Blog about starcraft

Copy pasted from other blog but I spent like 2 hours on it so I decided to post it here as well because it doesn't just cover poker stuff!

Introduction

Hey guys, it's been a while. The past weeks have been really busy for me and I haven't been able to do a lot of activities concerning poker. This was mostly because of two 'trips' I made and having to finish school. I attended the Pinkpop festival for the third year in a row actually which was a lot of fun. The weekend after that I went to Paris which was supposed to be a meeting with ToT (my team from Starcraft) but it ended up being just Eleo (for the starcraft guys, Eleo is Mondragon's girlfriend) and me. I don't think I'm going to do a write-up on Paris because it's honestly not that interesting. I saw a lot of cool stuff in Paris but all I did was see the city basically and honestly this blogpost is simply going to be too long.

So basically this is going to be long anyway with a lot of pictures. Hope not too long because I don't want to write this for no reason because you only read like half of it :D

Graduation

First things first: I graduated on 16 June for my bachelor's degree in civil engineering. I was actually 1 year late because of me being a lazy bum but I finally finished which is of course awesome news and I'm superhappy about it. Now I can finally move forward with my life. More about that later. First I want to write about the festival and Paris.

Pinkpop

This year we had a group of 7 people in total. A little less than last year but that's probably better at a festival because otherwise the difference in interest will just become a hassle. The usual people were there at least with 2 newcomers . As usual, I would go by car and bring the bags and camping stuff and the others would take the train while bringing the tents.

I already posted the lineup/schedule in my last blog item but here it is again:



I'll just continue this 'trip report' by day.

Saturday

I left home at 08:00 or so to pick up my friend who was gonna be my co-driver. He doesn't have a driver's license but it's nice to have someone with you for the long trip and to make out the correct driving route and stuff. We picked up bread at the bakery for the next 4 days and we were on our way. The trip would last us around 3,5 hours normally but it ended up being 6 hours because of all the traffic jams around the town where the festival was held. Doh, 50.000 campers . Good thing our friends had the tents.. they were already there at around 10:30 and picked a nice spot to the tents up so that was good. Anyway the parking spot we got assigned was really far away from the camping site so we had to walk like 30 minutes with all our bags and stuff. At least it was downhill which helped a lot.


Signposts which mean: 'faster than you think' and 'chance of a traffic jam', we had a healthy laugh about those while actually being in a traffic jam for 1,5 hours

We only got to the festival terrain at 17:30 so we missed the first few bands. Nothing we REALLY wanted to see though. First thing we did was get another pink hat to support Amnesty International (they cost like 6 euro's and they are pink, you won't wear them anywhere else but whatever! Because of driving for 6 hours though I was pretty tired. At the first 'famous' band which was the Killers (with their terrible song 'Human' - side note: it's weird though because the rest of their repertoire is pretty awesome) I decided to just lie down on the grass and just listen relaxingly. Good thing the weather was awesome all 3 days.

Bruce Springsteen was really good actually. He had a lot of songs that I didn't know at all but it was fun anyway. The famous songs were obviously most fun to listen to though. We watched it from a pretty large distance but that was okay.


Random picture from the Bruce Springsteen concert

Part of Born To Run

We were back at the tents at around midnight and I immediately went sleeping because I was supertired because of the long day and I still had two awesome days to go. Thank god for earplugs...

Sunday

Sunday I woke up because I literally burned out of my tent at around 10:00. It was really hot outside already. Had some breakfast from the bread we took with us and basically just chilled out because the festival would begin at 13:00 so we had all the time in the world. During the day it was a lot of chilling because the weather was simply too hot to do much. Listening to some fun music in the meanwhile.


Chillin', pink hat obviously and a beard from 1,5 days. Wasn't that bad yet, 2 days later it was way worse believe me

Anyway Maria Mena was relaxing, her voice is beautiful. It's kinda emo music but I like it. Madness I saw a little bit of but apparently the crowd was ecstatic about their performance. A bunch of cocky old dudes having the time of their lives on the main stage .


Maria Mena <3<3

After that we went to see a little bit of James Morrison who sounds extremely dull on radio. His performance however was really surprising because live he was a lot better than he is on the radio. Nothing too exciting though. Oh I almost forgot. The bad news about the festival was that the lead singer of Depeche Mode had some kind of illness which is why the band couldn't perform. Being one of the headliners, this was of course a real bummer for us and for almost everyone attending the festival that day. There were actually a lot of people who only bought a day ticket *just* for Depeche mode. They got replaced by Krezip which is a Dutch band who mostly sings simple pop songs that sound catchy. They were okay. They didn't get the headliner though. Placebo got bumped up to be headliner for the Sunday which turned out to be a good decision. I enjoyed the concert. The singer Brian Molko has this really unusual sound which actually makes it pretty fun to listen to.


Placebo

Placebo - Every You and Every Me

After that we went to see a movie in the out-door cinema. Basically a REALLY big screen with a large projector so the quality is pretty bad but because of the crowd you're watching it with, it's a lot of fun. We watched Taken and everytime Liam Neeson killed someone the entire crowd cheered and clapped their hands, lol good times. Little side note here: if you haven't seen Taken yet, go kill yourself. We went to sleep at around 02:30. Thank god again for ear plugs.

Monday

Monday was going to be the longest day simply because the festival was starting at 12:00 that day. We only got there at 12:45 though because the line at the entrance was humongous. That was okay though, we watched some fun bands like The All American Rejects, Mando Diao and Amy Macdonald was good for relaxing on the grass. After that I went to see the Script. Lucky I did because they were pretty good and Billy Talent was supposed to be pretty bad according to the critics. Just a lot of noise but that was about it. Franz Ferdinand was another good band to be relaxing to on the grass. After that I wanted to see Katy Perry and take some pictures for Byrnesam but I couldn't get close enough =[. All I got is this:



After that we jumped around some on Anouk and got some funny stares from people around us and we were gearing up towards the last concert of the festival: Snow Patrol. I kind of like their music and because it was the festival ender I really wanted to be at the front for that so we missed the Kooks and the Ting Tings to wait. Good decision because Snow Patrol was really good, better than expected. Most of their stuff is pretty mellow but they have some up beat songs as well. It was a really beautiful concert though and I enjoyed it a lot.


Snow Patrol

Snow Patrol - Run
How beautiful is that?

After that concert we chilled out a bit until we got kicked off the festival terrain. We sang random songs and got people to join us so that was fun. Thank god for earplugs again when I went sleepin' otherwise I'd be dead the following day since I still had to drive home for 3,5 hours. We packed up our stuff, used the remainder of our food/drink tickets on expensive fruit cocktails and stuff and stuffed all the stuff in my car. Left at around 11:15 and got home at around 15:00. First thing I did was take a huge dump, shave and shower. Hadn't showered in 3 days wowzers.


Ants

Plans

I'm planning on becoming a bit more active in poker again seeing as I have finished my education. Plan on making more videos again to satisfy you gents.

I also plan on going on vacation a few times as well in the summer although I haven't figured out where I want to go yet. Jamie (MidiaN) invited me to come to Korea so I might just do that for a few weeks?! Might be fun to finally go there. Other than that I have nothing exciting planned for now. Small window that I might still fly to Vegas but I doubt it.

I'll keep this short. I'll be playing on 5betpoker some more. I have a small roll there so I'll be playing some 200NL and 400NL to get things going again and then I'll just build up my roll there. It's fun to play with euros instead of dollars though. Makes it seem more real haha. Anyway this has been long and I applaud you if you are still reading. I hope it was interesting enough!

See you chaps later when I report on my latest endeavors .

Intro

I wanted to write a little about the liquibition and I figured why not do that in my blog, so here goes:

I was asked by Plexa to play in it against Drone on old maps so I was sure it would be awesome as I figured Drone and me would be pretty even skillwise with our rust from inactivity :D. I was scared I'd get slapped silly but that fortunately did not happen and we had a great match.

Introducing players

First a little bit about both Eri and me:

When I first saw Eri in a channel was when Nazgul told me that Eri was one of the best players around. This was back in 2000 or so when we still played Starcraft Vanilla (Original) and Nazgul was about to create Liquid. Eri always was a jovial fun guy that always tried to put effort into putting originality in his game. Later on he joined [pG] and went to the WCG finals in 2004 after winning WCG Scandinavia.

I started playing in 1999 or so and played Starcraft Vanilla until 2001 when I started Brood War. I got kind of known in 2003 when I joined iD. and started going high in ladders and winning against good players. I participated in WCG Netherlands 4 times from 2001 until 2004 and in 2004 I finally managed to win it and I went to San Francisco where I lost in the round of 16 to Zelotito. Afterwards Mondi begged me to join ToT and I dragged MidiaN with me .

I stayed active until around beginning of 2006 where the game stopped being fun for me to actively continue it.

The Liquibition match

On to the liquibition match:

The match pretty much started with Eri being pretty hungover and me suffering from a fever so it wasn't the best state of mind to begin the match in, but during the match I was doing okay and me being sick didn't matter *that* much.

I'll write about my thoughts on all the games.

Game 1 on Gaema Gowon:

He picked protoss and I picked zerg. Having played this map a lot in the past I knew that opening with multiple expands is totally safe while getting lurkers to pressure his expand on the ledge. The map has always favoured Z over P because of this so I was pretty sure I could take this match. I countered his initial harass with the 2 corsairs and zealot/goon very well by having units at all my bases to cover any drone losses while making sure I had at least 1 hydra on all the sairs so I didn't lose overlords either. I countered with around 10 hydra's to stop his natural from completing and because he had no storm I was able to do so. After that I just had such a big lead that I just macroed up, expanded some more and added some queens to make it even harder for him to break a contain (slow units against lurker/contain is no thx). One move that was pretty fun was that when he went up to his ramp with all his units, I was able to block off both chokes with lurker eggs for a short while so I had free reign on his natural with a small army. Game ended soon after.


Ramp 1


Ramp 2

Game 2 on Neo Jungle Story

He randommed terran and I picked zerg. Plexa mentioned a few times that we both practiced some builds but this was not the case. This zerg build was a build I used in WCG practice when this map was still a WCG map back in 2001 and 2002. Basically you can't really expand anywhere because your natural sucks because

1. It's really far away from your main
2. It's mineral only
3. It's hard to defend

So the standard was to get gas really early at around 11 supply, then get hatch around 12 or 13, then pool around 12 or 13. Because the bases were far away, no-one ever tried rushing so the build was a nice eco-build which allowed for a lot of gas accumulating. With that excess gas you could insta grade drop when lair completes and go spire and still have 600 gas for 6 muta's when your spire completes. So that's what I did. What was my downfall is that Eri also knew about this build and figured that's what I was going to do so there was some sick leveling going on. He countered my stuff perfectly by going goldrop/valk. I could've defended it if I had built more scourges and was more alert to his dropship so I could scourge it but he got a total of 8 goliaths on my island expand which was too much for me to kill. Game was over shortly after.


Goliath/valk against muta/scourge

Game three on Neo Silent Vortex:

I actually always loved this map because I almost never lost on it. You could always macro so fricken hard on this map. My gameplan was to just get some lurkers to contain him and take another base and just macrowhore while making sure he couldn't get another main. I patrolled a ling in one main while getting the other main up with a spore to counter any sair/dt harass. I don't think I was in trouble at any point in this game. He did broke my expands at some point but my ultra's were coming and I had a lot of hatcheries reinforcing my expands so I was pretty sure I could keep the main expands there. While he attacked me I also dropped his natural so his income was pretty much decimated so I was pretty sure I had the game won.

In the ending attack I dropped his natural and attacked his main while attacking his ensnared army with half of my army which was enough because his army comprised mostly of zealots.


Attacking main army


Attacking main army2


Dropping natural at the same time


Game ender killing the expand in the middle

Game four on Neo Forbidden Zone

We actually both picked random on this map because I didn't want him to have a huge advantage from the start because random on an island map is pretty huge because you can't scout him that fast of course. I ended up with protoss which I was fine with, granted that I thought Eri was either terran or zerg. My PvP has always been my worst matchup in Starcraft and things got even worse when my fast reaver went on a grand tour around the map to finally arrive at his base where I did minimal damage. After that I actually lost my shuttle and because of that I couldn't defend my natural expand which he killed afterwards. From that point on I couldn't really do anything and I left after some pathetic attempts on doing at least some damage with 2 goon drop sniping some probes and some reaver drops which did no damage because at this point he had double my supply and up a base.

Game five on Neo Bifrost:

Eri randommed Terran but he disced at the beginning so we restarted and this time he picked terran because that's what he wanted anyway. I picked my usual zerg. This map was pretty imbalanced back in the day in the fact that terran usually had it easy against zerg because they could pressure so well and without a gas expand that was easily defendable it was really hard for zerg do to anything. Also zerg raped protoss pretty badly as well due to all the different spots to attack and all the small chokes so lurkers became pretty strong.

This game however didn't show much of that. He killed an overlord pretty fast. My plan was to get speedling for some map control and get lurkers afterwards. After he killed my overlord, he thought that was a good timing window to attack me however, but my extra lings spawned at the right moment and I was able to destroy his marines with minimal damage. Afterwards my speed kicked in and I managed to run in and kill all of his infantry and some scv's. I kept pressuring with lings and got a spire because of all the marines I kept killing. After I got my muta's up it was quickly over.

Game six on Enter the Dragon:

Enter the Dragon is a pretty hard map for ZvT because it's really hard to defend expands and there aren't a lot of them so it's pretty hard to keep them as well.

Eri went mech again and started out with vultures which didn't do any damage. His drop also failed pretty badly because I had hydra's in my base fast enough and did a good job of killing the mines before they had a chance to wreak havoc on my hydra's. After this I teched up to muta's and made a sizable hydra/muta force to wipe out his first attack group.


Decimating his first army


Decimating his first army

After this I attacked his natural and took out a lot of scv's. I couldn't totally finish him off however and he stayed in there. Eri and me talked about the game afterwards and we figured on any other map it would've been over because I could easily take a few more expands and teched up to hive. Plexa mentioned a few times in the commentary that I should've upgraded more and teched up to hive, but because I had to spend a lot of money on units consistently to keep the pressure up and because I could not expand in far away places, this was not possible. What I actually should have done is get drop right away and put pressure on his main and get the islands as soon as possible. This is what I forgot and was also the reason why I lost. In the end his blob of mech units got so great that I had no chance of killing it. I got close a few times with a lot of muta's but in the end he just overpowered me.


Battles where I just ended up short of killing his army


Another close battle

This game was definitely the best of the series though, as it was really close at some points, but I definitely think I could've won this quite easily if I made the better decision of going drop after gaining momentum when killing his first army. Thinking about it now, maybe I should've even went for his main after killing his main army instead of going for his expand. Ah well, it was a fun game either way.

Game seven on Nostalgia:

This game he picked terran if I remember correctly and I picked my standard zerg. Because he meched in a lot of games I figured I could just take the nearest gas expand after taking my mineral only. My plan was to get ling speed so I could have some sort of map control and tech up to muta's soon after. Rage mentioned my exp was risky but I disagree. If he goes marines I would just get lair later and get sunkens at both my min only and my gas natural while having speed lings to counter/defend. If he goes tech I just get lair pretty fast and get muta's pretty fast to defend any harass.

He pressured some with marines but I had enough lings out to stop it while getting a sunk up fast enough at my gas expand. Ling speed kicked in and I managed to kill all his marines. After this I got my muta's up and his vultures and small marine force got decimated so I had free reign on his base with my growing muta force. The game ended pretty quickly so it ended with a disappointing game.

Overall I think the series was quite entertaining and we definitely saw some unusual strategies employed by both Eri and me on these awesome old maps. I think a lot of people enjoyed the games so I'm grateful for that.


Stuff that I wanted to do in this showmatch

ZvT: Muta/Queen. I wanted to do muta/queen against marines. I'm not sure why this is not used yet in 3 hatch builds, but if you can ensnare the marines, the new muta micro with the overlord grouping becomes even more imbalanced than it already is. Ensnare makes sure the marines can't get away and counter the hit&run from the muta's so it would be totally sick. Afterwards I just wanted to get 24 muta's, attack the command center and infest both of them. Unfortunately the only games where Eri went marine/medic, the game ended quickly (Bifrost and Nostalgia).

ZvP: Just play standard but add in queens with ensnare and broodling. I only got to ensnare because I was usually too busy to get more queens to really use broodling. The ensnares were pretty nice but not really *that* useful in these games . I think ensnare works best when you are lurk-containing because the whole idea of lurk-containing is to slow down your opponent and force him to waste a lot of stuff on your contain while powering up. By ensnaring the protoss units, you just make it that much harder to get out of there. In the end I just used ensnare in the battles to make sure the zealots and archons take longer to get to my hydra's and lurkers.

TvZ: If I got to TvZ I would try wraith/medic. Cloaked wraiths with a dropship with medics to optical flare the overlords. It's kind of hard to pull off but it would be awesome to see if it would work. I think it'd be hard against Eri though because queens > cloak, but maybe it would work.

Ending words
This got pretty long so I'll finish this by thanking Plexa to invite me to play the showmatch. I enjoyed the attention from Teamliquid and I hope everyone enjoyed the showmatch from two rusty old players .

Links to replays and VOD for those who missed the newspost:

Vod tracker

Replays

Cheers,

Twisted

General opinion

So it's been fun playing some Starcraft again after a 3year hiatus. I've made C+ in a few days. I was pretty sick all week so I just spent a lot of time playing Starcraft and being on IRC and stuff. It's been fun playing Starcraft.

The games are getting a bit harder right now but still quite easy for the most part. One thing to add though: I SUCK vs Zerg. I still hate ZvZ so I play TvZ but suddenly everyone microes muta's like a god which is really frustrating to play against lol. I haven't run into many really good z players except one Korean with like 55-30 stats (C+). I killed his gas natural on Andromeda with some 3 rax rushing but it still went to a pretty close game. He still had another gas expo on the other side of the map though.

One other thing is that almost everyone quick expands nowadays. No-one seems to play onebase style anymore. Against protoss it's really easy to play imo. You can adjust so well to what they are doing and just start macroing at the correct moment. Although it was still easier to play against 1 base protosses lol.

Some games from today

So there was this game in the gamelist. Some guy was asking for C+, B-, B, B+ while he was B so why not. Turned out that this guy was 70-4. He had the sickest macro I ever played against, so siiick. He made a shitload of cannons even and I couldn't even do anything. He just went standard quick expand and afterwards he teched up to speed zealots, ranged goons, obs, 3 forges and a frightening number of 11 gates. In 15 minutes he was up to 3-2-2 upgrades and just steamrolled me.

Here is the rep, maybe someone can find out who that is haha.

Replay

I also made a replay pack for those interested.

Replaypack

Especially the last wingame is a huge rapegame =]. My skill level probably increased loads because of some rustiness disappearing after some games.

Link to my account:

My account

So I decided to make a blog item for the first time on Teamliquid about WCG. I haven't been active on Teamliquid for a few years already, except the occasional thread closing and banning some guy but considering I met a lot of Teamliquid people this weekend I decided to make a little report as well. It's not gonna be epic like mnm's blog but whatever

I booked a twin bed hotel room at the Hyatt resort in Cologne with Kalle (my colleague from my pokerwebsite). It was a pretty awesome 5 star hotel with valet parking and they had some fountains in the lobby etc. so it was pretty baller.

Friday

I got to Cologne on Friday at like 9PM and I got to the hotel to find out there were like 8 guys in my hotel room plundering the minibar who had been invited by Kalle so that was a bit overwhelming haha. I found out that they were mostly guys from the german version of the poker website and some other people. I quickly punched down a vodka/redbull from the minibar before all was gone.

After that I wanted to meet the people from ToT. Mondi thought I was gonna eat dinner with them so he sms-ed me at like 8:15PM in the car that they were waiting for me so I called them to go ahead and I'd meet them after dinner. When I met them at their hostel it was fun meeting Midian and some British friends of his, Mondi and Ele were there and Lilsusie so it was fun to meet them all. I was already kind of tipsy there and I kinda urged the other guys to come with us to go drinking but Mondi had to play the following day so he didn't want to come and Midian had some stupid excuse that he was tired (wtf?) :D. So we just went drinking with the five of us only to find out that Cologne has a pretty shitty nightlife. We ended up in some club that had terrible music but we were too drunk to care anyway.

Saturday

Because we got at around 5 AM the day before we slept until like 1PM and watched the video on the stream while getting some breakfast via room service. After that we went to the venue and I met a lot of people over there. I got to meet Mnm there and Baal from WGT and the Liquid guys (Nazgul, Meat, Pooruser). I also met Ret, my fellow countryman. The last time I saw him was at some lan tournament like 4 years ago or whatever but he hadn't changed one bit hah :D.

Was fun to be at the venue and watch some Starcraft and hang out a bit. Kalle/me went back to the hotel around 7PM and I got ready for the Teamliquid meetup. I went there by myself with a cab from the hotel but couldn't really find the place at first because the taxi couldn't go there. Eventually I harassed Jamie a few times by phone but they couldn't find it either. I started asking random people on the street until I found a 'velo-cab' who could take me there. It was basically just a bike with a bench in the back so together with the guy we found it. I found out there were already like 50 people there. At first I was waiting for like a half hour to finally get a beer (too lazy to go to the bar to get it) and after like 1 hour 15 minutes I finally got a steak as well. Ah well whatever, I just talked to some Teamliquid lurkers as they called themselves, but I recognized their screennames anyway (Maenander and Konni I believe but I'm not 100% sure, sorry guys :D). After that I just went mingling with some people and talked to a bunch of people there. I didn't really talk to the Koreans because to be completely honest I don't care about Korean progaming anyway so I didn't really care about talking to them either .

Suddenly when on my way to the toilet I heard some guy shouting some Dutch like 'Now I recognize you!' or something and found out that was Nyovne, otherwise known as Forsaken~[TUW] (his bw nick) and it was a relief to be able to talk some Dutch hah. After that I spoke to the Teamliquid guys such as Pooruser, Nazgul and Meat and later on Puertorican was there too and I found out that he challenged Nazgul to a PvP betgame for like 10$ and they asked me if I wanted in on the bet. I wasn't sure if I heard this correctly. Puertorican wants to challenge the awesome protoss that is Nazgul for even odds? I was quite astonished but once I found out what was going on I obviously snapcalled.

Also met Nony and Tasteless and talked to them very briefly and gave them both my boost of confidence or whatever with their doings in Korea.

Also there were my colleagues from the website but they stayed away from the meet pretty much because they didn't know anyone from them anyway so I went and hung out with them a fair bit as well.

I kind of regret not meeting more people now. I was having fun as it is but now I regret it! I think we should've taken a picture with the entire Teamliquid Staff actually that was present. I actually dodged like most of the pictures even though I was there from 9:00PM until around 3:30AM so that was kind of weird haha. Ah well no worries, I'm just good at picture dodging.

Sunday

Got back at the hotel with a taxi and went to bed at around 4:30 I think. We had to wake up at around 11:00AM to get to the starcraft venue. So we took a cab and got there just as the game was starting. I saw Jamie there and we just got some seats in the back. If I knew you Teamliquid guys were all on the front I'd definitely go there. Oh man so many missed chances (not meeting enough people at the meet and not getting to cheer with the Teamliquid people goddammit). The final was really bad though and I enjoyed the Warcraft3 final waayy more. Also because I had Grubby to cheer on who I actually knew a bit from meeting him a few times at WCG 2004 and ECG 2005 and because the games were totally awesome/exciting/close. Warcraft 3 is definitely awesome to watch when it's top players playing.

So before the weekend I wanted to stay until dinner or something but I was really tired so we just went back to the hotel, checked out and I went home. I got home at around 8:00PM pretty smashed with a lot of good memories but not enough pictures. I actually didn't take any pictures except a few pictures with the website guys that are not really interesting to post here. I should be in some pictures that Eleonore made though but she hasn't uploaded the pictures anywhere yet.

A lot of thanks to mnm and Naruto for organizing the TL meet. You both organized the meetup in extraordinary fashion so you both have my thanks!

Not including pictures because I didn't make any and I'm not gonna take credit for pictures made by others =].

Oh edit: I actually will upload one picture so the guys that didn't meet me but wondered who I was know who I am for the next time (hope you don't mind that I hijack your picture Mnm :D).


Taken by Mnm

I'm the guy in the light colored jeans and the black/white striped shirt in the middle foreground of the picture (don't think it can get more clearer than that).

Maybe I'll blog some more in the future but I'm definitely going to attend more of these events (blizzcon or WWI or whatever) because they are really awesome. I might even play some Starcraft again to keep up my interest =].