A rather entertaining game to start off the match, that is if you find pain entertaining. Finale tries for the voidray supported early push thanks to close by air positions. Stc realizes this to be the most likely build and completely counters finales. A blue hellion drop in the main kills basically EVERY probe, while still managing to hold his ramp in a bunker. It's rare to see a game more one sided than this.

What more fitting than to send an ugly name in after an ugly loss? With a sinister feeling from last game Stc opts for the all purpose harass involving a viking, banshee, and hellions to be annoying whenever possible. This proves to be more effective on the psychological side of things, clearly showing signs of it haven gotten under the zerg's skin. When the terran push comes Monster makes some egregious positioning and micro decisions. Although Stc seemed to be a strong position, when the base trade began to happen Monster catches him unsieged and that's enough for him to squeeze out the game.

Old Generation decides they need some more consistently in their players so the choice from here is clear. Nada sets up the perfect bunker and monster dies, that simple sadly.

With no idea how to counter consistency MVP chooses Keen for a potential DRG seat warmer. Banshee's fly by one other in the beginning, both ultimately doing no real damage. Nada then demonstrates beautifully how to stop a drop and then further and further extend a lead. Keen answers back with some stunning tactics bombing siege tanks and circumventing siege points. Eventually the back and forth results in both players having around 80 supply at the 30 minute mark. This is until Keen's vulnerable 4th becomes too much of a liability and Nada's longstanding bases prove to be too much

Now MVP decides to release their kraken in DRG, at a 3-1 deficit can he make the come back? Can he be defeated at all? Nada expands off his blue flame hellions while DRG techs to his trademark mutalisks. However these aren't enough to save DRG's third from NaDa's quick response push. The zerg answers back by double expanding, an interesting trick for an economic lead; this makes it all too easy for DRG to eventually whittle down the armies of Nada. Never really allowing him to establish any sort of presence on the map.

Will even a Hero be able to topple the mighty DRG? The last hope for ogs, well not actually last, but their favourite anchor opens with a voidray/phoenix aiming to kill a few queens. DRG realizes that many air units in his base means few ground units at the protoss home. So he counters with mass speed-lings...the lings just never stop and the toss units can never land a foothold. Lings >hero?

Last and perhaps least Cezanne is sent out in hopes of some ZvZ luck to pull out the ace game. Did someone say ACE MATCH? With DRG? Well that's business as usual for MVP. Both players get quick hatcheries and then banelings, Mr. D gets the H quicker while Mr. C gets the B's faster. DRG keeps Cezanne on his toes with constant minor harassment, and eventually catches him teching to mutas with his roach clump busting Cezanne's natural. Staying substantially ahead for most of this game DRG finally ends the game with a push supported by hydras. Yet again he pulls his team from the FIRE.

Does anyone really not expect DRG to reverse all kill teams these days? Reminds me of days with Jaedong and Oz.

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Last week foreigner favorite FXO took on the relatively unproven New Star HoSeo. FXO got all killed the week before, and they were hoping for better results this week. Despite the handsome headscarf hero Qxc standing in as the team captain, they were unable to turn out better results. Oz and Seal show off some very new school PvZ, with infestor ling against archon immortal. Seal gets too many infestors and not enough support, so Oz takes the game pretty simply. Oz's next game doesn't go as well, after his 5 gate timing fails he cuts too many probes and is behind in tech/upgrades anyways, losing soon after to Jjakji's superior army count and composition.

In a battle of the capital letter schizophrenia, OpTiKzErO goes up against JjakJi, JjakJi gets vastly superior positioning in the ball vs. ball battle and takes the game. JjakJi kills 27 workers of Tgun with blue flame hellions, afterward JjakJi sets up a contain that infestor zergling isn't strong enough to break. Qxc does a failed blue flame hellion attack into failed cloak banshee attack costing him the game.

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A true line, is there any other kind? That's who is thrown into the opening game for this match. Line opened up with a very fast pool in order to get an equally fast baneling nest. His plan this game seemed to be an all-in supported by banelings and an offensive spine crawler. While his attack did massive damage and set both the players on nearly equal footing, True had lingspeed after stablizing and Line did not. It doesn't take much explaining from here to say that speed ling a-move is just too good.

The next player is set to see if the IM player is consistent to his very innards. Core begins the game with a cute little contain keeping True in his main at the begging via pylons and cannons. True eventually breaks this and attempts a hilarious baneling counter, both players end up roughly even after this. The protoss then moves out with a moderate army and kills the zerg 3rd moments after finishing. True attempts to replicate this feat on the Protoss but decides to fight against the Toss army in a choked area supported by 3 cannons, losing his whole army. This actually ends the game because during this battle DTs completely ravaged his drone line.

The wise elder himself decides to take on the man that cute cannon'd his ally. Yoda decides to respond to his teammates loss with a cute yet awesome build of his own. Teching quickly to cloaked ghosts and sending a single one to his opponent's mineral line while the protoss tries for the standard voidray push/contain. This ghost manages to get OVER 20 kills! Core responds well by immediately expanding to the gold base and begins slowly climbing back into the game...until he suicides his entire army into the terran main for no particular reason.

Zenex next wishes to test the TvT of Yoda. To start the players trade harassment in the form of banshees and Byun adds in some hellions, Yoda comes out on top of this exchange denying his opponent while achieving a marginal edge of his own. Yoda establishes the air dominance in this game which always proves to be instrumental for TvT. His map presence, control, scouting, and extending tank range make this game much easier for Yoda. He forces a beautiful engagement where Byun thinks he can flank with marauders, but is completely shut down by a PDD losing most of his army. Yoda utilizes the beautiful air support of viking/banshee/raven wonderfully, making it impossible for Byun to stop his slowly crawling but never stopping push.

In hopes of confusing him Zenex tries throwing a Jigsaw at the terran monster. Yoda goes again to his awesome ghost opening, however the initial result from the build is not so awesome this time. Puzzle is completely prepared for the early ghost, ignoring the set back Yoda begins taking the lead and starts using nukes to gain positional advantages. Allowing space to push the natural, kill the 3rd, level part of the main and so on. Despite all of this Puzzle is able to react as best he can and keep holding on. Eventually storm makes all the difference for the protoss; medivacs with no energy and never ending storms is enough for puzzle to just barely edge out the win. An AMAZING game, one which I will gladly let my prediction last week not to come to pass!

With the loss of Yoda IM pulls out their first big gun in Losira. Puzzle tries for the standard protoss air opening against zerg here, Losira is more than prepared for this thanks to overlords. From here both players play very passive-aggressively, only poking and never attacking. Eventually when Losira has numerable bases and a maxed out army, Puzzle decides to attack into the zerg and naturally gets demolished.

FXO is having a serious issue with their stage fright. Almost every game, I see players making poor decisions that are uncharacteristic of them. Qxc took Thorzain to the ropes at MLG Colombus, barely losing game three in a 45 minute slugfest. Sheth proved himself in his Code A run of being a top tier zerg, able to duke it out with the Koreans. If you take a gander at FXO's Liquipedia page, you can see that they have turned out results at MLG and at IEM. Tgun and sLog are really the only two unproven players on their team, with tgun showing some very cool, but ultimately ineffective game play in his GSTL games. So the question is, why is the team doing so poorly?



To me, the most obvious answer is stage fright. Game after game, I watch as FXO shows some creative game plans, but there is always a single defining moment where a terrible decision loses them the game. Decisions like Qxc cheesing in TvT, despite being very solid at it, moments like Slog losing his army to a nuke, moments like OptikZero not spreading out his high templar, and moments like Tgun losing 27 drones to hellions. These players are better than that, I've seen each and every one of them perform better than that, and they are clearly dealing with nerves.

How should FXO deal with this issue? Their focus seems to be to try and give every single player a chance to overcome their nerves. Oz has been the only FXO player to be used in every single weeks matches, indicating FXO's confidence in him. Other than that, FXO seems like they want to cycle the rest of their players evenly, distributing the experience.

FXO's purpose in Korea, as seen through their game plan, is not to win the GSTL, their goal is player improvement. If they wanted to win, they would have sent out Oz, Qxc, Sheth, and Moonan every single game, but they want to spread the love, give their team experience and help everyone improve. FXO's goal is for the long run, and that's the right decision. I'd look for them to be very serious contenders in the future as a result of playing for the experience, not the win.

Let’s say like me you didn’t catch the games live, so you logged in on Saturday to check out the results. Let's just go through that thought process.



OGS played Nada? And he even won a couple of games? Figures he would wait until I put him on my anti-team to have a resurgence.

Wait, DongRaeGu scored 9 points this week? Seriously? The man's a fantasy-point machine! He practically prints money! Why the hell did I take Bomber instead?

Oh well, let's see what Friday's results looked like...

Huh. The most dramatic result of IM-ZeNex was Yoda scoring 4 points, with a smattering of other players snagging wins? That's... That's downright reasonable. IM played a fairly standard lineup, starting out with a lesser-known player to feel out the opposition before switching to Yoda and Losira to seal the deal, and ZeNex responded with fairly reasonable choices. Maybe I can get a handle on this league after all. Just the FXO-NSH match left to check...

Wat. Who the hell is Jjakji, and how did he score 10 points? You've got to be kidding me. ANOTHER NSH no-name player busted out an all-kill? Two weeks in a row? Wait, that makes NSH the most valuable team with 12 points for an initial investment of 2? Jesus god, what's even happening in this league?

Top o' the Leaderboard to ya
Looking at the leader board, we find that literally everyone in the top 10 has DongRaeGu. What a surprise! Nexic, at 10th place, gets the "only person in the top 10 who didn't luck into an all-kill" award, while overall leader mrbamboo clearly has some kind of in with NSH, since he managed to pick up both Sage and Jjakji the week before each went on a murderous all-kill rampage. Other than that, the leaders have about what you would expect; big points from the Gu and an all-killer each, with a smattering of points from various supporting members like Happy, GuineaPig and Alicia. It is worth noting that a number of players have already dropped Hack, taking advantage his inflated trade value to swap him for someone who might have a little more... uh... Let's just say "staying power".

Trade advice
Step 1: Trade any non-DongRaeGu player for an NSH player you've never heard of.
Step 2: Who are we kidding there is no step 2, this is the part where you profit.

Repeat as necessary.

Both teams coming from differing mindsets into this match with ultimately the same goal. TSL coming off a fairly easy win, and Slayers from a crushing defeat at the hands of Donraegu MVP. TSL certainly has the weaker line up of these teams, but Puma showed us recently he's capable of being the beast; is support from the world's best player enough to secure a victory? Nah, 4-2 Slayers



Both of these teams are yet to win a match, someone will inevitably break the losing streak proclaiming the other the worst team in Venus group. Fou has some legitimate reason's for their record, they played IM week 1 and got surprise crushed by Sage. FXO on the other hand were all killed unimpressively with nearly the same result this week, though they decent showing in their first match. The foreigners do stand a chance here but I'm not sure if they have an answer for sC. 4-2 FoU



Both of these teams have netted their only win from FXOpen, arguably the free-win of the tournament. Either side could take this match as Zenex has the greater depth and variety to their line up, while Startale have the players that can fire up under the team leauge format. Other than tossing a coin I'm favouring Zenex for this 4-3