Zealot Rushes – Final Beta Game

I don’t know how many I encountered in the Starcraft II beta. A lot. I never really tried one myself as I considered them a bit cheesy. I don’t mind cheesy plays; I just feel that I don’t improve a whole lot doing them myself, so I don’t.

But I was online the final Monday night of the Beta and didn’t really feel up to laddering. On the other hand no one I knew was online for a 2v2, so I entered a 1v1 and ended up Protoss vs Protoss on Kulas Ravine. One minute into the game someone messaged me asking for a 2v2 and I really wanted to do that much more than just play my 1v1.

Tempted to get my game over quickly I just zealot rushed and won. Amazing. But what I learned here was much more valuable. My opponent tried to counter my rush with zealots too. The scene was set for a massive zealot battle. At first my thought was that this was a losing proposition for me as he had less distance to travel (I didn’t proxy as it wasn’t my initial plan to do a rush), but it turned out to be a good thing.

In previous games I had tried with zealot pressure plays and often been countered by the defenders stalker micro. With no defending stalkers it much more became a question of who had the most zealots and I had 3 gateways to his two and a cybernetics core.

The best thing was that I even had good enough macro to get my tech up while attacking and the finishing touch to the game was the arrival of my own stalkers in his base. Beautiful!