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.

Fun week!

               This was a good week, I’m going to be pretty straight up about that. I accomplished two major things that I wanted to do with my summer. One was out of necessity and the other less vital but of similar value to me, if that makes sense. I like didn’t need it, but I really wanted it.

               First off, I found a place to live this fall! WHOOOOOOO! That’s a huge relief for me, because as I began my search things just weren’t really going my way with it, so when I started the week I was starting to legit think I might be bumming off couches for the first month of my life in Edmonton. Jeez that would have been an experience. Probably would have sucked, but I would have learned a lot from it. That doesn’t really matter now because I did find a place to live. Nothing super special about it, 5 bedroom place in Southeast Edmonton, it has close proximity to shopping and LRT so I don’t need a car up there. (Huge plus for me!) It has a surprisingly nice looking kitchen in my opinion. But yeah, the LRT location is important for me because….          

Pretty Good for a Rental eh?

               With the confirmation that I will not need a car, I felt comfortable enough with my money to order the parts to my PC that I’m building! Yay! Isn’t it cool how those things actually link together like that? The build I decided to go with is the same one I talked about in my last post, so I don’t feel like I need to link it again. About 1100$ cost including shipping and handling, and Im confident that it will be able to do what a 1800$ pre-made rig would, so yeah. Lesson to the peoples, building yourself is way more cost efficient than buying a pre-made.

               You know what else I just thought of that makes this week even better? I’ve found what I believe to be a solution to my frustrations with League of Legends. Stop playing ADC. (Attack Damage Carry, I shot things a lot and win fights for my team.) Why? Because when I play ADC I feel an obligation to carry my team through the ENTIRE game. That’s not good, because when I think like that I get really hypercritical of my own mistake which leads to most of my frustrations. So I’m going to be looking to play more assassin like roles. Cause then I just make plays and be a cool dude. Yay!

               So yeah! Good week overall. Like a solid 8.5/10 More blogging next week! Or maybe tomorrow. Provably next week though.