WCS Global Finals
Round of 8

by TL Writers

The World Championship Series 2015 Global Finals are finally here! 8 players have converged at BlizzCon to play out the quarterfinals of this year's Grand Finale. The quarterfinals and semifinals will be played in single elimination format Best of 5's, while the Grand Final will be a Best of 7.

herO vs Classic

It's a rematch 364 days in the making. Blizzcon quarterfinals. Protoss mirror match. herO vs Classic. Déjà vu and all that jazz aside, these two play some damn good PvP. Their meetings in this past almost-year, although few in number, capture both players' strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies in the matchup with remarkable accuracy. Indeed, it is telling that herO exhausted every stratagem in his book, and Classic fought back from the brink of elimination, nearly every time they fought.

Blizzcon 2014
Down 0-2, Classic was basically dead. herO had lost his fair share of important PvPs that year, but he was not one to drop the ball when it was already firmly in his palms. Yet, Classic knew herO. He had seen sOs prove herO's reluctance to scout his base for proxy gates, and took it a step further with the less-commonly used location on Overgrowth in game 4. In a few minutes, herO had fallen from a commanding 2-1 to an equal score. At that time his susceptibility to such a loss was more than a running joke, and for many it was both dumbfounding and painfully obvious that he could fall that way again. In the final game, herO experienced another trauma that would torment him in future meetings. With a small stalker advantage but no second nexus, herO decided that he would work his way back into the game by breaking Classic's natural while the SKT Protoss transitioned into immortal production. Although herO was, and still is, recognized as the epitome of blink stalker use across all matchups, Classic held strong and sent him packing.

Various meetings online settled in a 5-3 map score favoring Classic. One game on Echo in particular was redolent of the aforementioned game 5, as herO failed to crack Classic's blink-fortified expansion with a slightly superior stalker count on one base. Although these games had little impact on future tournaments, it was not long before they met again on the live stage for another best-of-5 series.

IEM Shenzen 2015 (W/N: this series is really worth re-watching for PvP appreciators)
As if there were any doubts, herO proved in the first game that even when the battle is too close to call, his impeccable micro will tip the scales. But by the end of game 4, when Classic's double stargate gambit was too much for herO to juggle, a few more truths about this clash of Protoss titans had been uncovered. While herO could force himself into advantageous positions with well-managed aggression, Classic could whittle his way out of deficits and temper herO's ferocity with patience and sturdy defense. Both players adeptly executed mid-game strategies to take command of the game, complicating the standard tech and economic progression of the mirror matchup as a test of their opponent's adaptability. Brought to the final set once again, herO collapsed again: this time with shoddy defense against dark templars. All the micro and army control in the world was not enough to salvage herO from his economic deficit, and the CJ Protoss was forced to watch Classic proceed to win the tournament.

GSL 2015 Season 3 Round of 16 Group B, Final Match
Just a month and a half later, the two threw down the towel in their third offline series. Reaffirming his dominance of the micro facet of PvP, herO punished Classic's slightly greedier blink opening with jaw-dropping ease in the first game.

But Classic shifted his game plan, showing that despite his lack of flair in execution, he could beat herO's aggression if he played more defensively. In the second set, with the help of Echo's defense-friendly terrain, Classic managed to work his way up to the late game, where herO had shown against more than a few times that he is tactically inferior. Classic had a better grasp on the ideal late game army and managed his resources more efficiently, and it was obvious herO was out of his comfort zone. In the final game, herO bet on Classic opening oracle again and made a phoenix before teching to blink. Classic, however, opted for straight blink, and with that advantage took an earlier nexus. Starting to sound familiar? herO rammed his head into Classic's natural in vain, and after a few pokes in and out, was forced to concede with no expansion to fall back on.

Now - Blizzcon 2015
Since then, herO won a best-of-7 against Rain and Classic lost a best-of-5 against Dear. Such is the nature of high level PvP—few players consistently win against the other elites, and there are often too many variables in an extended series to parse out reasons why one player was better. Nevertheless, herO and Classic have articulated through their rivalry distinct characteristics of how they like to play PvP. With the stakes as high as Blizzcon, it is certain they will be studying these trends as closely as stocks are on Wall Street. Every practice partner and close friend will offer any tidbit of intel deemed helpful, all to refine their strategic lexicons.
Does herO still lose to proxy 2 gates? He hasn't in a while.
What are Classic's greatest vulnerabilities when he plays for the long game?
To what extent can herO's strategic fragility be exploited?
What can Classic actually do if herO gets into his attacking groove?

In all the mental gymnastics and game theory they will do for this quarterfinal match, herO and Classic will of course not lose sight of the future rounds. Bracket (un)luck has dictated that they will have the misfortune of playing either Life—who, if he is in form to make it that far should be a frightening opponent in his own right—or the fan-favorite INnoVation. By virtue of INnoVation's apparent peak in form, both Protosses would naturally prefer Life. Life's way of disrupting the game's pace to fit his chaotic approach may be more preferable for herO, with his blink stalker wizardry and equal decisiveness. Classic, on the other hand, has already demonstrated his crisp, textbook PvZ against no slouch in ByuL, and it will be up to Life to crack that solidity. Against INnoVation, it is a wonder what the best formula to beat his TvP is. Both herO and Classic are equally capable of playing standard with the strongest, yet their differences in non-standard styles are noteworthy. herO is more fond of one base blink builds and mixing in dark templars to his attacks, while Classic prefers stargate-oriented cheeses such as proxy oracles or tempests. Classic's late game PvT is second to none, even when the opponent is Maru dropping nukes everywhere. And herO, although FanTaSy does not quite compare to INnoVation's threat, reminded everyone of his extraordinary flexibility against Terran as recently as the Round of 16 of this tournament.

On the one year anniversary of Classic's victory over herO at the 2014 Blizzcon, this year's Blizzcon will have already crowned the winner. But until then, two of the best in Heart of the Swarm's litany of Protoss savants have a score to settle.

Prediction: Classic 3-2 herO

INnoVation vs Life

A veritable battle of the titans is ready to unfold as both INnoVation and Life secured their quarterfinal places in quick, one-sided fashion. In many ways their identities are intertwined to those of their respective races, and their clash is representative of the asymmetric nature of the struggle.

INnoVation embodies the terran ethos: unshakable patience, godlike mechanics, and play more solid then adamantium. But if INnoVation is the rock that has weathered a thousand storms, then Life is the embodiment of a typhoon—fluid, capricious, and relentless.

A few things have changed since the last time their players faced off. Most notably, INnoVation has augmented his play to match the times. For a long while, INnoVation prized efficiency above all else, whether that manifested as greed, aggression, or "abusive". However, over the years, INnoVation has had to face the harsh truth—efficiency isn't always the best option in a game. He first discovered this against Maru, and then later on in his clashes with TaeJa. Maru abused his predictability to launch vicious strikes until INnoVation was so paranoid he couldn't anticipate the greed right in front of him. TaeJa's unknowable nature perplexed him and lead to TaeJa amassing a considerable advantage throughout their careers (20-12 record in games, 9-4 in series). Few players can boast a 60+% win rate against INnoVation.

Since then, the man more known as machine has made efforts to change. While he always included all-ins in his play, he has recently expanded his build order repertoire even more. He mixes more bio and mech, his all-ins are more varied and used more frequently, and he rotates through standard builds at a deliberate pace. Take his series against Zest in the GSL Ro8. INnoVation took the standard widow mine drop and added his own twist in the form of fast drilling claws, blindsiding Zest and leaving him apprehensive throughout the rest of the series. However in his Blizzcon games, INnoVation abandoned this strategy. In the first two games he elected to pressure with quick 3 rax, denying a 3rd base or doing economic damage. In the final game, INnoVation took advantage of Cactus Valley's size to go 14 CC, but took it one step further and set up a hidden base in an unused corner. The supercharged economy was enough for INnoVation to execute a devastating SCV pull.

All this recent praise sounds grim for Life. He has been in a lull since his monstrous start to 2015; currently he holds a 18-25 record against INnoVation. By all accounts he should be the significant underdog. But that's exactly what we thought last year, when he landed one of the toughest brackets imaginable. His first opponent was KeSPA poster boy Zest, who would later be voted Breakout Player of the Year and overall Best Player. Life squeaked by 3-2. Next he faced San, a player Life had struggled against ever since he was on ZeNEX; Life vanquished him with ease. Then came what looked like certain doom. Even before HotS, TaeJa frequently came out on top after their clashes. Before Blizzcon he had accumulated a 25-12 record against Life, only losing just 3 of their 14 series. Yet Life fought on and managed to put TaeJa off-balance enough to take him down.

So yes, the meta may not suit him right now, but it hardly matters when it comes to Life. He can not only adapt his play to the times, but also come prepared with builds that surprise his opponents so much that the game falls into disarray. It doesn't take much—a small ling run-by, a base snipe, a proxy hatchery—the merest sliver of an advantage can give Life control of a game.

Overall it feels like INnoVation has the upper hard, with everything going his way—his mechanics, the matchup and even his willingness to change. But we don't know if INnoVation's attempts to change are an authentic paradigm shift or an attempt to find a new, more efficient style. If it's just a veil of secrecy meant to disguise a greedy/standard style, then how Life responds will be key to shaping the course of the series. While his traditional blend of early aggression and extreme greed has tilted somewhat towards the latter in recent times in ZvT, Life’s never been one to shy away from a challenge, and with everything on the line, he could well revert to the former if cracking INnoVation’s late game mech compositions proves to be beyond him. Don’t rule out the possibility of bespoke builds popping up either—something akin to his proxy hatch into roach rush build that he debuted against Dream earlier this year, for example.

While Life wants to smother any attempts at greed, INnoVation's selection of harassment and aggression should be a concern. If the game goes late, he will need to utilize his mobility against INnoVation, and maybe even pull a page out of Rogue's book and go for some swarm host harass, while Bbyong's consistent success with hellbat timings against the KT zerg will surely have been noted.

One thing's for certain. We'll finally know if INnoVation is the new and improved T-1000, truly adaptive and lethal. Or if he's just a old robot trying to learn new tricks, up against a truly unpredictable force of nature.

INnoVation 3 - 2 Life

Rain vs sOs

For much of 2014, Rain was imperious, especially in Proleague. A 17-3 streak to close out the season, including a succession of crucial ace match wins, drove SKT to the Grand Finals of Proleague, and his PvP in particular looked like the best we’d ever seen. We often speak of many of the great players controlling a game, but while many do it through aggression (Maru and Life, for example), only a handful had Rain’s knack of passively bossing a game from start to finish. In most games, you can frequently point to a moment where the momentum sharply shifted in one direction—a particularly good engagement, or denial of an attempted expansion—but to watch Rain at his best was to watch an hourglass, slowly filling with sand until the job was done. His 0-3 defeat to Zest in the GSL a mere month after the conclusion of Proleague was, therefore, a shock. Not so much for the scoreline—any player can have an off day—but for the manner of his defeat. Zest took elements of Rain’s play from his dominant streak and turned the tables on the then SKT protoss. Zest took the bedrock of Rain’s ultra-solid style, and simply executed it better, and for once, it was Rain on the back foot, struggling to regain control of a match that was irrevocably slipping through his fingers. Too late. The illusion of impregnability had been shattered.

To play at your best, and still get beaten comprehensively, is a blow that must hurt for any progamer, let alone one with ambitions of establishing himself at the very top of the scene. Maybe that’s what caused Rain’s sudden transition in styles at the end of 2014. Freed from his SKT shackles, Rain has shown a distinct willingness to mix it up, from the hidden stargate opener that’s become his go-to build in PvP on four player maps, to the multiple proxies he deployed against Polt in the direst of circumstances. We often say in Starcraft that the best player is the one who wins the match. This is incorrect; it’s the best player on the day that wins the match. While Rain is clearly no longer the monster of 2014, it’s his variations that have kept him in competition in 2015. And while the Rain of yesteryear would have lost when playing poorly, or when up against a superior player, it’s those variations that mean he’s still here, scrapping his way towards the biggest win of his career.

However, that would mean getting past sOs. Coming into the Global Finals, the Jin Air protoss has arguably been the form player amongst the sixteen attendees. It’s becoming a bit of a cliché to say that sOs is a man for the big occasion (and complementary six figure rewards), but the mounting body of evidence is starting to turn a joke into something far more concrete. Success this week in Anaheim would mean that sOs will have banked three of the four $100,000+ prizes in Starcraft history.

His late season sprint to the finish has banished all the fears and disappointments of the early season. A traditional MarineKing collapse in the Hot6ix Cup finals may have gifted him a headstart in the annual WCS points race, but the subsequent dual failure in starleague qualifiers soon had us recalling the scattered disappointments of his prior defeats, rather than the twin victories that still tower over the rest of his career achievements. Slowly, though, the results began to return—top four finishes in GSL Season 2 and Dreamhack Stockholm, along with the MSI MGA championship. However, it’s been his late season form in Proleague which has had players praying that he’d be on the opposite side of the bracket to them. An sOs out of form is perfectly capable of taking a map off anyone in the world; an sOs in form is absolutely terrifying, as KT Rolster found out when the chilling predictability of his eventual reverse all-kill began to take hold.

His series against PartinG in the Round of 16, and in particular Game 4 on Cactus Valley, was a display of his power in microcosm. For all the talk of his vast array of build orders, and preternatural ability to deploy cheese at the best possible time, sOs’s strengths come down to one deceptively simple thing—he always knows what to do. sOs simply sees options open that the rest of us don’t, whether it’s a colossus drop against Zest in Proleague, or proxy gating herO in the biggest match of his life. Twice. That ability lends itself to winning seemingly lost matches or impossible engagements, and the climactic fight on Cactus Valley was the thin line between going home and progressing to play on the main stage at BlizzCon.

Stylistically, the match should favour sOs considerably. Rain’s traditional predictable defensive style is begging to be picked apart by whatever tools the Jin Air man has brought, while any early game aggression suits sOs to a tee, whose power grows as the chaos of a game begins to spiral out of control. However, it’s worth remembering that PartinG took sOs all the way to the decider, and could well have taken the win in four sets—sOs was far from infallible. Should he make the same mistakes in the early game, a solid display from Rain could well allow him to turn those same leads into victories. Expect proxy stargates from Rain, and at least one game changing DT move from sOs.

Spurring both of them on will be the knowledge that the other quarterfinal in the lower half of the bracket will be between Rogue and Hydra; both of whom the protoss pair would love to face. While both sOs and Rain have had better results in PvT than PvZ this year, the zerg pair simply don’t have the fear factor behind Maru or Dream, both of whom have dealt out crushing blows to protosses throughout the year. Hydra and Rogue are yet to truly prove themselves on the world stage, and the winner here should be relatively confident of progressing to the final.

Predictions

Rain 1 - 3 sOs

Hydra vs Rogue

Both Hydra and Rogue already have outdone themselves in this tournament. They had entered their Ro16 matches as underdogs, but they left as conquerors. They overcame their favoured adversaries against the odds, and thus they have earned themselves a chance to play on a magnificent stage in front of a giant crowd, in what is going to be one of the greatest and most important tournaments in their lives. After advancing to BlizzCon weekend unexpectedly, another win should seem like a mere bonus for any of them. That, however, isn’t the case. They have come to Anaheim for the ultimate victory, not to win a single series and earn a pat on the shoulders. They will stand on this stage for one purpose only: triumph.

Hydra knows the feeling. He has stood in the center of an arena several times before, with everything on the line. He is experienced in playoff situations, he knows the pressure. One critical difference to Rogue however, is that he knows how to deal with it. After all Hydra is a champion. He won an MSL in 2011, fighting through a bracket full of ZvZ series: Calm fell against him first, Jaedong next, and at last Great fell as well. That was four years ago—almost an eternity in esport terms. Having won a championship, some players can feel satisfied; their hunger for triumph stilled. True champions, however, always stay hungry. And if they aren’t able to win another title, this hunger starts to consume them.

Unable to satisfy his lust for glory in Korea, unhappy with the amount of opportunities in his home, Hydra fled to North America this year. In WCS a buffet had been opened and Hydra had claimed his share, taking one second place and one championship. The zerg player became the fourth Brood War champion ever to triumph in a StarCraft 2 premier tournament. However, that didn’t make the ROOT Gaming player a favourite for BlizzCon—far from that. People had doubts about his abilities; after all he had fled from the hardest region to make easy WCS money. Surely he would be crushed by KeSPA opponents, who qualified through tournaments many times more deadly than anything Hydra ever had to face in the west. He had to prove that his spot was indeed one earned legitimately.

And that he did. He beat Dream, a two times StarLeague runner-up and deadly TvZ player. He might not have done it in dominating fashion, but that’s not important. He won, and that’s everything that counts in the end. Hydra did whatever was necessary to secure his advancement. Against his next opponent, this needs to be the path followed as well. Figuring out Rogue might prove more difficult than finding Dream’s weak points however. Hydra, together with his team’s captain, is a master of the unexpected. He knows how to find weaknesses, how to best use his own strengths, and what factors are to be considered when preparing a series. As he has shown against Dream, Hydra doesn’t hold back as soon as he identifies his opponents’ vulnerabilities, hitting that spot again and again. Boasting a record of 122-91 in maps and 54-37 in series against fellow Koreans in Heart of the Swarm, we can deduce that Hydra very well knows how to approach a ZvZ. Recently the picture was a bit more mixed up, but with the semifinals on the line Hydra will surely double his efforts.

Jin Air’s Rogue is much the same, in more than one way. Not only is Rogue also an excellent planner, his craziness even surpasses anything that the ROOT minds can come up with, as he has shown repeatedly over the course of this year, most of all in Proleague. However Rogue's grave shortcoming should be obvious to anyone: despite his consistency in reaching quarterfinals in premier tournaments, the zerg player just isn’t able to overcome them. His nerves and mentality have so far failed him in every huge Ro8 series of his career. Rogue’s chaotic style might have given him the opportunity to reach many playoffs, but his lack of mental fortitude in those important moments has cost him the chance to actually make an impact, and to go for the ultimate victory. It seems that Rogue, unlike Hydra, has a limit he cannot pass.

The numbers might ease his itching nerves a little bit at least, because his chances look good enough statistically, bringing a record of 105-75 in maps and 53-34 in series to the table—in a deadlier environment than the ROOT player. Additionally Rogue hasn’t played many ZvZs in the last weeks, making it even harder for Hydra to guess how exactly he is going to approach this series.

Korea’s zerg mirrors have seen a lot of mutalisks recently, blessedly reducing the frequency of the roach wars which had dominated the match-up for so long. Sure, roaches have still seen their fair share of usage, sometimes even together with mutalisks, but air superiority has been priority number one. However, outside of Korea, this trend wasn’t really picked up. It may be because of the different map pools, or because the players just feel more comfortable without it.

If the two styles clash here, we are in for an interesting ride, especially because the week of preparation time for this duel plays to one of their shared strengths. In head to head Hydra leads against Rogue quite clearly, losing only one of seven series against the Jin Air zerg. However, with their most recent encounter coming in March, that might not be too reliable an indicator, especially because Rogue has greater demons to conquer. He not only has to defeat Hydra, he has to finally break his chains and overcome his own limits if he wants to have a shot at being world champion. This one is going to be close, and both could really come out ahead here. However, this might at last be the time Rogue unleashes his full potential.

Hydra 2 – 3 Rogue