ESFI World

The first week of GSL 2012 action was probably the best kick-off week of a Code S so far. The new best-of-three format meant longer, more meaningful groups that evolved and matured over the course of many hours and games. It shows in the results too. Players and fans can no longer blame bad groups or cheesy games for the results now: each player has at least four and at most nine games in which to prove himself. Everyone that fell out seemed to have deserved it with poor play, while everyone who made it through definitely proved their worth.

Group A was the group of player comebacks, with Boxer returning to Code S for the first time since March, and Sen playing his first GSL games since before Code S was instituted. Both returns ended up in disappointment, though, as neither player managed to advance. Sen's performance was especially lackluster, as he did not win a single game out of four, and seemed to lose control whenever game states got too complex. Boxer's return was more auspicious, starting the group out out with his first Code S game win since last year's January season. He beat Ganzi by brilliantly amassing a huge hidden air force which he use to protect a full bio army drop on Ganzi's sieged tanks, essentially ending the game. Unfortunately for Boxer, though, he tried to keep playing cute and so lost the next two games to Ganzi's straight up, solid play.

The winner's match was a deep, strategical TvT between Ganzi and Jjakji in which both players were pushed to the boundaries of multitasking and tactical intuition. Ganzi won both games, but just barely, sending Jjakji to face Boxer, who had beaten Sen, in the deciding match. The first game of the last match saw Jjakji try a very Boxer-esque two-barracks-reaper opening with medivacs for support and a siege tank follow-up. But Boxer had gone for quick banshees, which sent the game into a base-trade that the flying units easily won, since Jjakji had very little anti-air in his army. In Game 2, another one-base timing from Jjakji forced a lift on Boxer's fast expansion, giving the reigning GSL champ the edge he needed to close out game two. In the final game of the group, a crucial unsieging of Boxer's army allowed Jjakji to set up a brutal tank contain that doomed the Emperor to once again have to fight his way back into Code S from Code A.

The second group, Group B, started off with a much anticipated ZvT that pit Leencock, the newly successful old hand at StarCraft 2, against Fin, the formerly successful StarCraft 2 newcomer. The first game of the match did not disappoint, with both players' skills on full display. Fin went for a super greedy and marine-heavy opening that saw him quickly build up to +3/+3 and seven reactored barracks, off of which he hit the 200 max 30 supply ahead of Leenock. But the young Zerg's hive tech kicked in just in time to repel the mostly bio army. From there Leenock's constant ultra/baneling harassment kept Fin on the back foot, leaving him on just fifteen scvs and at an impossible economic disadvantage by the end of the game. In the second game Fin thought he his marine timing was much more potent than it actually was, and so Leenock's early +1 carapace zerglings easily defended against it and slaughtered Fin's stubborn reinforcements as they worked their way across the map. Without much of an army, Fin was forced to stay in his base defending against mutalisks while Leenock just droned, hit max with a 60 supply lead, and rolled over his Terran opponent.

Leenock's patented baneling mines just weren't enough

Leenock played a similarly inspired match against SuperNova, who had beaten MC in an odd but uneventful series, demolishing him in the first game. Leenock was on the cusp of advancing to the Ro16 when a slight over-extension with his ultralisks cost him the second game. Leenock had plenty of chances to win the third game as well, but when it devolved into an extremely low-economy situation, Leenock let himself be strangled out by SuperNova, who was the first to advance from the group. Fin played a messy and disappointing match against MC and so was eliminated from his debut Code S season without winning a single match. The deciding match between Leenock and MC was a short one that involved a failed proxy hatch, a successful ZvP baneling bust, and finally a brutal MC 7-gate that sent Leenock down into Code A and elevated MC to the Ro16.

Group C started with a throwback as Zerg player Lucky fell far too easily to Mvp's two-rax bunker pressure. Next, Lucky dropped dozens of banelings and roaches from the sky to their deaths to lose game two. Things stayed retro as Nestea handled Idra with his former Zerg versus Zerg faculty. But unlike in the past, Nestea was finally able to get past the huge mental block he seems to have had against his Mvp and beat his teammate in a BoX for the first time in GSL play. Lucky advanced past Idra in a fairly typical ZvZ, although it came down to about a 10 second window in the last game in which Lucky's roach attack managed to hit just before Idra's hydralisks finished hatching.

Lucky survives with just a single wondering spine crawler for a base

The final match, therefor, was a rematch between Lucky and Mvp, with Code S status on the line. The winner seemed obvious after the drubbing Mvp had delivered to the hapless Zerg in the first series of the group, but the second meeting proved to be much more interesting than the first. The opening game had one of the strangest endings we have seen so far in the GSL: Lucky's building count had been reduced to just a handful of spine and spore crawlers that he was forced to protect by unburrowing them and bringing them with his final air army that, lucky for him, managed to force Mvp out of the game. In the second game, Lucky got too greedy with economy and tech, losing his spawning pool to a drop, which disabled all unit production for him except for drones. In the final game of the group, Mvp managed to build up to almost three dozen ghosts that got off multiple nukes and thousands of points of damage in snipes in an incredibly tense game before Lucky finally had to concede.

Group D was a disappointing one, especially compared to the groups that had come before it. Especially disappointing was Bomber's performance, which was marked by mistakes, lapses in attention, and failed cheese. He always seemed to be behind his opponents and never quite seemed to know how to stay in the game. Oz, on the other hand, showed that his semifinals run last season was no fluke, solidly beating Curious with an odd two-gate forge expand that always seemed to leave him ahead, and even defeating PvP extraordinaire Inca in a typically bizarre Protoss mirror match. It briefly looked like InCa might make his return after losing to Oz by just a few mismicroed zealots, but Curious proved that he is in Code S to stay by exposing InCa's terrible weakness in the PvZ matchup.

Comebacks: In the eleven matches that have gone to a third set so far this season, the player that won the first game ended up winning the match only three times (27%). This is the first time we are getting to see bests-of-three in the first round of the tournament, but in the matches played in the rounds-of-sixteen in all Code S tournaments so far, the winners of the first games have gone 12-8 (60%). Part of this huge difference is likely due to the fact that the losers now get to pick the next map, but why the winners of the first maps should be out-performed by the losers by almost 3:1 remains unclear. This is a big deal, as if the trend continues it casts serious doubt on the results of the previous single-game groups, which would have turned out radically differently had 73% of sets gone to the opposing players.

Tiers and Tears: We now have multiple tiers of players competing in Code S, a fact mirrored by the complex system of group selection for the first round. At the top we have the players that made the quarterfinals of the previous season; below them we have the Code A players that powered directly through into Code S; and at the bottom we have the Up-and-Downers and invited non-Korean players. The first two groups both did well, but neither significantly better than the other. GSL November quarter-finalists went 17-11 in games and managed to push three out of four players through to the next round. The Code A players also went 17-11, and got five out of six players through. The Up-and-Downers, on the other hand, went 9-15, and all were eliminated. The two invitees, Sen and IdrA, went 1-8 in aggregate, and were both, obviously, eliminated.  

Unexplored Territory: Three new maps entered the map pool for this tournament: the neutrally-creeped Metropolis, ladder map Entombed Valley, and the ESV-created Cloud Kingdom. All three seem to be fairly balanced so far, and players are already finding and exploiting different nooks and crannies. There is far too little data to tell for sure if the maps are fair as of yet, but the community seems relatively satisfied with them at the moment.

	“Washed Up” former Champions	Nestea and MC both looked great this past week, beating very worthy foes in Leenock, Fin, IdrA, and Mvp.
No Change	Jjakji	Still getting second in groups; still tempting elimination up to the last game.
	Foreigners	IdrA made a point of saying that he did not care about the GSL and was only going to Korea for the practice environment. Nonetheless, scores of nerds stayed up hoping to see him get through his group of death, only to be disappointed and sleep deprived. Don't even talk to me about Sen.

So far NesTea is on the longest run of first-round successes in Code S, having made it through his initial group for the past six seasons. In fact, NesTea has made it through the first round of every season of Code S except the second, when he fell to San and Ensnare in March 2011. The next longest run has been Nada, who saw first-round victories in each of the first five seasons of Code S.

NesTea also overcome a huge stumbling block for himself this past week: Mvp. NesTea has been 3-8 against Mvp in the GSL and had famously melted down against him in the Blizzard Cup 2011 finals, letting him overcome a losers bracket disadvantage after beating him in winners finals.

InCa has proven himself to be one of the most inconsistent players match-up wise in all of StarCraft 2. His loss to Oz only reduced his record to 17-5 in the GSL (77%), while his loss to Curious dropped him 2-13 PvZ (13%).

This next week might be quite a bit less exciting. There are many old names that have tapered off (Genius, Zenio) and new names that have yet to prove their worth (Brown, Parting), as well as unfulfilled promises (NaDa, Puzzle) and constant disappointments (MarineKing, Keen). However, there are two players who have been recently acquired by non-Korean teams, Zenio and JYP, so perhaps EG and Liquid will manage to inject some hype into an otherwise unpromising set of groups.