CJ Entus Update #1 [Dec. 14, 2012]

Recaps

Proleague: CJ Entus vs Woongjin Stars

+ Show Spoiler [Results] +

herO[jOin] played a wee bit funky but nothing too crazy, he ultimately killed the seemingly inferior fOKINS with a 3 base pre-Hive push, featuring a whole bunch of hallucinated Colossus. In the next set we watched the mental breakdown of Flying as he rushed for Mothership on two base, got most of the tech, then expanded. The game was maybe a bit closer than it should have been but Hydra eventually came out with the win using standard zerg play. In our marquee match of Bbyong vs Neo.G_Soulkey, we saw Bbyong rather handily hold off an early Ling/Roach/Bane bust and go into the macro game with a bit of an advantage. Keeping Soulkey to three base while taking a fourth himself and harassing heavily with dropships, Bbyong prevailed with the win after a nice long game. CJ's only loss of the night came from EffOrt at the hands of sHy. Effort seemed to hold off the DT rush pretty well, but then got caught off guard by a funky Blink Stalker/Archon timing and wasn't able to live through it. Finally we had sKyHigh proving himself to be a beastly Terran and upcoming ruiner of FPL anti teams as he showed one of the most flawlessly executed Mech TvZs I've seen to date, leaving ZerO seemingly helpless

Bbyong vs Nestea, GSL Code A

+ Show Spoiler [Results] +

In the Round of 32 of GSL Code A, Bbyong faced a difficult situation. Not only is his opponent NesTea a strong player, he’s a fan favourite trying to make his return to glory. Either Bbyong wins and people dislike him for it, or he loses and he loses (duh). Right out the gate, Bbyong showed how little he cared about that and proxied two barracks. Nestea scouted them pretty late and was unable to mount any respectable defense so he died. On the bright side, it looked very relaxing for Nestea as he retreated to his main base and watched his 6 Drones mine for a while.

The next game went very differently. No cheese from Bbyong and Professor Tea played very intelligently for the map (read: greedy), securing himself a decent lead without much actually happening. Bbyong did the normal Marine/Tank fun stuff for a while and tried to kill Nestea with some suave multitasking. Unfortunately, Nestea’s defense proved pretty strong this game and eventually managed to take an insurmountable lead with an Ultralisk based army before ultimately closing out the win with the help of some Brood Lords and a few Infestors.

So what’s the obvious solution? Back to Two Barracks! But this time it was a macro version, making the Barracks on 12 and 14 food, with one at the main ramp and one at the natural ramp. Nestea barely doesn’t see the second barracks but holds off the Bunker rush without much difficulty anyway. We see Bbyong do the normal thing with 3 CC and 4 Barracks, then does some poking around the map with his Marines and does some decent damage. We get a pretty normal Marine/Tank macro TvZ, similar to the Whirlwind game but with the early game advantage now going Bbyong’s way. And with that, Bbyong manages to take the game and the series to move on to the next round!

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Predictions

Proleague: CJ Entus vs EG-TL

Bbyong <Tal'Darim Altar> Jaedong
Bong[S.G] <Bifrost> TaeJa
herO[jOin] <Caldeum> HuK
SonGDuri <Arkanoid> ThorZaIN
Hydra <Cloud Kingdom> HerO
EffOrt <Antiga Shipyard> JYP

+ Show Spoiler [Ace] +

The match kicks off with what might be the highlight of the set: Bbyong against Jaedong. Jaedong looked really sketchy TvZ in his most recent Code A match while Bbyong seemed reasonably solid in both his match against Nestea and last week’s Proleauge match against Neo.G_Soulkey, so I’m inclined to give it to Bbyong. Then we have a newcomer called Bong[S.G] who we haven’t seen since the Hybrid Proleague. That makes the match hard to predict, but his opponent is TaeJa which makes it a lot easier. 1-1 we are!

Next we get herO[jOin] against HuK, two players probably best known for their PvP. Huk’s been looking very strong again recently but I’m not convinced it’ll be enough to bring down Horang2’s reincarnation and expect this match to bring about a CJ advantage in the set. Then we finally get our Arkanoid match! And it’s even a non-TvT as SonGDuri takes on ThorZaIN. I don’t know anything about Songduri or even about Zerg on Arkanoid, but I’m inclined to lean in Thorzain’s favour if only because of the map.

We get to see another HerO as the Liquid player takes on CJ’s Hydra. Hydra won last week’s match against the strong protoss player Flying on this very map but he didn’t look particularly good doing it. Also the match is indeed taking place in the month of December so Hero should probably win this. Finally we see CJ’s superstar EffOrt take on EG’s JYP. Though JYP hasn’t looked too hot lately, I’ve learned not to put any faith in Effort’s ZvP, so we get a 4-2 victory for EGTL by my predictions.

If I’m wrong about this (if the past is any indication, I absolutely am) and we get to see an ace match, I think the odds of us seeing a HerO/herO fight are pretty darn good. All I’ll say in regards to that match: Whoever wins, the casters lose.

Bbyong vs Polt, GSL Code A

In the final round of this season’s GSL Code A, we see Bbyong playing against Polt to determine who goes to the Up & Downs and who goes straight to Code S. Bbyong looked pretty strong against Nestea last round but Polt’s been on a bit of a tear and is looking like one of the strongest Terran players around right now. There are many Code A Ro24 players I could favour Bbyong over, but the mighty Polt unfortunately isn’t one of them. Prove me wrong Bbyong!

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Other Things

- This week Horang2 announced his retirement from Sc2. Very sad.

- I’ve made a CJ Entus Fan Club, go join it!

- I’ve started a weekly CJ Update to keep track of all things CJ. This is that. :D

+ Show Spoiler [Final Note] +