The biggest weekend of Starcraft in 2013! (Part 1 of 3)

I've legitimately thought a lot today about writing a post where I do something beyond just talking about E-sports and in particular talk about things happening in my own life. I know it'd be a crazy stretch to do that, especially on my own personal blog, but hear me out! The thought crossed my mind. Thats all it really did though, no talk about me today, on to video games!

Some of you know this weekend as American thanksgiving. While that is certainly true, this year its actually the busiest weekend for StarCraft II. We have 3 separate major tournaments running with the World Cyber Games trying to remain relevant, the Intel Extreme Master's stop in Singapore where Acer.Scarlett will attempt to win her first premier title, and finally we have one of my personal favorites, the Annual awarding Liduid Hero with a check festival Dreamhack Winter. I'll be giving my own brief thoughts on who I think each of these tournaments are going to play out. We'll start with WCG and then talk about real tournaments tomorrow and Thursday. #ShotsFired

First up the World Cyber Games in Kunshan, China. This is going to be a weird tournament, because we have 4 groups of 7-8 players that are all going to play each person in their group in a Bo3 with only the top two of each group advancing. That means over two days, nearly 100 Bo3 series are going to be played. Thats at least 200 games! That is an ungodly number of games, I feel so sorry for both the casters and the players here, it's going to be grueling to say the least. Especially if you lose the first few and are essentially eliminated half way through the day. There are going to be pointless games being played and that just shows that the tournament format is bad. Never the less, out of each group I feel there are 2 favourites to come out of each of them. Group A will have PartinG and Sen completely out classing the rest of their group. Group B might be the closest, but I feel that France's Dayshi and China's Jim will be advancing, (That doesn't mean I won't be cheering for my fellow Canadian Desrow!) Group C will be dominated by Sora with MacSed following behind, with maybe the American Xenocider making an upset. Group D will be Korea's Soulkey wrecking everyone and the German protoss HasuObs picking up the pieces of the wreckage to advance in 2nd.

Into the playoff stage it will become like every other tournament in that the Koreans will likely dominate. I think PartinG looks to be the most likely to take the whole tournament, Soulkey could also take it, don't be shocked if its those two in the finals.

If I can throw some real talk down about now, WCG is a relic and not really that rel event of a tournament anymore. The only part that seems to matter is the Korean Qualifiers, since none of the foreigners (Non-Koreans) that would have had a even play this anymore. It's just like a charity to for the 3 Koreans that make it to the global finals. If your thinking of watching your first StarCraft Tournament this weekend, don't have it be WCG, not while there are two other very high quality tournaments going on at the same time.

RIP on WCG. Plz. 

Source of picture World Cyper Games. Plz don't sue me.

Shoutouts and Feeling Good!

               It has been quite the week let me tell you. Filled with all sorts of experiences and feelings. Some good and some bad, but in an effort to stick to what I was talking about in my last post I am going to be focusing solely on the positive things from my last week. I’ll talk about two three things in particular.

               The smaller one was that I once again returned to the work force back under the employ of the Town of Magrath. Even though I haven’t been paid yet for my work it feels really great to one know that there is income that will be coming in and secondly that I actually have something to do during the day now! Man, you would be surprised what full time work can do for a guy that’s bored, suddenly I hardly feel like I have spare time at all and its awesome!

               The big one that I really want to talk about was the opportunity I had to see one of my absolute best friends and a critical figure of my life get married to the man she loves. Big congratulations to Samara and Scott Dewey! It was so easy to see from the way they look at each other that they have a bond that is simply unbreakable. I’m thrilled that she found someone so good for her. I've probably talked about this before, but I've always felt like I had this “Duty” to ensure that the two Lybbert girls that I knew well ended up happy and with good people for them. I think this because I feel like I owe it to them. In reality any positive attribute I've developed over the past few years could in one way or another be attributed to something they did to help me grow.  I know for a fact that neither one of them realizes what they've done for me over the years. So yeah, it was important for me to see her so happy with Scott and I would be a liar if I told you that I didn't shed a tear during that day. Augh, how embarrassing.

               This isn't quite as long as I wanted so I’ll throw another positive thing that came out of a negative thing. Suffice to say there was drama this week and I got to discover that a friend of mine is a truly outstanding individual. I haven’t had the chance to properly thank Makinna Kristensen for how helpful she was this past week. I most definitely owe her one. 

               Well this was nice, I like all these positive feelings and such. Maybe I should like try to keep this positive vibe going. confirmed, Being positive is good. Jonny Tollestrup 2013. You can quote me on that. 

Unrelated picture of Fiji cause I can.