WCS Korea Season 3
GSL Code S

5th Place Matches
Trap wins last ticket to Canada

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Trap wins last spot in Season 3 Finals

by Christelle

With the four quarter-final losers gathered for one last shot at making it to the Season 3 Finals, Soul's Trap ended up being the unlikely hero who grasped this last chance. An underdog throughout the entire tournament, Trap showed his best play of the tournament to overcome PartinG and Jjakji and take the final ticket to Canada.

While PartinG and Rain—champion and 3rd place finisher at the 2012 WCS Global Finals—were considered the favorites to win the fifth place spot, they were outmatched for one night by Trap and Jjakji's inspired play. As a result, neither of them has a chance at returning to the Global Finals in 2013.



Match 1: Soul_Trap 2 - 1 SKT_PartinG

The Code S placement matches of WCS KR Season 3 2013 opened up with a set of seriously high-paced games between the alleged PvP-master Parting and the highly aggressive Trap.

The opening strategy for Trap going into game one confirmed that he was not about to stray from his path as an early-game-specialist in PvP, as he quickly advanced over the map to establish a proxy-stargate. In the opposite booth, Parting was playing a greedier game, going for a 1-gate sentry expansion.

Unfortunately for Parting, who decided not to scout until mothership core, Trap's proxy void ray was seconds away from completion before it was discovered. With Parting having opted to open sentries instead of stalkers, there was little to defend him from the first Void Ray as it entered his base. With his sentry and MSC destroyed before photon overcharge was ready, there was nothing left for Parting to do but tap out.

PartinG shrugged off his game one loss and proceeded to open with a no-scout build again in game two, choosing a blind DT rush that would most definitely have been crushed had Trap utilized the same opening. This, however, was not the case, and the tables quickly turned in game two as this time it was Trap who was caught off guard by his opponent's risky build. Though PartinG's two early DT's didn't end the game all by themselves, they did set up the follow-up timing attack that did, fusing into an archon to tank the photon overcharge and secure Parting's win.

Game three turned out to be an extraordinary display of the insanity that is Stalkers vs. Stalkers in the hands of skilled players. And I mean extraordinary. Trap would opt for a quick blink-build while Parting went for mass vanilla stalkers, chronoboosting out as many as possible for an all-out attack. With PartinG significantly outnumbering Trap in terms of stalker count, it didn't seem like Trap had a chance of surviving this doomsday attack before his blink tech could complete.

However, the laws of logic seemed to blur before one’s eyes as Trap managed to out-micro Parting in an insane encounter right in the heart of his main base. With the eventual pulling of probes and clinical use of the finished blink upgrade, Trap managed to push PartinG all the way back across the map. While PartinG had switched to robotics tech in the meanwhile, his two immortals and blinkless stalkers proved helpless against the stream of stalkers. Trap had beaten the odds and defeated Parting 2 - 1, keeping the dream of reaching the Season 3 Finals alive.

Match 2: mYi.jjakji 2 - 1 SKT_Rain

The second set of the night pitted Jjakji, the forgotten champion, against last season’s WCS KR runner-up in the highly renowned Rain. Rain is known for his orthodox play-style and ability to safely assemble the dreaded Protoss death-ball, but it was Jjakji who ended up getting to show textbook Terran power as he dismantled Rain in a best of three.

Dismantle, or perhaps inhibit would be a more accurate word. The tone for the series was set early in game one, as Jjakji quickly began utilizing scans to snipe observers and inhibit him from seeing the incoming drops. This ultimately allowed Jjakji to contain Rain within his own main and natural bases, forcing him to struggle without his usual map vision. With the continued destruction of observers Jjakji eventually landed a doom drop that sniped Rain's main nexus, combined with non-stop multi-drops in other locations. When the final skirmish occurred by Rain's third base, jjakji's EMPs dealt the final blow to a crippled Rain.

Game two boiled down to two key points. First was some very successful scouting by Jjakji, discovering Rain's twilight-tech opener with a reaper and the follow-up templar archives with a single dropped marine. Second was Rain's rock solid defense, anchored by a hero immortal that survived and cleaned up an SCV-pull all-in. Jjakji, basking in the warmth of the nexus-cannon for a bit too long, failed in his attempt to defeat Rain with his committed attack and found himself far behind. Instead of giving up he geared up for a second all-in with more SCVs pulled in a last-minute-effort to win, but found himself running into a wall of zealots that would not budge and the series was tied 1 - 1.

Game three went to the 15 minute mark without a major encounter between the two players, who were both busy establishing their scary end-game-armies. Things initially looked bright for Rain in this arms race as he had fooled Jjakji into viking production with a single colossus early (even hallucinating an additional colossus!), only to secretly switch to templar tech. Things were looking great for Rain as he safely established his storm-tech against jjakji's 10+ vikings.

However, perhaps Jjakji was left alone for too long for this gambit to succeed, as he had plenty of time to add a considerable amounts of ghosts once he realized he had been duped. Due to the same, continued sniping of observers as in game one, these ghosts were literally invisible to Rain as the first and deciding battle of the game took place by Rain’s third base. The single observer present was quickly destroyed, and Jjakji had no problems rendering all of Rain’s high templars useless with his EMPs. Without sufficient splash damage to deal with Jjakji’s army, Rain GG'd out to send jjakji to the fifth place match against Trap.


Trap and jjakji faced off in the final series of the night for the coveted fifth place spot.

In game one Trap decided to open up greedily, going for a very quick third Nexus on Derelict watcher, a map where thirds in general are quite hard to defend. However, the decision paid off as jjakji was unable to punish Trap after going for his CC-first build, and the economic advantage would eventually allow Trap to win game. The factor that put Jjakji beyond recovery ended up being his fruitless attempts to drop, losing too many units for too little gain. With the superior economy provided by his risky opening in addition to plenty of free kills on jjakji's troops, Trap was able to eventually roll over jjakji to take game one.

Another early gambit would see Trap take game two as well, but this time it was early aggression instead of greed. Utilizing a stalker and a zealot along with very precise micro of his MSC, Trap crippled jjakji's economy and army in the early game. While Jjakji would survive to play the mid-game, he found himself contained in his base due to the warp prism harassment, all the while Trap was expanding and growing even stronger. Though jjakji managed to snipe Trap’s main nexus with a successful drop, he was simply too behind from the beginning of the game to be able to turn things around and tapped out to Trap's continued attacks.

Game three was very similar to the ones we saw Jjakji play vs. Rain, with constant observer-kills being the cornerstone of Jjakjis eventual victory. The game was a long back-and-forth struggle between the two players, with both players finding themselves ahead and behind after constant battles. What ultimately decided the outcome of the game was Trap's decision to expand to the opposite side on the map, far away from his 2nd and 3rd expansions. Jjakji was able to exploit this distance with his final army—not a very big one due to the never-ending battles—killing Trap's 4th along with its protective colossi-based army to take the map.

It was worth noting that Trap looked strong playing a standard game in addition to his preferred aggressive styles, and seemed that he learned from watching jjakji's ghost play against Rain. Knowing that cloaked ghosts were the real backbone of jjakji's late game army, Trap tried hard to keep himself out of positions where a lack of observers could spell instant doom.

The final game of the night was similar to the earlier three, with the difference being that Trap’s drop-defense was impregnable this time around. He would exploit an initial error of Jjakji’s – a failed attempt at infantry pressure that ended in the loss of big chunk of his army – to turn a small advantage into eventual victory. Once again we saw Trap utilize warp prism harassment to great success, as the zealots dropped and warped in on the inside of jjakjis main took out a significant part of his SCVs along with several add-ons. Jjakji found himself with half the amount of workers of Trap, and more crucially, his army spread out over the map in a very unfavorable way due to drop defense. When the colossi finally appeared for Trap there was little left for Jjakji to do, even though he continued to impress with his ghost-play.

Without the resources or unit count to deal with the potency of the Protoss army, jjakji gave the final GG to send Trap on to Canada.