On paper this series seemed pretty cut and dry. SKT’s senior players stood up and trounced an STX lineup that hasn’t looked solid for almost two seasons now. However, these games were alot closer than the score appears. Sure, kal is slumping, and the SKT rookies yeOngJae and By.Sun rolled over and died to superior opponents, but Modesty gave Bisu a legitimate scare with an interesting lurker drop strategy on alternative, and Best almost managed to lose to Bogus despite acquiring a significant lead in the mid game. What I don’t understand, is why STX didn’t play Calm. Everyone knows Fantasy’s TvZ is suspect at the best of times, and Calm’s ZvT is ok and his ZvZ is fantastic. They could’ve send out calm instead of Kal in set 1 on icarus, where he has played ZvZ’s before, or even sent him out on Empire of the Sun, regardless of the poor zerg fortunes on that map, to try and snipe fantasy. So at the end of the day, stx had it coming. You don’t beat the best team in the competition by not using your best player.


The other opening match of the round, which was probably the most hyped, ended up being less exciting. The CJ protoss, overjoyed at being mentioned in a recent Bisu interview, took this new found exuberance into their games and stomped some Hwaesung Oz face. And despite Killer doing a super dumb 5 pool into speedling allin into burrowed speedling surprise, the real highlight of this set was Leta vs Jaedong. Leta, who had been avoiding 2 port wraith strategy’s in TvZ ever since Jaedong beat him while he was using the strategy, came back to his roots, and the results were remarkable. Leta's wraith harass and subsequent followup (expansion + bio + tanks + vessels) was executed brilliantly. You could hear the Jaedong fans everywhere wincing every time Leta’s harassing wraiths came back in and sniped a drone. Sure, the slumping Jaedong played fairly sloppily, but Leta deserves all credit for this routing of Oz’s ace player and CJ’s subsequent great start to the round.


I honestly cant think of much to say here. Stars rolled over and died. As far as excuses I can put forward for them, well zero didn’t get to play, but that is more of a lineup decision issue than an excuse. It wasn’t like MBC got amazing matchups either. Free should’ve beaten Jaehoon. Really should’ve practiced TvP if he was coming out on Aztec, and hon_sin really had no right to lose to sang considering the advantage he had. Sea vs light was the highlight here, as it so often is when players of this caliber play each other. But in reality, this result makes no sense. On paper, Stars are so strong, Zero and Soulkey are in great form while Really and Free should provide some solid backup, while the MBC lineup in comparison looks like garbage apart from Sea and Tyson.


Ace are really starting to look good ever since WL finished and regular proleague resumed, and their first game this week was no exception. Ace came out guns blazing and took out the #3 ranked team with ease. It seems like KTFlash is rearing its ugly head at the least obvious of times. All throughout winners league other players were standing up for KT and taking the wins, but now we’re back in regular season KT is starting to have dumb losses like this again. The games themselves were fairly entertaining for the most part, but ace games usually are. Hoejja showed us how to fail in ZvZ, leaving his pool open to be sniped by mutas with terrible spore placement and forgetting peace was allowed to hide lings. Interestingly, the most exciting game on paper, Flash vs Firebathero turned out to be the most boring, with Flash doing his normal tactic of making some stuff and winning comfortably. Piano continued on his recent TvZ tear with a really cool display of low tech marine/medic aggression. Busting up a ramp against lurkers is no mean feat at the best of times. Story of the day was Canata, winning his first game since joining ace this round with some interesting cheese and good crisis management to knock off the mafia zerg.


With Jaedong slumping, things are starting to look really grim for poor old Oz. Coming up against the entirely uninspiring WeMade FOX lineup, they once again managed to lose in convincing fashion. The worst part of this loss was that it wasn’t like Jaedong lost in an epic game to Baby or mind, he lost to hero[join], who has a 37% winrate. Oh Jaedong why do you do this.


This set, surprisingly, ended up being really cool. Notably there was a hive tech ZvZ between Juni and Hero, where unsurprisingly Juni(who practices with the hive tech master Great) pulled out some clutch plagues to take down Hero who stayed far too long on lair tech. Meanwhile the other stories of the day were Jangbi continuing his good form, and Kal actually winning a game, and a PvZ no less, on the most imba of ZvP maps in the current pool, Aztec.


Last time these two teams faced each other, it was an epic set that went right down to the wire, with Zero taking out bisu in a PvZ! I think all of us SKT fans have tried to forget that day, and fortunately our revenge was swift. While Fantasy and S2 managed to fail, their fails were almost comical, with fantasy attempting to open 1 port cloaked wraith into expansion, into bio, into vessel, and straight up died to 8 mutalisks a moving into his turretless base while he lost his wraiths to un-moving scourge. Hyuk stomped on an out of form Free with a nice comeback win, after having not getting a go in proleague since winners league. S2 decided to move his lurkers into a giant terran deathball and have a super later swarm and proved no match for lights super solid TvZ. Then SKT’s protoss line decided to make the end swift for the remaining SKT players, affording us another hilariously fail match between Best and Really, where either player would get ahead, then find a way to stuff it up, and luckily when the game concluded it was really’s turn to have stuffed up. Bisu took down an outmatched Flying without incident and then By.Sun played a really dynamic PvZ to finish off soulkey.



It seems like when CJ win, they tend to dominate, and apart from Iris winning on the terran paradise called Beltway, it was a near clean sweep. Once again the CJ coach performed well, and as a result, almost all his players ended up in their strongest matchup. There is a lot to be said for selection of lineups, and this almost seems a repeat of the CJ coach’s performance against SKT in round 5, where all of CJ’s snipers got their preferred matchup. Moreover the CJ line has been performing well in their off matchups, and I don’t expect this would’ve gone much differently if the CJ players were jumbled up.



This match by KT is almost a complete counterpoint to the travesty that occurred versus Ace earlier in the round. While Flash got taken out by a build order advantage and solid followup by Reality, the lesser heroes of KT stood up the took the reigns. Most notably was Stats taking down Stork twice! While the first game was a simple build order win with a 3 gate against a 1 gate expand, the ace match here was when stats showed off his impressive PvP skills. Both players had almost identical openers, but stats simply had better army positioning, and better control the whole game and kept winning fights and not letting the pressure off stork. The final battle came down to storms, stork had none and stats had 4. Storm is something that is currently underused in modern PvP. In a recent interview, the PvP master himself, Horang2 commentated that the strongest composition in PvP is Zealot, Dragoon, Reaver, Archon. And while this may be true, a lot of protoss are pre-emptively morphing almost all of their midgame Templar into Archons, where storms could’ve had a much bigger effect. Stats utilised this and brought about storks undoing.



Now this isn’t a sight you see every day, Wemade Fox winning without baby! Most of the games in this set were relatively underwhelming, however there were two more exciting games played. Jaehoon vs midas saw Jaehoon taking a huge advantage into the mid game, and then trying so hard to throw it all away. It seems like every protoss these days feels that carriers are the only way to best a terran late game, and as a result a lot of the PvT’s look like this game, with a refugee protoss desperately trying to hide expansions to fund their interceptors. Lucky for Jaehoon, he got just enough to outlast Midas. The other game of not was the rookie, Wooki (P7GAB) beating Hyun on Aztec. The current zerg plan on this map is usually to make 30 sunkens, take 4 bases, and pump out a bunch of +1 carapace muta/scoure and score an easy win. Wooki, it seems, had a lot of practice against these shenanigans,and came out with a fantastic DT drop + sair build, that killed Hyun’s 4th before he could mine from it, and almost all the drones in his main. He was a little sloppy with his sairs, but he expanded at a great timing, popped out some reavers and sieged down a flailing Hyun for the win. Hopefully wemade fox can carry this energy into their upcoming matches and try and rise up the rankings a bit.