M-x Kelsin

Yesterday I went to the Bronze to Gold tournament that the NE Sc2 league hosted. It was at the Boomkin gaming center up in Haverhill mass. The location was pretty great. They had lots of game systems and TV's. They even had a rock band stage and stuff like that. If they got computers it would be a perfect place so hopefully they do that.

The tournament went pretty well. Had some great final fights in the round robin section between the winners of the bronze, silver and gold teams. I do have to say though (and no offense meant to anyone) but all of the strategy talk that went on seemed so pointless. Everyone in the tourney has to do one thing to get better: constantly build workers. The games that were one sided were only that way cause one player had double the workers of the other.

I've been playing a lot more team games as random as well. It's pretty fun. Slowly feeling like I'm getting up to speed with the other races. We still lose games due to macro in general, but that will improve I'm sure. Playing random teams is pretty fun since I'm not used to playing with people of my level, and that actually happens pretty often in random teams.

Tonight I finally played my first random team games as random. I havn't touched any quick match games with random teams (due to me being scared of getting jerks) but tonight I decided I don't care. I want to practice playing random vs other real players and this is the best way to do it without tanking my 1v1 rating.

If Blizzard is listening: I will buy a smurf account as soon as you enable two accounts on one b.net id... for shizzle.

I played three placement matches for random 2v2. So far I'm 3 for 3. Two of the games I was zerg and the one middle one I was terran (with a terran partner). The zerg matches were largely uneventfull. I can't even remember them. The middle game was the most interesting since I was actually off race. I decided to try out marine tank so quickly got 2 barracks and a factory out and started getting marines and tanks. I forgot about getting stim for a while into the game, but it turns out marines are good anyway.

One opponent went void rays while the other did a lot of gameway units (as far as I can tell). Their first push looked scary (and at one point they killed my army before my team mate could get to my natural expansion). After this push I macro'd up (hard) and expanded 4 times at once. I got no planetary fortresses opting for crazy amount of mules that allowed me to pump marines like there was no tomorrow. The only other moment I was scared was when I saw the void rays coming into my team mates base. Luckily stimmed marines get there quick enough and absolutely DESTROY void rays... so that was cleaned up easily.

Definitely a good time.

After this I played some 2v2's with a friend and played random again. We played our 5th placement match and won. Got placed into bronze. We then played a game where we got opponents who were favored and we creamed them. A good two games for sure. One game I was zerg and the next protoss. Playing as random is definitely a ton of fun. I hope to do it more.

Saturday was the second qualifier for the NE Sc2 League season 1. I won my first match pretty quickly and was unfortunately paired up against Bitters for round 2. The games went pretty quick with him completely out macroing me. That combined with excellent force field placement made these games go by VERY quickly.

My first losers bracket match was vs Logo (a very nice master level zerg). I tried to go baneling the first game and when I scouted his roach warren I did the normal cancel on the baneling nest and went roaches myself. The first battle finally happened with my roaches vs Logo's roaches plus queens which didn't work out for me. The second game I tried Slush's fast burrow build but I'm not that good at it and just wanted to see what happened. Being out macro'd makes any match difficult so it ended pretty quickly as well.

So the tournament didn't go as well as the first qualifier (for me) but it was very fun and I got to watch a lot of very good players play. I'm very excited for the third. On top of that I'm also going to go to the Bronze to Gold tournament this coming weekend. I can't play in it (unfortunately) but it's at a lan center that's pretty close (only 40 minutes away) so i want to go to support the league and to maybe get some team games going after :)

I got to play the ESEA match game vs Fnatic today. So much fun! These guys are really nice and actually said hi in the channel and stuff prior to the games. I got to tell Fenix that I liked watching his games last year at IEM NY and got to tell KawaiiRice how great it was when I played him in a TL Open and only killed one marine.

Luckily this time I did indeed kill MORE THAN ONE MARINE! We chatted about it prior to these matches and we joke about it in the first game.

Both games he went for a 5 marine + 1 helion push and scouted with the factory after that. He expands add 4 more rax for a 5 rax push of pure marine. It worked both times. Here's some screenshots from the games.

The replays are available on the NE Sc2 League Forums in this thread.

 

So last night the first match was me vs ROOTslush (from ROOT gaming). I was super excited to be able to play pros that I watch on a regular basis. My teammate Rob played ROOTCatZ.

The matches were both fast. The first game was on iCCup Match Point. Slush 10 pooled (I think) and while I held it, it set me back. I then made a weird decision to expand even though he hadn't yet. He then attacked with a ton of roaches and won.

The second game I picked iCCup Valhalla. Slush did a roach build with very fast burrow and roach speed which worked great. He came and attacked and while I "held" it via two spine crawlers and my own roaches while I got an expansion up he eventually just had too many roaches and was able to kill me. He was constantly picking off one of my roaches via targetting and then burrowing again. I didn't have any detection this early in the game. It was pretty effective. I actually copied the build in my one ladder game (just happened to be zvz) and won!

After the ladder game I played in the NE Sc2 League online qualifier #1 and got beat pretty quickly by a 5 gate. I was a standard game for me cause I forgot to pull guys off of gas and got supply blocked so I had no hope of holding off the 5 gate.

Lastly I played my z33k league match vs Zoltan (3k master terran who is 3-0 [not 4-0] in my group). The first game was on Lost Temple and we got close positions. He bunker rushed and while I killed the svc and one marine, he got 3 more marines and 5 svcs to come and finish the bunker and I quit.

The second game I got close positions on Metalopolis and he assumed I was going to 14 hatch again so he built a bunker at my natural. I'm so bad when this happens. I see the bunker, send guys to attack it then realize I have 500 minerals. I need to build my pool RIGHT away if something is blocking the hatchery but I never remember that first thing. He eventually just ran the building scv away and then canceled the bunker so I got my hatch down. Then later he pushed with 3 tanks and marines and I just didn't have enough to hold it at all. Spines are worthless vs tanks and roaches and lings can't get close to the tanks without taking heavy losses so I just need A LOT more units from better macro up until that point to matter.

At this point it was enough loses to make me not want to play anymore. I want to get more ladder games in tonight so we'll see if that happens. I'll also try to update this post with some shots from the games later as well.