[GSL] Code A Recap/Code S RO16 Preview

Results from Live Report Thread by SeeKeR.
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Class Mobility
– Vampire and Hyun send BBoongBoong and Zenio to Code B, while others defend their spots in Code A

Last week we saw all eight Code B challengers have the door slammed in their faces as they went up against an impossibly strong combination of Code A and S players. This week, the gatekeepers were considerably less formidable, and a pair of hopefuls found their way through. In the first match of the night, Vampire, a rotation player on MvP's team league roster, was able to upset recent Code S player BBoongBBoongPrime in three sets. Not known for his ZvP prowess, BBoongBBoong's inability to deal with mid-game armies of blink stalkers and immortals ended up costing him his spot in Code S.

The other player to drop into Code B was one of the GSL's most familiar faces in Liquid`Zenio. A GSL regular since the open tournaments of 2010, Zenio had been experiencing a stretch of bad form. He went into his match against TSL's HyuN after dropping several of his last ZvZ series, and the ex-MBCGame player only added on to his ZvZ miseries. A failed roach-baneling timing cost Zenio game one, while Hyun was able to clinch the series with a ling-bane bust of his own in game two.

– Cheese: A staple Korean food

A couple of the hopefuls from Code B learned the hard way that getting a shot in the GSL booth doesn't mean you have a chance to show your best games. MvPLure and SlayerS_Crank surely had to realize they weren't going to play normal games when they saw they had been matched up against coL.Heart ZeNEXSuhosin. Yet, they were sent packing to Code B nonetheless.

Lure's story was pretty standard: Heart masked two cheese builds (including double proxy-rax inside his opponent's base) and smashed Lure before he knew what hit him. Crank's experience was many degrees stranger. As expected, SuHoSin was determined to avoid going to the late game at all costs, and committed heavily to lair stage attacks in every game. More used to playing the role of the unorthodox aggressor himself, Crank was forced into a defensive posture as SuHosin battered him with constant attacks. In an ironic twist for SuHoSin, his aggressive play actually set up a favorable hive transition for him in the third and final set, and he was able to eliminate Crank with brood lords.

In AnnYeongPrime's case, he actually turned the tables on the entrenched GSL player by going for for three ling-baneling all-ins in a row against MvP's Sniper. Although this was good enough to defeat Sniper when he went for a hatch-first opener in the first set, Sniper adapted by going for more conservative builds and was able to take games two and three.

– Royal Record

Only a few weeks after Nestea received the inaugural "Lim Jae Deok" award for qualifying for ten consecutive seasons of Code S, SlayerS_YuGiOh achieved the similar but slightly less prestigious achievement of playing in ten consecutive seasons of Code A. While his achievement went unrecognized by GomTV, YuGiOh celebrated his royal jubilee by dismantling ZeNEXHarrier and guaranteeing an eleventh consecutive Code A appearance next season. However, YuGiOh will be eager to cut his streak short at ten - by reaching the Code S RO8 and staying there for good.

Games of the Night: SlayerS_Crank vs ZeNEXSuhosin – Games One and Three

The strategies for Crank vs SuHoSin played out as expected, with SuHoSin going for all-out lair stage attacks while Crank was forced to abandon any crazy ideas of his own as he focused on defense. However, the games took a very weird turn as the results of SuHoSin's attacks were largely inconclusive. SuHoSin couldn't break through and win the game outright (like he did in game two), and Crank never defended efficiently enough to take a big lead. The two players traded evenly for the most part, ending up in a limbo like state.

What happens frequently in that situation is that both players decide to take a breather and build up, transitioning towards a more normal game, but SuHoSin refused to relent. Even after losing twenty drones in defending one of Crank's counter attacks, SuHoSin continued to pump straight army instead of replacing his workers. This backfired on him in game one on Entombed as he ran out of steam by the end, but it proved to be a game winning choice in the final set on Ohana. One of the game's defining sequences saw a hydralisk-drone-brood lord army march on Crank's sole remaining expansion. It was a bizarre scene out of context, but a viable decision within the flow of the game.

Though it wasn't the most exquisitely executed or perfectly played series, SuHoSin vs Crank provided a lot of unconventional, scrappy entertainment.

Genius, Quantic.NaNiwa, GhostKingPrime, MvPKeen

Initial Matches

Genius vs Quantic.NaNiwa

Each passing season he survives in Code S, Genius becomes a more intriguing player. His main battle.net ID is unabashedly "king bubble," Korean slang for someone who has royally overachieved. Whether it's interviews or group selections, you constantly see other players poke fun at the mystery of Genius' continued success in Code S. It's extremely hard to tell how much of it is good-natured teasing, and how much of it is seriously calling him out on his skill. I'm often left wondering, 'could Koreans really be underestimating Genius' skill?' If there's one thing that differentiates Koreans and Westerners, it's that Koreans are far quicker to respect winners instead of getting hung up on some idiotic idea of who 'should' be doing well. It would be uncharacteristic of Koreans to so easily dismiss a player with nine Code S appearances to his name.

For a player who is chronically underrated, it was a bit ironic that Genius would pick NaNiwa for the second season in a row. Genius did his usual "I suck" shtick and underplayed his abilities (conveniently forgetting about beating Happy and Mvp and advancing as first place from his RO32 group), and said he'd like to go for a PvP. With Seed, MC, and NaNiwa on the board, he went with the Swede who he's 0 – 3 against, the same one whose Code S success owes a lot to his skill in PvP.

Genius covered it with the typical "I want to avenge myself" line, but really, this is too easily read as him underestimating the foreigner two seasons in a row. To be honest, foreigners win so few tournaments that you can almost excuse Genius for this pick... but really, he should have picked Seed. Especially after NaNiwa looked into Genius' soul and destroyed him last season.

As for NaNiwa, it's still kind of hard to digest all of his Code S success. At the very least he's equal to HuK when he played during the Terran summer of 2011: clinging in Code S through a combination of skill and match-up luck. More optimistically, he could be the first foreigner with the meticulousness, and just the right amount of crazy needed to succeed over the long term in the GSL (also, being on a team that doesn't exhaust him by forcing him to fly every week seems to be helping). In that sense, this is still an ongoing test for NaNiwa, almost twenty games into his Code S career. Time will tell.


GhostKingPrime vs MvPKeen

There was a time and age where you could try to sort TvT players by skill, but these days the match-up is in a real jumble, with a dozen or so players looking like they all have a similar chance against each other. You can divide them into sub-groups by playstyle, but it's hard to say who's truly better. Everyone's mechanically amazing, everyone has mastered the standard openers, and there isn't even much of a gap in decision making any more. A few stylistic outliers exist – like Gumiho and his insane-aggression, and TheStC and his devotion to mech – but by and large, it's hard to tell who will win on any given day.

Both Keen and GhostKing fit into that upper tier of TvT players who are hard to separate. Both players can use bio and mech, all-ins and standard strategies, and both are as mechanically sound as they come. Basically, it's a mirror match of TvT textbooks.

It's super close here, but Keen's shameless cheesing of Squirtle in the RO32 really impressed me. It takes some guts to flat out admit "I thought I was worse, so I cheesed," and then follow that up with "it worked, so I used it again." A guy with that mentality isn't afraid to do ANYTHING, and it's players with no fear who often do the best in tournaments.

On the other hand, it's hard to ignore how GhostKing served his suspension, shrugged off the old ESV weekly scandal, and has resumed his career as if nothing happened. CoCa's still trying to find his feet after that setback, but GhostKing has just powered through, looking like an elite player the entire way. He was a Code S quarter-finalist when he was disqualified, and he's on verge of getting back to his rightful place. Keen is cold blooded, but GhostKing has HEART (or some other internal organ that's a better symbolic representation of the mental qualities he needed to overcome his setback).


Winnner' match and onward

It's guaranteed Protoss vs Terran after the initial matches, and three of the four players should be pretty happy about it. NaNiwa and Genius both combine skillful death-balling with dastardly cheesing to create a deadly PvT package. Don't forget, Genius still has an extremely high win-rate in games above 25 minutes, and he also cheesed out Mvp in the last round. NaNiwa is similarly dangerous. The StartaleQ Protosses have shown a hundred and one attack timings in their various tournaments, making them highly unpredictable.

GhostKing brings that kind of variety from the Terran side. While some top TvP players overwhelmingly favor macro games, GhostKing throws in a healthy amount of one and two base all-ins as well. That doesn't mean he's lacking in standard play - he's just a very well-rounded, unpredictable player.

That leaves Keen, who hasn't stood out at the TvP match-up in his recent games. Well, no, he did make himself very prominent by beating Squirtle with two proxy-barracks in a row. Let's say instead, that while he's been in some high profile games, he hasn't looked especially potent in any of them. He beat SaSe in some decent games at DreamHack Summer, and then dropped a series to NaNiwa which included a funny base trade.

The thing about Keen is that I keep coming back to his post-match interview after defeating Squirtle. What kind of player flat-out admits they thought they were worse in a straight-up game, and so blatantly (and practically) resorts to cheese as a solution? What does that mean for Genius and NaNiwa? Does he think he's better or worse than them? Keen's comments are mind-gaming me as a viewer, so I can't imagine what his actual opponents must be thinking at this point.


Overall outlook and prediction

With four players who have the balls to go all-in no matter what kind of pressure they're facing, it's hard to predict this group. Part of me wishes these guys would play Zerg and six-pool all of those cheeky CC-first Terran players more often. Besides favoring NaNiwa slightly over Genius, I think it's near 50/50 in all these series.

NaNiwa > Genius
GhostKing > Keen
GhostKing > NaNiwa
Genius > Keen
NaNiwa > Genius

GhostKing and NaNiwa advance.