EPTAn Introduction to Free-v-Z
My fandom was sparked by one game against Jaedong, which was one of the first games I watched getting back into BroodWar in 2008 after college. I want to talk briefly about this game, because it exemplifies several strategic necessities of winning in Starcraft.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSrljNirolw
+ Show Spoiler [Battle Report] +
free opens forge-Nexus-cannon before gateway and plays very safe into sair-DT. Jaedong opens with a pool-hatch build, and takes a third base (and eventually 4th), aiming for a 5 hatch attack. Both players are deterred from their plans by the others' preparedness: Jaedong makes mutalisks, while free goes HT-heavy (his first four HT are morphed to archons) and plays for pressure, with his forces out on the map (without actually attacking). Behind this screen, despite the mutas, free gets his third base up.
Both players continue to probe. free works up to five bases; Jaedong, with a little more effort, manages six. Jaedong raids free's nat with guardians; free adds a DA to his army.
Jaedong drops free's main but loses half his OLs before they can drop, to sairs. free cleans up the attack easily, and counters to Jaedongs natural, where he is met by lurker-ling, defilers, and ultralisks. He wrecks most of the defenses but Jaedong's reinforcements drive him off. Jaedong counters to free's 5th, but is driven off in turn by reavers, cannons, and the rest of free's army. Further skirmishing turns Jaedong's army to free's 4th, where he kills the Nexus, and pours in reinforcements seeking blood - but free's army defends and returns to its dominant position on the map.
Jaedong is slowly bleeding dry, while free slowly works on preparing to expand to his 6th and 7th bases, and runs several storm drops into Jaedong's mining bases. free gets his sixth up, but Jaedong's ultralisks take down the Nexus while free is pounding Jaedong's natural defenses again. But the Zerg army is cut off and mostly destroyed by a larger zealot-archon-reaver force. free stops Jaedong's 7th, and when Jaedong again runs in ultras to stop his own 6th from rebuilding, the previous scene is repeated, with most of the Zerg units dying to a superior army after destroying most of the Protoss buildings.
It's a little more complicated than this, but at this point free retakes his 6th, takes his 7th (with cannons) and smashes in Jaedong's nat, successfully this time. Jaedong ggs.
Both players continue to probe. free works up to five bases; Jaedong, with a little more effort, manages six. Jaedong raids free's nat with guardians; free adds a DA to his army.
Jaedong drops free's main but loses half his OLs before they can drop, to sairs. free cleans up the attack easily, and counters to Jaedongs natural, where he is met by lurker-ling, defilers, and ultralisks. He wrecks most of the defenses but Jaedong's reinforcements drive him off. Jaedong counters to free's 5th, but is driven off in turn by reavers, cannons, and the rest of free's army. Further skirmishing turns Jaedong's army to free's 4th, where he kills the Nexus, and pours in reinforcements seeking blood - but free's army defends and returns to its dominant position on the map.
Jaedong is slowly bleeding dry, while free slowly works on preparing to expand to his 6th and 7th bases, and runs several storm drops into Jaedong's mining bases. free gets his sixth up, but Jaedong's ultralisks take down the Nexus while free is pounding Jaedong's natural defenses again. But the Zerg army is cut off and mostly destroyed by a larger zealot-archon-reaver force. free stops Jaedong's 7th, and when Jaedong again runs in ultras to stop his own 6th from rebuilding, the previous scene is repeated, with most of the Zerg units dying to a superior army after destroying most of the Protoss buildings.
It's a little more complicated than this, but at this point free retakes his 6th, takes his 7th (with cannons) and smashes in Jaedong's nat, successfully this time. Jaedong ggs.
Analysis
While this game fascinates me, I admit it's not one of the absolute best ever played. free's micro was incredibly sloppy at times. Jaedong's decision-making was poor in many places and incredibly passive. But I do find it a classic example of the value of positional play (which of course in Starcraft is related mainly to control of bases, which is to say econ).
free essentially won this game by winning the early game strategic chicken. Athena 2 is an interesting map in that its central area can plausibly be controlled by a single "ball" army. There are side attack routes, but as Jaedong found (although he failed to utilize them as well as he could have) they are not the most practical way to move large armies around the map for a backstab. Therefore, when free's center-map army survived the mutalisks, and free had three gas (then four and five), he was free (heh) to make the high-gas units that would go toe-to-toe with Zerg Hive tech and win him the game.
To put it another way, Jaedong became a victim of his own early-game passiveness and what almost looks like indecision. Cannons or no, for instance, simply carrying through with 5 hatch hydra would have swept the Protoss units out of the middle and put the pressure on free. Later in the game, accompanying his drop on free's main - which pulled a lot of free's army to defend - with pushing lurkers out into the middle of the map would have gained him the map control he in fact never got. And finally, his counter-counter was a bad idea. He had the forces to push free's army out of the middle (and then expand, cementing an econ lead), but by committing them against the bases instead (to the final result of sniping *a* Nexus) he wasted his advantage to no positional gain, indicating at least a miscalculation.
Not to take away from free: many Protoss would have been overwhelmed by the flood of ultra-ling, would not have had the idea to stay in the Zerg's face the whole game, or messed up any other of countless decisions that won free the game.
Career Background
This game also is valuable because it demonstrates one thing free was (and occasionally still is) known for: unstoppable late-game play against Zerg. But investigating this further, I found something very curious about free's record. For the first fifteen months of his career, free was a Zerg-killing machine, racking up a 70% winrate. This brings us up to The Revolution - after which, in truly rock-like fashion, free's winrate dropped precipitously to a "mere" 58% over the next year. And that really does seem to be a turning point, for whatever weird reason: from beating Jaedong in series play, he went on in the next three months to lose to every good Zerg he faced (and FireFist). On the other hand, his PvT and PvP (previously mediocre and mediocre) became scary and also scary over that next year. In short, free became a complete player in 2007... but for some reason his stellar Zerg-smashing record became merely very good, and it coincides with Bisu's reinventing PvZ. You can see the changes on this handy chart:
![[image loading]](http://kupax.com/files/16713_aegfa/free.png)
The easy hypothesis is that free - possibly under coaching pressure - changed his style to match the new standard. I was going to write on this subject (leading into the question of, "How important is standard play vs. a player's own style), but I ran into a problem. I can't find any VODs of free playing PvZ before Bisu made forge FE standard. The only replay I can find is a game vs Calm on Peaks (and the replay is broken, meaning it's pretty old, and anyway forge FE looks kind of implausible on that map).
So... can some old-timer illumine me? What made free's early PvZ so good? Why did it change?
The other possibility is that Zerg invented something that countered free's style (more focus on early aggression?), but I don't even know where to begin trying to figure that out.
Can
