January - March 2004
taken from a post by Waxangel
It's usually good to start off with a positive comment, but MBCGame's new MSL forces
you to curse. With 8 of the 16 players from the previous league receiving seeds,
2004's first League looks very much like the previous one. The 'funny' race
distribution does not help. Let's take a look at the HanaFOS Cengame MSL.
Sponsor
HanaFOS is a Korean(no, russian!) website providing all sorts of services; web
search, e-mail, blogs, etc. One of their services is Cengame, which lets you play a
variety of games online. It's pretty much what NHN Hangame is, just that it's
younger and less popular. Kind of like OGN and MBCGame, haha! HanaFOS has some
relation to Hanaro Telecom, a Korean ISP that sponsored a very old Starleague before
OGN came to be.
The total prize money is stated as 50,000,000 won (1200 won = 1 US dollar). It's not
that much compared to the obscene amount in the KT KTF Premiere League, though. I'm
not saying that the prize money is small, it's the largest amount MBCGame has been
able to get together. The Premiere league just has an abnormal amount of money.
1st: 25,000,000 won
2nd: 10,0000,000
3rd: 4,000,000
4th: 2,500,000
The rest of the money will be divided amongst the remaining players, somehow. It
would be better to cut 5,000,000 from 1st place and better divide it between the
remaining players, in my opinion.
Players and groups
The race distribution for this league is PERFECT. I mean, absolutely perfect. Seven
terrans, seven Zergs, and a toss and random a piece for variety. Beautiful.
Terran: ILoveoov, Nada, GoodFriend, Yooi, Xellos, TheMarine, Kos
Zerg: Yellow, Jinsu, Silver, SC_Side, Black, Junior, Chojja
Protoss: Nal_rA
Random: Chrh
Chrh switched back to random, which is pretty interested but probably not good for
Chrh. He's not a top terran player at the moment, switching races can only make him
worse. At least he played random for a long time before switching to Terran.
Because of the the race distribution, the group selection was changed. After placing
the 4 seeds in seperate groups, the remaining three players were drawn randomly. It
was not a completely randomy draw, a group would first draw a zerg player, then a
terran player, and finally any non terran player. After the groups were drawn
randomly, the seeded player got the choose which player in their group they would
play against for their first game.
The groups are not really groups, they are chunks of 4 player on a 16 man double
elimination bracket.
A: ILoveoov(Seed) - Yooi - Junior - Nal_rA
B: GoodFriend(Seed) - Black - Kos - Silver
C: Yellow(Seed) - Chojja - TheMarine - Chrh
D: Nada(Seed) - Xellos - SC_Side - Jinsu
The above does not show what order the players were drawn in, it was random so what
does it matter. The player next to the seed is the player the seed choose to be his
first opponent. So, ILoveoov went with Yooi, GoodFriend with Black and so forth.
ILoveoov and GoodFriend chickened out, picking opponents they thought to be easy.
Yellow and Nada don't have to beat Chojja and Xellos to prove anything, but they
went with dangerous opponents anyway.
Results
If Wax did his job well, everything is here.
http://www.teamliquid.net/images/brackets/cenbracket.gif