Game 1- Circuit Breaker:
Bisu (P) spawned at 5 in orange on Circuit Breaker while Shine got 7 in white. Bisu scouted clockwise while Shine did a neat trick and send his overlord anticlockwise (rather than the usual route to the nearest nat at 10) and opted for 9 pool speed. There has been a recent trend of scouting for overlords to eliminate locations, because Zergs almost always scout in the direction of the closest Protoss natural when forced to choose between two equally close main bases and the weird overlord in combo with 9 pool speed could have given him a free win. In this instance though, Bisu was taking no chances and sent a second scout probe to Shine's base after starting his forge, wanting to ensure that there was no possibility of a third scouted 5 pool or similar.

Bisu scouted Shine's 9 pool gas build and responded with 2 cannons guaranteeing his safety against the threat of the six lings in eggs. After his probe went down the ramp to block a potential expansion, Shine made a further two lings and walled the ramp, preventing any more scouting of his main by Bisu. The first lings returned to drive the probe away from Shine's natural and both players expanded; Bisu having a significant economic lead, but Shine having the ability to deny scouting information if his speedlings were utilized effectively.

The speedlings picked off Bisu's scout probe and unfortunately, he had insufficient respect for Shine's style to have hidden a second probe on the map (a mistake which cost Best his first game vs Soulkey on Circuit Breaker). I think this was inexcusable hubris, Bisu was confident that his superior skills would easily be able to take care of Shine's "Bag of Builds" if only he knew what was coming but refused to adjust his play to scout more intensively. Four minutes into the game, literally, all Bisu knew was that Shine had at least 1 hatchery and at least eight speedlings. His probe wasn't able to check for a third at 9 or 10, nor even check for a natural expansion, didn't know lair timing, or if there was a hydra den. This is playing Shine on hard mode.

Shine went 2 hat lair with hydra den while Bisu blocked a ling runby that just wasn't coming and headed for stargate.


Refusing to modify his standard timings to adjust to his opponent, Bisu stayed on two cannons at his natural, took a fast second gas, started producing zealots and basically pretended that he was playing Jaedong (against whom small risks may be strategically swallowed to push timings to their limit). Shine's speedlings picked off a very optimistic scout probe that walked out under an overlord and Shine attacked Bisu's natural with range upgraded hydralisks, picking off the walling buildings and faking a hydra bust. The timing was a little early for a 3 hatch no lair hydra allin, but entirely believable for a 2 hatch hydra + ling allin play.


The build Shine was faking wouldn't simply run into the cannons and zealots hoping to win in a single attack the way 3 hat hydra does or do a runby the way speedlings do. 2 hat hydraling uses the hydralisks to destroy the gateway and break the wall (preventing any further zealot production) and then swarms through the gaps with lings to get on top of the cannons while the hydralisks shoot them from range. The existing cannons are destroyed and the flood of reinforcements theoretically prevent Protoss from stabilizing by killing new cannons before they finish. Bisu added three more cannons and prepared to hold his front.

Unfortunately for him, Shine's variant reduced the potency of the frontal attack he was threatening by adding a fast lair and fast drop upgrade with two overlords strategically placed ready for an elevator up to the main base of Bisu. Unfortunately for Shine, Bisu was extremely careful. Despite being in desperate need for information from Shine's main, immediately Bisu took two seconds to rule out an elevator.


There was an extremely tense few seconds as the first corsair did everything it could to kill the first overlord which had been left crucially undefended. Shine rushed his hydralisks over to protect it, but when the second corsair arrived it was sniped which was absolutely huge for the game. Bisu was facing off against a control group of hydralisks, eight speedlings with just two zealots, two corsairs and no cannons, but there was only one overlord available for elevator duty.


The elevator successfully established a foothold for Shine on the high ground, but again sloppy cover from hydralisks that were out of position allowed Bisu to pick it off. Shine had lings in Bisu's base and a corner that was covered by hydralisks on the low ground, but no overlords to follow up the initial success. Meanwhile, Bisu finally had a new gateway completed in his main and started adding cannons. With about three probes to every one of Shine's drones, Bisu could afford to engage inefficiently, all that mattered was that Shine wasn't able to kill him. Bisu's corsairs confirmed that Shine wasn't even mining his natural and he added more cannons and a robo, knowing that mass hydralisks and potentially lurker drops on mineral lines were basically his only lose conditions.

Shine did the only thing he could do, mass his overlords and prepare for one last epic drop. Overlord speed finished and Shine went for it, although he again neglected to cover his drop point with hydralisks on the low ground. The hydralisks established a secure corner of Bisu's base to drop into, but Bisu had a number of slow zealots, cannons dotted around his main and a reaver on the way. Shine's hydralisks did pretty well. He had made literally nothing, but hydralisks and overlords for six minutes and at this point, he had quite a few of them. It looked like Bisu might lose despite scouting it, punished for his hubris (he continued to mass sairs, get +1, make goons/probes etc rather than just make nothing, but cannons and wait for victory).


Then Shine started doing this for literally no reason.


Rather than use his massed hydralisks to destroy the robo bay (in the part of Bisu's base Shine now controlled) or forcing Bisu to stop mining or even just grouping all his hydralisks to overrun the gateways, Shine started feeding his hydralisks into a reaver, a few at a time. The critical mass of hydralisks was broken. Where previously Bisu could outproduce Shine but Shine could engage profitably due to his significantly greater force, now all Shine could do was trade.


GG

Bisu 1: Shine 0

editorial: Bisu played far more greedily than he needed to. His corsair game sense looking for that first overlord was nice, but had Shine been better prepared to defend or to replace it, Bisu still probably would have lost the game. Bisu had no defence against the drop beyond relying on Shine managing to throw away two overlords, both of which could have been defended by hydralisks. Even after getting extremely fortunate that Shine cocked up his opener, Bisu continued to play greedily, scouting that Shine was going mass hydra allin with just 10 drones on minerals total and not adjusting his play. Shine's build deserved to win but his poor execution and complete lack of a contingency plan in the event that both his first two overlords died threw the game. Meanwhile Bisu's weak scouting and weaker response to scouting information deserved to lose but were forgiven by his passable execution.

Game 2- Andromeda:
Bisu (P) spawned at 5 in white on Andromeda while Shine got 11 in purple. Andromeda, a classic macro map, really ought to favour Bisu although Shine pulled out an impressively prepared build vs Mong on this map in the Ro8. Shine opted for an overpool, the macro opening of players who want an economy but also don't want to let the Protoss scout probe scout them forever while Protoss confidently skips cannons. Bisu opened forge FE with just a single scout, holding off on choosing between nexus and cannons until he learned whether he'd find Shine at the second location he scouted. Finding Shine and the overpool Bisu correctly followed his forge with a nexus, cross positions on Andromeda being extremely forgiving.

Shine went for the standard hatchery at expo after overpool with Bisu refusing to contest it with his probe, instead watching the eggs and getting his advantage by delaying cannons and refusing to make more than he needed. As Shine didn't store up 3 larva and with drones steadily popping from the hatchery, Bisu went for a single late cannon, choosing probe production to match Shine's drones. Shine made two lings, one to scout for Bisu's location (although the probe scout timing strongly implied cross spots) while the other chased Bisu's probe, but this time around there was no expectation that Shine would actually deny Bisu scouting. At progamer levels, single slow zergling is intended more as an apm tax than for scout denial. In contrast to his normal style, Shine played with his cards face up, choosing to make extra drones and let Bisu see them rather than fewer drones inside a black box.

The game devolved into a classic macro game. Shine quickly dropping a third hatch at the mineral only and heading to lair in the most standard build of the current meta. As his lair neared completion Shine finally made four more zerglings and chased out the probe while Bisu neglected to drill a second probe to the main mineral line and honestly leaving earlier than he had to. The probe was successfully able to make it all the way home and contribute some valuable mining, but I'm pretty confident that scouting Shine's lair would have been worth the sacrifice. Meanwhile, Bisu took a fast second gas, made a stargate, started +1 air and dropped a robo in his nat, implying that he wished to go sairreaver.

Sairreaver is a very old school build, predating even the rise of the forge fast expansion and Bisu's revolution. It's over ten years old at this point and is generally considered to be inferior to the more common archives transitions from a fast expansion. Most viable on island maps although playable on Andromeda where control of the centre of the map isn't so important. It also has the advantage of offering rapid air control (safe vs muta), an early robo (safe vs lurkers) and reaver behind cannons (safe vs hydra break) making it a very stable opener.

Shine followed his spire with a fourth and fifth hatchery and ever more drones, declining to make the hydra den/evo wall normally considered necessary due to the threat of +1 speedlots, nor sunkens, nor hydralisks, nor even lings. At six minutes in, Shine had just five zerglings and drones, lots of drones. Bisu threw his first corsair away to scourge, hungrily chasing an overlord kill that really didn't mean much. Shine's third and fourth scourge scouted all of Bisu's base and picked off his third corsair which had been rallied to the main nexus and not to the cannons at his natural.



Shine switched his colossal economy over to hydralisk production and only hydralisk production. No queens nest, no third gas, no bases outside his initial three in his starting location, no evo chamber. Just an awful, awful lot of hydralisks. His scourge scouted that Bisu had no real production capacity. Bisu having just one gateway, and wasn't even on the same tech tree as the upgrades gateway units would need to fight against hydralisks. Bisu was playing a defensive macro opener, trying to take his mineral only quickly behind a shield of corsairs in the skies and reavers + cannons on the ground. Shine correctly identified that cannons can't move very quickly and that reavers take a long time to build, even though they're crazy cheap for how good they are, and that Bisu basically had a fortress in his natural expansion and nothing else.

After the loss of his first corsair Bisu didn't want to scout further without a critical mass that couldn't be killed by scourge. The loss of his third delayed that further and Bisu chose simply not to scout for 90 seconds. Therefore, this was the first indication that Shine had made some hydralisks.



It was panic time. Bisu had assumed Shine planned to continue making drones and was preparing to harass with his corsairs and reaver. He'd built a second robo, a second stargate, shuttle speed, +1 air and a host of other things that would be really useful 15 minutes into a macro game, but 8 minutes in, and facing two control groups of hydralisks, he would have traded all of that for a control group of speedlots, six gateways, and psionic storm. Shine promptly made Bisu's day worse by bypassing his natural and the cannons there entirely.


Sairreaver abdicates map control and the ability to contest large groups of units for harassment and the ability to pick your engagements carefully. A deadly sword composed of speedshuttles + reavers and an unbreakable shield composed of cannons + reavers behind them. Unfortunately, when twenty hydralisks are dropped inside your main, you can no longer simply refuse to engage them and the sairreaver nightmare, engaging hydralisks with reavers in open terrain happened. To make matters worse, Bisu made a complete mess of the engagement. With absolutely no ground army to shield the reavers and keep the hydralisks from getting on top of them, Bisu could only really use them to defend his main, which had blocking buildings and his natural. However, Bisu threw his two reavers into a desperate attempt to hold his nexus at his mineral only third, bringing in a screen of probes far too late and wasting half of his scarab shots.


When two reavers are literally your entire ground army and two robos (which produce reavers at a glacial pace) are literally your entire ground army production capacity, you simply cannot trade units against a five hatch hydralisk Zerg. Bisu's third fell and the absence of reavers allowed Shine to promptly snipe one of the two robotics facilities, further compounding the Protoss nightmare. Bisu's corsairs finally shut down the overlord airlift operation, but Shine's hydralisks already inside Bisu's base went for the kill in Bisu's main.

Something extremely questionable then happened. Shine did not tell his hydralisks to kill the main nexus, instead allowing them to free fire.


Then Shine realized that he should probably kill Bisu's main nexus because, you know, winning games, and told the hydralisks to focus it down to 200hp (out of 1500) before deciding what he really needed to do was to run his hydralisks to where the reaver slowly crawling to save the nexus was.


Bisu's one robotics facility hadn't been able to build a shuttle to go with his desperate single reaver defense and was entirely reliant upon Shine moving his hydralisks to where the reaver was, rather than the other way around, but after Shine did exactly that, Bisu took the opportunity to get back into the game. Mining resumed as his main and his corsairs worked overtime to keep the drops out. With two stargates and +1, Bisu stabilized and with Shine still on just his starting bases and just two gas the game suddenly appeared salvageable. It shouldn't have been, had Shine killed the nexus and then just switched off hydralisk pressure into powering the game would have been over, but Shine continued to try to pressure with drops when all Bisu had was a fortress of cannons, reavers and corsairs.


Shine still had no queen's nest, no evo chamber, no third gas, nothing but hydralisks and drops, determined to try and win in literally the only way Bisu could defend against. Another three control groups of hydralisks were suicided and Shine finally decided to try a different route.

A wave of scourge were produced, followed by a wave of mutalisks and double expansions to the 9 and 1 bases. Bisu stayed on his old school sairreaver style, refusing to transition into a ground army supported by reavers with harassment style that is more commonly used in modern sairreaver games. However, without control of the air, he couldn't establish an island third base or contest Shine's two new expansions. His entire ground army was still just reavers in shuttles, without even a slow zealot screen to defend them against hydralisks. Shine was able to expand without needing sunkens, spores, lurkers, or even more than a dozen hydralisks scattered around the map, and the droning continued. Every tool that Bisu could have used to punish Shine's expansion (storm drops, dt drops, speedlots backed by reavers and corsairs, dt sair) had been declined by Bisu in favour of committing wholly to the sairreaver play.

Finally the time came for Bisu to do his sairreaver attack.


You don't really recover from that.

GG.

Bisu 1: Shine 1

editorial: Shine's build was just better. He correctly read that Bisu wasn't going for any kind of gateway pressure (guessed blindly, but he was right) and massed drones. Meanwhile Bisu, with all the information he could need, let Shine go pure drones while using an opening that couldn't punish it. Shine threw away the win a few times (kill the damn nexus man), but Bisu stuck with the outdated variant of sairreaver and refused to transition it into a modern hybrid gateway reaver style. Bisu simply deserved it less. His scarab micro was sloppy, his early corsair losses were totally avoidable, and his strategy was simply wrong. Shine came up with an opening that destroys defensive macro sairreaver builds on Andromeda and then destroyed one.

Game 3- Camelot:
Bisu (P) spawned at 5 in red on Camelot while Shine got 1 in white. Shine overpooled again while Bisu did another forge fast expansion, following his forge with a nexus, correctly identifying that Shine wasn't interested in making more than two lings. Shine threw down a quick third hatchery at the 12 gas expansion and picked up a gas, representing a standard 3 hatch lair 5 hatch opener.

Some sloppy probe control reduced Bisu's probe to 2hp and, either due to overconfidence or a refusal to deviate from his normal style just because he was playing Shine, Bisu declined to drill a second scout probe to the mineral line in Shine's main base. The probe was finished off and Bisu decided to send another, but because he hadn't drilled it Shine was able to deflect it with some nice micro.


An early pair of zealots got nothing done beyond forcing lings, thrown away in an attempt to scout a three hatch hydra that wasn't coming, and Shine got his spire, drones and five hatch down. For his part, Bisu scouted with a corsair, started building up a corsair count, upgrading +1 air and ground and heading towards archives. With just one gateway and early zealot losses, it was a defensive opener, building up tools for use in the midgame while ceding map control in the early game to Shine. Two corsairs were picked off by Shine who, realizing that he could take air control, pumped a wave of mutalisks. The one gateway zealots attempted to exercise any map control but were met by this nonsense.


Meanwhile, the mutalisks responded by hitting Bisu's main; mutas killing the cannon while scourge picked off the next three corsairs. Normally, zealot pressure can punish mutalisk aggression, delaying it until Protoss has five +1 corsairs. However, the combination of losing early zealots and two wasted corsairs left Bisu vulnerable and his third, fourth and fifth corsair were left to die. The correct play would have been to pull the corsairs and probes to the natural while trying to recover with high templar from the gateway covered by cannons in the natural morphing into an archon while the undefended gateways pumped dragoons.


The mutalisks couldn't have killed the nexus before Bisu would have been able to pressure them with the surviving corsairs and dragoons. By trying to fight mutalisk and scourge with just three corsairs, Bisu threw away his chance to hold the mutalisks, lost control of his main mineral line and had nothing but a rangeless dragoon to defend against muta harassment of the probes at his natural. Three corsairs in the natural, hitting the muta when the muta harassed and backing over the natural cannons when scourge pushed, would have saved him. But a single rangeless dragoon let Shine have a party.

Shine didn't even bother trying to do anything, but kill probes, ignoring the dragoons and Bisu's retaking of his main base. The economic damage was done. As the last mutalisk flew home, it scouted that Bisu was committing to dragoons and with a wave of mutalings Bisu's army was made impotent. He pushed out with dragoons, corsairs and an archon, but again mismicroed his corsairs which were picked off while stationary, far from archon support. The dragoons and the archon tried to make something happen, but without air support Shine simply focused the archon with mutalisks and lings, tanked a few archon hits on his mutalisks and then overran the dragoons with mutaling.


The constant losses prevented Bisu from ever making any kind of critical mass. His stargate had never stopped producing corsairs, but by this point in the game he'd lost around ten of them. Likewise, his four gateways had been working overtime, but his army had never been allowed to build up, his aggression being punished over and over. Bisu stopped attacking, went up to six gates, added a second archon and sheltered his corsairs until there were enough to be safe against muta. After 90 seconds of playing defensively and massing Protoss midgame units, he finally had an army he was confident pushing out onto the map with; a critical mass of corsairs, two archons for mutaling, +1 speedlots, a solid army off of two bases.


Unfortunately, Shine was still on three bases, still on three gas and had lurkers, so Bisu's brief moment of map control did absolutely nothing for him. Mutalisks and scourge threatened a stab at the main and Bisu wasn't confident he had enough corsair to defend against them without backing archons too. Two high templars were sniped by mutalisks which got out basically for free, despite corsair air cover and moving shots. However, 13 minutes into the game, Bisu finally had the air control he'd been struggling for since his first corsair. His ground army could move freely and any mutalisk backstabs could be punished with just corsairs. He could finally start harassing overlords and using the corsairs for map control.

Shine then attacked him with hydralisks and lurkers and killed him. He'd spent the entire game making awful trades in the hope that eventually he'd get a critical mass of corsairs and have air control and when the moment came to kill all the mutalisks and get ahead, Shine revealed that he wasn't playing that game anymore and what Bisu really needed were observers. The only thing Bisu's corsairs could do was keep overlords away from the hydra lurker push so that a single dt could clean it up. Unfortunately, Bisu didn't think of that and so the game was lost.



GG

Bisu 1: Shine 2

editorial: Bisu lost corsairs in the exact same way as game 2. His first corsair had no business trying to kill overlords with a completed spire out and his third wasn't cancelled after two scourge were allowed to sit above a stargate. He completely misplayed the defense against the mutalisks and suffered colossal economic damage to them. The dragoon archon corsair push could have worked against mutaling but again, the corsairs got thrown away. Over and over the weak link in Bisu's army was that he kept losing corsairs, before they achieved a critical mass, trading them very poorly and getting punished hard for it each time. By the time he finally had his goal, the game was over. Shine straight up outplayed him. He capitalized very well on Bisu's errors and at no point did it look like Bisu had the game under control.

+ Show Spoiler [how it went down] +

Game 4- Outsider:
Bisu (P) spawned at 9 in purple on Outsider while Shine got 1 in red. Bisu did a two gate in base zealot rush to Shine's 12 11 opener, scouting Shine first, a pretty ideal situation for him. Shine didn't scout with a drone, but he was lucky that his overlord went the right way, letting him know that Bisu was rushing him. Bisu sent two probes to block drones from making creep colonies and the micro wars were on. Zealot probe vs ling drone, zealot probe winning easily in a straight up fight, but drones having the ability to turn into sunkens and a second hatchery slowly tipping the unit production balance in Zerg's favour (while the nexus pumping probes tipped the economic balance in the opposite direction).


Micro wars went on with Bisu getting the better side of the trades and although the two hatchery ling production ultimately proved to be more than the zealots could deal with, Shine lost over a minute of mining time on four drones, only one of which returned to the mineral line. To make matters worse, Shine left drones mining gas the entire time they were microing at his natural rather than taking them off after he had 100 for speed. When the dust settled, this was Shine's economy.


Bisu came out of the engagement with approximately 20 probes, five zealots, gas, and a core already started. Shine couldn't take Bisu's ramp with the zerglings and he was at a serious deficit in an eco war. He started lair and pumped a few more drones from his two hatcheries, but it was already pretty dire for him. Meanwhile, Bisu dropped a quick stargate and took a mineral only at 7. A hydralisk den completed in time with the lair, implying some kind of lurker rush, and Shine's overlord positioning over the map suggested he may try to slow drop them behind the mineral only at 8 (which he hadn't yet scouted), try to run them behind the main mineral line or at the very least, contain the ramp, forcing Bisu onto one base.

Bisu had again chosen to play completely blind until the corsair was out, despite the problems this caused him in games 1, 2 and 3. Speedlings made it impossible to slip a probe out, but a probe already placed on the map could have walked into Shine's natural and seen three drones, telling Bisu to spam cannons. A single cannon was placed at the top of his ramp behind the zealots, proof against a ling allin and, with a good enough probe drill, hydra allin. A robotics facility was started behind the cannon, Bisu covering his options.

The first corsair scouted Shine's natural and immediately saw that Shine had completely cut drones.


At this point, Bisu, who had a saturated mineral only and around twice Shine's 16 total workers (13 minerals, 3 gas), should have known literally the only way he could possibly lose the game is if he lost it in the next minute. There had been three minutes in which Shine hadn't been scouted. Bisu knew he had used that time to build up his economy into an unstoppable force that dwarfed Shine's, and he also knew that Shine had used that three minutes to do something completely different, something that involved making units that weren't drones, that involved lair tech, that involved a hydralisk den and that definitely didn't involve a spire.

So, armed with this information, Bisu continued to make corsairs, did not make an observatory, continued to make probes, did not make additional gateway units, made just one additional cannon and did not reinforce his ramp. This happened:


GG

Bisu 1: Shine 3

editorial: I know Artosis's rule is "when you're ahead, get more ahead" and given that Shine had no spire, no money to build a spire, slow overlords and very few hydra, I can see why Bisu thought that corsairs could win him the game. But if I might propose an alternative rule "when there is only one thing you can lose to, counter that thing". Bisu knew Shine was allin, he knew that even if he didn't develop his own tech, economy or army for the next few minutes, he'd still be ahead on all three if he could just not die to lurkers. And he knew it was lurkers coming. He added a second cannon after scouting all of that information and maybe he thought a second cannon was enough. But a third wouldn't have been so expensive. Not compared to losing the game. Not when his income was already over twice Shine's. Nor would a fourth. And after four cannons at the ramp were done, it wouldn't have been so expensive to put two on each mineral line either. Sure, if two cannons would have been fine, then that'd be 900 minerals wasted. But he had 900 minerals to waste.

Also it'd be so much easier for him if he just hid his 15th-ish probe on the map and then sent it to Shine's base at 5ish minutes. When you know you're playing an opponent who has a "bag of builds", it's worth losing a single worker's mining time to take a look inside that bag.