Hana Daetoo Securities MSL 2010 Semi-Final A: Flash vs free
Thursday, May 13th, 2010: 18:30 KST / 11:30 CET / 5:30 EST / 2:30 PST
Thursday, May 13th, 2010: 18:30 KST / 11:30 CET / 5:30 EST / 2:30 PST
We near the end of the 2010 Hana Daetoo MSL. Flash, free, Calm, and Jaedong remain in the scene, and tonight Free will see if he can take on the ultimate weapon. I feel like there's not much need to write too much about Flash now, since everybody and his mother knows about how great Flash is, though I will take a slight moment to highlight his recent TvP statistics. Since the start of 2010, Flash has gone 22-2 against Protoss. Even though it's Flash, I'm still amazed by this feat. The only two games lost have been to Movie in the OSL finals and the infamous game to M18M. However, since that loss to M18M Flash has gone 10-0, taking out the likes of Shuttle, BeSt, Kal, Jaehoon (okay maybe this one doesn't count), free, and most recently, Pure. Most notably, Pure was demolished in the OSL semifinals, being unable to even take a game off of Flash. In his splendid post-game analysis using graphs, heyoka showed to us just how scary Flash's macro was: Flash was consistently outmacroing Pure (who was macroing quite well, in fact), breaking past the 20 supply deficit that Terran has compared to Protoss in the early- and mid-game.
However, Pure isn't considered the most notable for his macro, and here's where we take a look at free. free, Woongjin Stars' best Protoss, is known for conjuring up huge armies, and is touted as one of the few players these days that can keep up with Flash's macro. Of course, the same was said about BeSt last year before the MSL semifinals, and BeSt got 3-0ed by Flash in a pretty resounding manner. So before I talk more about free, let's look at the relevant statistics. free is 13-9 against Terrans in 2010, which is (almost) a solid 60%. Granted, a lot of the losses came at the hands of Terrans like Flash, Sea, and fantasy, but one sore spot that really sticks out is free's 1-2 loss to Fancy in the OSL offline preliminaries. free's PvT isn't the best (he's definitely way more notable for massing large balls of archons in PvZ), but he's defeated many Terrans on the road to the semifinals in pretty tough and exciting matches, beating Sea 2-1 in the Ro16 and coming back from an 0-2 deficit against HiyA in the quarterfinals. Unfortunately, Flash is way above anything Sea and HiyA can bring, so free's going to have quite the uphill battle. Head-to-head with Flash he's 2-7, and while Grobyc would be happy with that record becoming anything from 5-7 to 5-9 tonight, I honestly cannot see that happening. People say that Flash is unstoppable right now yet somebody will stop him soon, but I really can't see it being free tonight.
Either way, hoping for some good games, and a good series.
+ Show Spoiler [flamewheel91's faildictions] +
I definitely do not see free winning this, so the question becomes whether or not the score will be 3-0 or 3-1. I'm going to tend toward the 3-0 side. True, free could cheese and Triathlon is such a weird map, but Flash has shown to be invincible when it comes to deflecting oddities in matches. If free does take one game, it'll be on Triathlon, and even then he has to worry about Flash's razor-sharp timing attack. After the debacle that was the NATE MSL finals, destiny demands a rematch between Flash and Jaedong. I don't believe free is going to be the one to try an challenge that.
+ Show Spoiler +
I mean, it's the semifinals of a StarLeague... go watch them all. But still:
+ Show Spoiler [Set 1] +
+ Show Spoiler [Set 2] +
+ Show Spoiler [Set 3] +
+ Show Spoiler [Set 4] +
+ Show Spoiler [Set 5] +
+ Show Spoiler [o.0] +
I mean, it's the semifinals of a StarLeague... go watch them all. But still:
+ Show Spoiler [Set 1] +
Good game, features some nice micro and aggressive (sometimes overly so) play.
+ Show Spoiler [Set 2] +
Mismicro by loser. There's an interesting unit not normally seen in TvP though...
+ Show Spoiler [Set 3] +
Ridiculously one-sided. Just complete and utter devastation.
+ Show Spoiler [Set 4] +
No game.
+ Show Spoiler [Set 5] +
No game.
+ Show Spoiler [o.0] +
Wow Flash broke Jaedong's vP ELO record today...
How to watch?
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/hateplow
http://tv.zeroboy.net/roffles
http://tv.zeroboy.net/kentor
Thanks, boesthius, Roffles, and Kentor~
Post me streams in the thread and I'll add them here!