Not much to talk about this week, this is gonna be a busy week in school and outside school, so I do not know how much gaming I will be able to get in, but I'm hoping that I will find the time! :D
There's a lot more exciting stuff in the other parts of this blog, so I want to focus more on that for this time.
Although, I do have some things to say:
I watched Jinro's games against Choya today, and I can honestly say that I have never ever been such a nervwreck over watching someone else play video games as I was when I was watching their armies go back and forth in game 5. I was like "NO, JINRO, DON'T ATTACK, DON'T DO IT GORILLA TERRAN, HE WILL HURT YOU!", and when he finally won I fistpumped and was overjoyed! I'm sure you won't read this(and if you actually do, wth man, back to practice!) but I have to say that the last month you have been so incredibly impressive and I really think you deserve to win the GSL.
Speaking of the GSL, what happened? GSL 2 was AMASING, but now in GSL 3 it's all cheese and all-ins? wtf?
And to Ken Ashcorp who made the Tasteless theme song: damn you for making such an awesome song, I've lost track of how many times I've listened to your song(even listening to it right now), it's just awesome. I wanna have a theme song too!
I also finally finished everything up on my car, and I finally don't have to take the bike in -10C to -20C cold Sweden. HORRIBLE I TELL YOU, don't ever come here, who ever said it was a good country was wrong. It could be OK if we were further south, but we are not. I might have to put my progamer dreams on ice.(I'm so boring.)
Ok, done with the crap talk, let's get down to business:
Ladder
Last week I said that I was hoping to go over 2000 before the end of the week. I'm currently sitting at 2096 rating, so that part at least worked out well ^___^ I'm happy to be progressing decently! I'm currently 17th in my division.
Let's compare the ratings just like I did last week:
Rating before starting my project: 1129
Rating after the first 2 days: 1379
Rating last week: 1864
Rating now: 2096
I'm currently sitting at a 56% winrate. Could be better, but I'm happy with that atm.
Goal before next weeks blog: Achieve a 2300+ rating
Custom Games
Okay so, basically I've been practicing quite a bit of TvP lately, I am really struggling with this matchup, and I am nowhere near to having it on par with my other match ups yet, but I have been trying really hard to improve it.
I thought I would give you some insight on some stuff I'm currently testing out against my practice partners:
TvP:
At first, I tried to play it like I saw Naama play at DH finals. Slow pushing with turrets, sensor towers, siege tanks and bunkers. It looked a lot like BW. However I find this style really hard, and often I end up turtling hard which doesnt really help against toss. It feels like they really crush you once they are maxed.
What I've been trying lately is to just play it like a zerg. I try to always be one base up from the toss, and just make a huge bio ball. This has actually worked out really nicely for me, it really requires you to have great positioning going into the battles tho. I try to wait for my opponent to push out, with my units spread out in a lot of different angles, then the push usually gets crushed and it is usually a fairly easy win from there.
I find this style kinda hard to explain, but a replay says more than a thousand words I guess, so here it is:
http://www.mediafire.com/?j9q0jdffajmoorx
I think that is one of my first tries though, and if I don't remember wrong it is kinda marauder heavy. I have switched to a more marine heavy early game now, cause I felt it was too vulnerable to void ray rushes and also it really allows me to make a whole lot of units faster.
TvT:
I've been doing this style where I go for marines with fast stim and a fast expand. after the FE I get additional raxes and try to rely on sheer marine numbers, positioning and micro to deal with a lot of the early timing pushes that people tend to do in TvT. After a while when my expo starts getting saturated I get a lot of gases and toss up 2 factorys and start getting a lot of siege tanks, most of the time I skip siege mode. I also try to get a lot of upgrades for my marines. I then work hard to maintain map control so when my opponent moves out (most go for a bio-mech army with sieged tanks) I flank him with my unsieged tanks and my marines. It actually works better than it sounds, and I have a really high TvT win% with this build right now.
Replay: http://www.mediafire.com/?h5bvgy730nj24c4
There is also replays of this in the custom map cup folder in this weeks replay pack(more on that further down!)
TvZ:
I like mass marines, I really do, it is a build that suits me so much. Lately I have been struggling a bit with it against the 2base/kyrixstyle baneling busts tho, but I have been planning on talking to some of my zerg practice partners to tweak the build against that during the week.
Something I have been trying out this week is to get an extremely fast third with planetary fortress against zerg, which also have been working decently. I still have a lot of tweaking to do, but you can find replays of me trying that in this weeks replay pack. (check out the games against Seaking and VIPzzKigami, thanks for the games guys, especially Seaking since he has been practicing with me since almost the start of retail starcraft 2)
Tournaments:
This week I participated in three tournaments, heres the results:
ESL Late night cup (Round 2)
ESL Go4SC2 cup(Round 3)
ESL Custom map cup(1st)
ESL Custom map cup:
http://www.esl.eu/eu/sc2/#/eu/sc2/1on1/cmc9/rankings/
This is one of ESL's smaller tournaments, but I actually won it. I thought I would give you a bit of a more detailed guidance through this tournament, either you can read this, or watch the replays in the replay pack. Or watch both!:
+ Show Spoiler +
Round 1:
Met some silver dude, sent some marines early and the game was just over. Nothing else to say really lol.
Round 2:
Met a zerg on 2.3k rating, this was bo1 so I went with my mass marine build. We had some intense battles outside his natural, with me just rallying more and more troops to him. Eventually I sent a group of marines up and took out his third, and short after his natural also fell. After this I just went up his ramp and won the game, recieving some angry comments from my opponent after.
Quarter finals(bo3):
In this round I met a 2400 diamond rated terran. He and his opponent was still in the game, so I had some time to go through his match history and found out that he liked to go for blue flame hellion drops in TvT, so I placed my marines out to stop any drops and placed them in a line at my ramp to minimize splash. It worked out decently, although after some disorganisation on my part he got hellions into my mains mineral line, the damage wasn't enough tho as he had lost a lot of hellions and he lost that drop too. I eventually went on to take game one!
Game 2:
If I recall correctly, he went for onebase pressure that I barely held off with heavy losses, as I went for my standard marine heavy FE. In the end, my control of the xel'nagas caused me to win the game, as I caught his army in an awkward position and completely demolished it. He went on to call me a hacker and left the game. Feels good! Props to you, Noxout, for handling a loss real well!
Semi Finals(bo3)
My opponent was a random race player on 1.9k. First game he spawned as zerg and tried to baneling bust me. When it didn't work he tried it again. And again. And again.
Kinda like this:
+ Show Spoiler +
Eventually I just won since I survived all the baneling busts, not much more to it.
Game 2:
I went for mass marine again, as I feel confident I can beat most zergs just straight up, even if I used that same style before. I failed pretty hard on micro this game however, and thought I was going to loose. I managed to turn the game around slowly though, and pull out a win, mostly because of superior macro.
Finals(bo3):
My opponent was a 2k rated toss, and my TvP is just horrible so I didn't really expect to win. I went for a FE with marauders into bio + double starport vikings in all three games, while he went for colossus tech in game 1 and 2. Game 1 was on "Enigma" and it is a fairly wide map so I figured that if I just got a third relatively early and massed up a lot of units I could get realy good concaves on this map, and I should be able to beat colossus tech quite easily with viking support. It worked out nicely and I won game 1.
If only all maps were as wide as this one!
Game 2:
Second map was match point, I went for an FE with early marauder pressure. My opponent stopped it pretty easily with Force fields(tm), and even though it was a pretty even game, my opponent choose to attack me at a time where my first vikings had not finished yet. I was in a decent angle when the attack came, but for some reason I choose to back into a corner and take many unnessecary hits while relocating my army. I also didn't split my units up at all, so micro fail really cost me the game here. He went on to kill off my third and by then it was already GG.
A horrible sight, many scv's families cried that night.
Game 3:
I thought about my map choice for a while, looking through the map pool. I wanted a map that was as open as possible, so I could get as good concaves as possible if he would go for colossus again. I choose God's Garden, a map that I really liked in BW and that has a really wide and open middle which makes it just great for me.
I figured that if I just played like game 1 on this map, I would win no problem, so going for a similar plan on this map I had my expansion up when suddenly:
My opponent going for blink was very unexpected, and as I had seen his stalkers in the middle of the map, and moved out to snipe them with my marauders it could have turned out really bad, but fortunately my army wasn't that far out and since my army was almost only marauders I could clean up all the stalkers in my base while taking very little damage, I then went out to take out his proxy pylon and killed even more stalkers on the way there. Having no expansion and no army my opponent GG'd and I had actually won the tour, I was really happy!
ESL Go4SC2 cup:
I was doing really well in this cup and I had the flow up since I won the custom map cup, but in round 3 I went out to my doom against zerg, the baneling bust. I was really, really dissapointed after this loss because I really felt it comming, and I was making my wall bigger, but it was too little too late and I went out in the most embarassing way. I hope to come back with a stronger showing next week!
The replays from all tournaments are in this weeks replay pack!
Replays
I promised you a TvZ replay pack, and I put in every TvZ I played this week, even the ones I lost. It is actually very few replays for such a long period of time, and I'm not too satisfied with it, as I think I have a lot more of my TvZ to show than this, so I will be releasing a second TvZ replay pack once I have released the other 2 matchups replay packs. For now this will have to do!
As a bonus, all of this weeks tournament replays are included(except for the games against bronze or silver opponents that I got in this weeks round 1's, not much to watch really)
Here it is:
TvZ replay pack
To wrap this blog up, I want to thank everyone who have posted usefull criticism in my previous blog posts, I really appreciate it and I read all the posts on my blog so thank you, and hope there's at least some people out there enjoying these blogs! =)