was poorly defended with only 3 tanks, since Flash had to commit units to 4.5. Although 4 was mined out earlier, it was still an invaluable position as the link between Flash’s natural and 4.5; had Fanta overrun it with his mobile mech force, set up a tank line and claim 5.5, he would have been able to isolate the bottom-right base completely. Fanta attacks 4.5 but through abysmal positioning, he deals less damage, yet takes more damage than he should have. He abuses the lack of Turrets to drop Tanks on Flash’s sieged Tanks which eventually took 4 to get rid of Flash’s 3 (although if you look closely at the 3rd tank that got dropped, the closest mine to Flash’s tanks glitched and didn’t get dragged, saving him 6 more seconds) and lost many Vultures trying to get on the bigger ramp while his own tanks were too slow.

With the situation at 4.5 having somewhat stabilized and Fantasy’s mobile army thinned out, Flash, sitting on an upgrade advantage and higher dropship count, lays down his plan to capitalize on Fanta’s current lack of mobility. Valuable intel gathered from scanning has revealed Fanta’s dropship parking at the low ground near 5.5, nowhere close to 11.5 or 10.5, his two crucial mining nodes. Flying 6 dropships toward Fanta’s budding 11.5, Flash is met by only 4 Turrets, an inadequate defence. The unopposed airborne troops make short work of everything, but it’s Fantasy’s reaction that’s more game-changing than anything.


death from above

Desperate for a counter, he moved his army toward Flash’s 4 (of which has been better reinforced by now) and dropped 9 tanks from his 5 dropships near Flash’s defending tanks, an nigh-flawless surround. But something was wrong: Those tanks, spearheading the assault, get immediately showered by plasma artillery out of nowhere as they land, and vaporize just seconds into action, shutting down Jung Laden’s offensive in catastrophe. Upon examining by the observers, Jung’s opponent, clutch as ever, has kept 3 tanks outside his natural, for Fantasy’s airborne party to completely deploy in a death trap. It was a battle decided entirely by positioning and Flash was clearly the superior; as when the 9 tanks melted hardly any of them even managed to fire a second volley - audience at the live game, TL streams and LR thread all exploded at once. Reach and Suny were probably the most exhilarated ones on the KT bench, as they clapped their heart out when Flash’s airborne mech, having handily thrashed 11.5, continue to roll toward Fanta’s undefended 10.5, while coach Lee Ji Hoon tries his best to hide the feeling of someone who has just been resurrected from death.


Fantasy will have nightmares about these guys when he sees the VOD.


“What are you guys so on about? This is completely normal.” - a nonchalant Stats, who usually off-races as Terran to help Flash practize his TvT.

Fantasy, at first shaken, manages to pull himself together and quickly build another army, while grabbing 5.5 to make up for the lost expansions as it’s still too early to tell anything even though now the balance has been considerably tipped. Flash, having secured 10.5, begins to expand to it in order to stay even more ahead in the base race. And this time I can’t tell whether it was Fantasy’s positioning failure or Flash’s omnipotent game sense, that Fantasy’s dropships were miles away when Flash’s first frontal assault in this game came full-bore, sweeping Fanta’s tank line guarding 5.5 and forcing the CC to lift. Then, not giving Fantasy any time to recover from this critical mistake, Flash quickly regroups and stages another attack, this time pushing him even further backwards. Fantasy was emasculated.

On 1 and 1 unsaturated bases against Flash’s 2 fully saturated and another 2 coming up, Fantasy’s has never been in such a critical situation. His units still have control of the high ground but it doesn’t seem to matter now as there is not enough force to attack any of Flash’s low ground positions. Stalling for time to build up another army (even though time is not on his side either), Fanta scans Flash’s main and realizes his facilities for BCs have finished. Having to build Goliaths which will affect his Tank count later on, Fanta’s one brief thought of retaking 10.5 was intimidated by Flash’s maphack scan, forcing Jung Laden’s dropships to turn back for the moment. They would comeback later, however, only for Flash to feel as if every unit of resource spent on the defence of that position was worth it. Despite eventually overrunning 10.5 with ground force, Fanta lost a ton of SCVs, dropships and everything inside them to tank fire, turrets and a couple of well-placed mines. Undetered, he continued by swarming the low ground near 5.5, forcing Flash to lift. Flash then attempts to drop at 11.5 but reaps unexpected success when 10.5 is also left inexplicably undefended,


Can’t believe he’s letting this happen all over again...Yes, 10.5 IS undefended.

leaving Fantasy completely mined out after the trade. Fanta has now had to resort to distance mining from 5.5, while Flash’s 12.5 is still yet to be depleted. Having obstacles to his victory cleared, Flash reveals his last card: BCs. Rallying a sizable fleet, he tests their might on a few unguarded Tanks near 5.5 and Fantasy’s CC that was flying over.


On the bright side, this is as one-sided as Flash would ever get in this game.

And from then on, it was all but game. Flash flew a CC over and comfortably sat on 5.5 until the end of the game, while Fantasy’s own attempt to take 10.5 was immediately spotted and intercepted. Even with an apparent advantage in troop count, Fantasy could not attack, because it was his last army that had absolutely no way to replenish, and Flash’s fleet was still growing. Flash only had to whittle away Fanta’s units with Yamato guns until 3/3 BCs outnumber Goliaths, that he decides to land the final blow.

All things considered, Flash v. Fantasy was an epic game, with reminiscence to their epic Bigfile MSL series. It’s no doubt that Flash’s play early on was shaky (honestly I can’t remember a time when he had an early advantage in TvT that was not an economic one), but the stronger the pressure, the more it seemed that Flash knew just what he had to do to win. He held back and conserved his units, blocking Fantasy’s aggression. As opportunities came, he picked only the best places to attack, leaving Fantasy having to do with the worst ones. Then when Oov’s apprentice finally went bankrupt, BCs came out to finish, when just 10 minutes ago they were thought of as a questionable choice.

And Fantasy... the more I watch the VOD, the more I feel sorry for you. From victory within grasp to lost cause, what went wrong? Your vultures outshined Flash’s in this game. Your timing and abuse of mobility up to midgame was brilliant. Yet the stress of imminent victory has proved to be your eventual demise. Fantasy had the territory advantage, but could not convert into a base advantage. Too focused on strengthening his front, he forgot the importance of expansions in TvT - and as a result of having 10.5 and 11.5 repeatedly pillaged, the weight of Jung’s unstable economy finally came crashing down as Flash took back 5.5 for the second time. It’s not exaggerating when logistics is one of the reasons to Flash’s victory: once his bases were up, they remain practically untouched until the end of the game. Fantasy, meanwhile, lost a total of 5 CCs. His flaws in unit positioning didn’t help either, but I feel no need to mention them again, because after all, this is not to criticize Fantasy. It’s hope for his strategic play to improve. It’s what he only lacks when pitted against the S-class.

A bomb, a powerful explosion is the onloy way to qualify woongjin's first round. Acquiring really and flying from estro in the pre-season, coupled with soulkey's rise to power toward the end of last season and with the format change to Bo7, woongjin was looking like a strong contender for this year's title despite their mediocre results from last year, barely missing the play-offs. Yet even the most optimistic woongjin fans dared not predict the 7-2 record their team earned, really started to recover from his deep slump and was suddenly looking a little better at TvZ while the team's ace, zero, was playing like he had been throughout last year's GSM (12-1 record that is). Meanwhile soulkey developed into possibly the strongest ZvTer on the scene, surprisingly crazy-hydra was playing decently and free was keeping up with his teammates with a 7-3 record. Flying high was woongjin's rising star .

Woongjin was leaping through the sky, traveling at the speed of light, like a shooting star. But shooting stars go down don't they? At the first sign of adversity, woongjin collapsed. After dismantling snow in the OSL ro32, soulkey was slained in his best match-up, ZvT, and against Hiya (that “I was 2-7 before playing soulkey” Hiya). Zero, despite being on a ZvZ tear fell to hogil (after a tie game in ZvZ). These harsh OSL result shattered something in woongjin's winning atmosphere, Soulkey entered a small slump,zero went back to his “how am I supposed to play ZvZ?” mode and free decided to play with only really actually playing decently on the team. The tides turned and woongjin quickly lost their first seven games of the round, finishing the round with a pathetic 1-8 record. Woongjin fans quickly went from ectasy to depression, a depression only eased by Zero and Soulkey making the MSL Ro16 (where zero was forced to team-kill soulkey).

Expectations were high when winners league arrived considering woongjin's 2010 WL (semi-finals finish) and GSM performance and, while Stars have been doing better with a mediocre 2-3 record thus far I can't help but feel underwhelmed. Both soulkey and zero have the talent and should by all means be in the top 10 proleague players yet they're both achieving mediocre results (except zero's MSL run). Free who is supposed to be good is not and only crazy-hydra is being impressively good for what people were expecting from him. Woongjin currently is looking like a soulless team, only helplessly wandering in and out of mediocrity and never quite getting into that zone where i can say “this is a good team”.

Why do you do this to me woongjin?

Though now that Guemchi is back...


of this man I am proud though

As players and fans, it is natural for us to want to talk about how good the players are. After all, we want to talk about who is hot and who is not, we want to know if our favorite player will be able to dismantle the other player, or if the opposite will happen.

There are of course, a million different things to consider when we try to make such decision. The factors that help decide who wins a game or not incldue raw talent (whatever that is), player's affinity towards a map or matchup, the opposing player's skill, how prepared the player is, how much the player understands his opponent, the player's emotional state, to even how many FPLers put the players on their antiteam. There are many variables such as these that make predicting the winner of a match difficult for the most part. After all, we do watch the games because the winner is never set in stone and there is always possibility of an upset.

Yet often times, we tend to overlook many of these dimensions. Factors such as biasedness (are you a fan, or are you an anti fan), prior judgements (key example here is Jaehoon), missing variables (not consider in factors such as map) all affect what we think of the players. The purpose of this article, then is to give you some things to think about when you think about player skill. This is of course, a small subset of many things that you should be considering, but hopefully this will be able to get you started anyway.

Winning and Losing isn't everything.

One of the biggest factors that we use to see if the player is good or not is by looking at the player's record. To an extent, people may be tempted to rate people by the record, and there is of course, much correlation between how good the player is and how much they win.

But what actually matters, as implied by the second paragraph, is the set of variables. It is often these variables that decide when players win or not -- and often times some players who post good record do it via a very unorthodox style that may not work in the future. One example is TurN's tendency to go all-in ver often that helps him post up good records, or ForGG's timing attacks during his peak -- once these methods are figured out and people are able to deal with it, many of these players take a long time to come back. In fact this was the biggest criticism against Bisu last season by Korean commentators -- that Bisu was not able to come up with anything new, but do more of the same old -- a factor proven by Bisu getting sniped very convincingly in the finals.

Biasedness

Fans and the Antifans are the people who are the worst at recognizing variables, of course. They have a predetermined mindset on how players operate and will go to their grave defending their idea about certain players. One of the biggest examples of this is Shine -- as many people still tend to shrug him off as someone who just all-ins everygame and often insults Shine's ability to go late game. Yet the converse is also worth thinking about -- Shine's really good at finding holes in people's games and abusing them so that the games rarely go to the late game for him. The former is less useful when thinking about player's actual capabilities, and contains less explanatory power when things change in the future (and it has in the case for Shine), while the latter can easily provide a reasonable explanation when the same event happens. Biasedness often prevents players from analyzing a situation properly.

Looking for Structural Changes

Many things in Proleague change, of course. From players getting "better" to players slumping (Leta T_T), maps changing, to build orders subtlely changing, all of these things constantly affect the game that goes on.

But often times we forget about this when it comes to players we already have a strong opinion of due to prior experiences. We look at Jaehoon and simply imagine him as a scrub, despite Jaehoon performing solidly this season overall, surprising many individuals (including the writer who had him on his anti team). Reporters often see changes like this and often get interviews to figure out the "secret to the player's success), as they become important things to report back to the players.

Things could be a bit more subtle, of course, as talked about before -- such as a slight metagame shift. This has happened with the 3-3-3 revolution -- where Bisu brought in a new era of PvZ and many players had to quickly adapt. If you want an example more relevant today, think of the Zealot pushes Protoss does against Zerg to punish greedy play -- or just imagine -- "Will Stork's PvT continue to be the best if he continues to play normally and everyone picks up Fantasy's builds?"

In the end there are a lot to think about when it comes to deciding if the player is actually good or actually not. But given that things change over time, true skill comes in adaptability -- player's ability to not only survive the metagame shifts but to bring them about themselves, with constantly adapting play. The true mark of an S rank player is the ability to transcend maps and other shifting variables and bring about new play that can overcome the disadvantages and still reign at the top -- after all, how else can they stay at the top? Without this adaptability -- glory quickly fades and players disappear into mediocrity.

First looking at the new map for the first round of WL, what is the most striking feature? the swatchiska that aside I find the way the side expansions (3,6,9,12) were made to be quite interesting. What happens there is that on one side you have a very narrow bridge to lead you in this expansion and from the other side you have a wider entrance. What's very interesting about this is that, looking at the picture I made, you can see that player red, spawning at the top right location is going to have a hard time expanding to say the 12 o'clock if he is playing against a player that spawned at the green main rather then expanding to 3 against the player that spawned at the blue main instead. Thus this mean that basically you have a 1/3 chance of almost being forced to take another main as an expansion instead. As shown on the following picture.




Taking the 3 o'clock instead as red playing vs green is not really that great of an idea either because the green player can simply attack it using the orange marked path. Arguably you could have your army located in the squared area but looking at how wide the area I circled in blue actually is, I believe it makes you vulnerable to an attack on your natural by the pink path. The other thing I wanted to note is the 4 high ground ridges formed withing the swatchiska. While an important area of terrain, what's amusing about this map is how many paths you can tank to reach the other player's bases. If you spawned as the green player, you can take either a rapid push path toward the top ridge, a slightly slower one toward the bottom ridge or run around troops toward either the top or bottom side expansions. This means that there are 4 paths you can take to reach the 3 o'clock or the blue circled area. This means that holding a ridge with a strong defensive position actually means very little considering the opposing player can simply walk around it. Using the ridge to mount an attack against the opposing player also is near useless considering it is much more likely that his army will be located in the blue circled area than in a place where the high-ground advantage from attacking downhill still applies (as illustrated on my picture by the red arrow that runs down the hill but only meets the opposing force a lot too far from the ridge for the high-ground advantage to still have effect). What this means however, is that while holding a position there is near useless, fighting opposing armies on the ridge actually is probably going to be game-breaking on the map. What I mean by that is that proper use of those ridges is probably going to be to scout the opponent's army movements and trying to reach the ridge faster then your opponent to block the attack.

I think that the play on this map will be very dynamic and proper understanding of your opponent's army movement is probably going to be game breaking for this map. I am a little worried about a slight positional imbalance in certain match-ups considering the first point I made but this shouldn't break the map and it should still lead to interesting games.

+ Show Spoiler [outdated predictions] +

Tuesday - 19:00 KST (OGN)
Last time these two played, Oz crushed Ace thanks to the return of Sashin. Now, it's Winner's League and there still have been no zerg allkills. One zerg in particular craves for that all-kill. His name is Park Joon Oh and he will even set aside some time away from being a kpop star to practice for this. The other match is T1 vs Hite at 18:00. (MBC)