Koreans vs the rest of us

Right now in Paris, at the Blizzard World Wide Invitational, there is a Starcraft tournament being played. The participants consists of Korean pros and some non-Koreas as well. It is half and half. The Koreans are not even currently the very best, althoug sAviOr, Sea)Shield or Stork are exactly bad either. The fourth Korean player is Siz)Kal, and I really don't know anything about him.

After the first round was played only Koreans went on to second round. All non-Koreans were sent to the losers bracket! I think that it is very telling of the difference in level in Korea and outside. Players like Dreiven and ToT)Mondragon( have a reasonable reputation in the western community and they lost!

In the losers bracket IdrA has advanced to second round, but he plays for eSTRO, so he could perhaps be considered half a Korean.

And in other news from WWI: Blizzard announced Diablo III was in development. Yawn!

Replay by Popular Request

So someone asked for a replay of my amazing game against AiurAdun. That is of course not something I can refuse. So enjoy the 42+ minutes long battle of the giants amateurs. hf gl.

Others suck at Starcraft too

Some months ago I played a batch of one-on-ones against AiurAdun. I lost all the games and it was pretty humiliating, since back in the days I used to win most of our games. Since then we have mostly played team games against others, and I have been begging for a rematch against him -- just to prove that my training has paid of a little.

So last Sunday he let me have a go at it. He chose Blue Storm as the map. It was a map that neither of us knew really well, although it later was proved that I knew the map a little better than him. AiurAdun has always played Protoss, whereas I am a Terran wannabe. So the game was set.

I have never played Blue Storm much; I didn't like the map since it is very complicated and favors small units and drops. Terran tanks and even vultures have a hard time navigating and you basically have to micro manage every unit on its way to the front.

We both chose to do a fast expansion and teched up fast too. I had seen a game where Flash won by holding on to exactly half the map and letting his Protoss opponent attack up the ramp giving him the defensive advantage. I tried to do the same. Tanks on the center ramp protected by mine fields and the occasional vulture volley of grenades. I think AiurAdun tried to force his way past my forces 6 or maybe 7 times each time failing narrowly. It was a blast, although I can understand he got quite frustrated to all the zealots he lost in the mines.

There is something very satisfying about spider mines once you get a good amount of them. Even I can figure out using them when I got money and vultures enough and I had money flowing in from three bases most of the time.

There was also an incident where he succeeded in dropping two reavers in the mineral patch of my natural expansion, but he later lost his shuttle to some lucky fire from goliaths.

The rest of the game was basically a question of who gathered the most resources and in the end I did.

After the game there was the traditional complaints. The zealots didn't obey orders to stay out of the mines. Protoss vs Terrans is a hard match-up and so on. I'd be willing to repeat the game with me as Protoss and AiurAdun as Terran though. Just to see how that would play out!

GoogleBot owns me

So I have had a poll running on this blog for 20 odd days. 11 visitors voted and of those 3 claimed to be the Google Bot. Somehow I doubt it, but it really doesn't change much. The remaining 8 claimed to read the blog (of my Starcraft suckage), but I know they lie. The web statistics clearly shows that no one ever comes here. I even wonder how the votes was placed without even visiting the site!

Nah, I know some people visit, although far less than I had hoped. It is hard to start a new blog and gain an audience. I had hoped that my self deprecating style would attract readers, who don't really care about the game. Not many have taken the bait.

There are hardly any comments, although there is one I really like:

Nice blog. I would say that you can be a good writer seriously. Keep it up!

It was as an answer to my posting about the iC Cup. I hope more will follow.

2v2 games with an old friend

So I spent an evening with AiurAdun playing 2v2s on Battle.net. It was fun. Just like old times.

There is a trick to picking up games on Battle.net today. You create a game, name it, and wait for other players to find it and join. People only joins certain types of games: Games on money maps, 3v3 games on Hunters and games suggesting that the game creator is not very good.

We don't play money maps and once a player joins a game he quickly finds out that the map is not hunters and that we don't allow more than 2 players on a team. So announcing a 3v3 on Hunters is out of the question if you want to play a 2v2 on Othello! This basically leaves you with the option of creating games named "2v2 N00bs!" and hope some easy prey shows up. The concept is still stupid, as those who join, usually, do not consider themselves new at the game, they are just hoping to find easy prey. It more or less works out the way that everyone fakes being a newbie and most lies!

But yesterday we played 4 games. And we won. We dominated. One opponent complained that his ally, a random pickup, was a newbie (I don't know what he expected, the game was called "2v2 N00bs!!!") and another complained too, stating the fact that AiurAdun and I was not the newbies we had claimed to be. That was true, but also the way Battle.net works today.

Tonight on messenger AiurAdun and I talked about the games of yesterday. My opening lines was "Yesterday when we played it felt like old times. We were dominating left, right and center". He agreed but added: "True, but back then we were good!". A dry reminder that everyone sucks today compared to Starcraft's early days. Even us.

So I Suck at Poker

I haven't really been playing online poker in a long time. I had a brief stint as a low-level poker player, back when there was something called pokerchamps.com. It no longer seems to be there.

Recently I discovered Tillerman's blog. He was once a top notch Starcraft (and later Warcraft III) player, but he, like many other western pros found out that playing poker was more lucrative. Finding his blog made me remember the good old days on Kali playing Warcraft II and then later transitioning to Starcraft. If he could make a killing at Poker, then so could I.

I created a new account at PokerStars. I don't know why I chose them -- I just did. I played a few games with fun-money and then entered a free roll tournament. I may suck at Poker, but it is nice to know, that so do many, many others

I may not be a pro like Tillerman, who confidently play the $2500/$5000 cash games, but in a free roll, I can be king too. In my first tournament I made it to the top 10% leaving more than 6000 players behind me. I admit that I then got bored an threw my stack away, yet again proving that I suck -- even at poker, where suckage seems to be pretty common.

Now even my computer makes fun of me

I got beat by the computer today. This is embarrassing. The computer was Protoss and I was Terran. When I scouted his base, I saw a gateway, a cybernetics core on its way and no zealots. This is unusual. When the first 2 dragoons popped out it even did a fast expansion at its natural. This smelled like a gamble that a human would make.

20 minutes later it was all over. The computer had rolled me over with a combination of zealots and dragoons. Not very sophisticated, but it worked. After all: It had a much stronger economy than me.

So why did a loose to a computer controlled opponent? It all started out with an innocent download of a mod called Entropy II, which promised better and non-cheating AI controlled players. And deliver the mod did. Wow.

I had to try it again. And again. And I was disappointed. It only succeeded the first time around. The second time I saw a gamble like in the first game, I pressed on and basically rushed my Protoss opponent with 4 marines and a couple of vultures.

But it is a good mod. It really forces you to watch what strategy the computer picks and then counter it. Playing the regular AI, a game typically last 10 to 15 minutes, but using the Entropy mod I've not played any games shorter than 25. That alone feels like a huge improvement. But being defeated by the computer does feel like suckage.

RazerTSL Final

Tonight, at 22:30 CET, the final of the Razer TSL will be played. I've followed the tournament for the last many weeks. My favorite, russian BratOK, was defeated in the semifinal by Jian Fei, so now I am cheering for the polish player Draco. Tonight's final is a Protoss mirror-match-up, which is kinda boring.

They play best-out-of-five games. I hope the entertainment will go all the way. The tournament is organized by the only non-korean website for competetive Starcraft, that I know of: teamliquid.net and sponsored by Razer. I suppose that means that I pay for the entertainment through my purchase of a mouse...

Less than 20 minutes before the show start.