ASUS Rog GD Invitational Round Up!

[Includes spoilers from ASUS Rog GD Invitational]

So over the weekend I spent a pretty fair amount of time watching Starcraft, not an excessive amount but more than I have been able to watch in quite a while. Although I caught a few games from the WCS Asia Finals, I had no really interest in following it properly as it was pretty PvP and PvZ heavy and so I followed it mostly on Liquipedia.

What I did spend my time watching was the ASUS Rog GD Invitational - a small European 8 man invitational with a $10,000 prize pool. Going into it I think it was probably fair to say that Thorzain, Lucifron and Mana were the names people were really looking at to come out of this with the first place prize.

Well, the whole tournament wasn't full of upsets but there was definitely a few surprises; many of those welcome at that. In Group A Thorzain got off to a flying start to the weekend  going 3-0 and showing some fantastic decision making and mind games against Ret with his uses of 11/11 raxing. Nightend and Lucifron also came out of the group, leaving Ret to finish in last place going 0-3 and being one of two players who would not get to play on day two.

It was unfortunate - while many would have expected it to be a toss up between Nightend and Ret to have dropped out due to Lucifrons recent WCS dominance and Thorzains reputation as a top foreigner it was actually a lot closer than it might sound. Ret lost 2-1 in all of his games, and looked very solid throughout, unfortunately losing out after having some large leads in certain games. Sometimes Ret is a top end player and sometimes he doesn't show anything this special. This weekend he was an unfortunate top end player.

Group B was where the upsets really started to come. Fresh out of Korea Mana was ready to show off his new learned skills from spending over a month away practicing. A few hours later and he had gone 0-3 in his group. Again, he lost every series 2-1, but after being fresh out of Korea I think many people would have expected something a little bit more spectacular against the likes of Kas, Elfi and TLO. At least the TLO people remembered.

TLO turned up and gave us some of the most innovative Zerg strategies we have seen for a long while. I myself despise the endless repetition and staleness of ZvP - the choice of 2 base all ins or mass macro from both sides doesn't catch my interest. But TLO showed us something special this weekend. Some games he just made perfect reads, scouting Kas taking late gas and punishing it with a Baneling Bust to end the game before the greed kicked in. Others he just gave us things we never expected to see.

TLO with Innovative and Refreshing ZvP strategies

As you can see above, he really did pull out all of the stops. Using Nydus Worms in particular he was able to fend off Manas Immortal/Sentry timing as well as take out Elfi's front. When casting his games Thorzain stated everyone was scared of TLO - and who wouldn't be? This guy wasn't afraid to use new strategies that others wouldn't be comfortable dealing with and that is probably why he went 3-0 in his group, dropping only 1 map to Mana.

This concluded the first day, but before we talk about the second day I'll just mention how awesome this tournament was in terms of production. Now honestly, I don't usually care so much about production. If there's an advert screen on then I don't care, I can find other things to fill my time for a few minutes. As long as I can watch the game with decent audio and video quality I'm usually happy.

But this tournament took the extra step and made full uses of its situation. Between series switches were filled with numerous interviews with players - which was perfect. Too often I find that time-fillers are forced and unnecesary, literally just trying to tick the box of not having an "Ads In Progress" screen. Player interviews are the perfect way to get around this and I was glad to see the GD Crew taking advantage of the format of their tournament in this way.

So onto day two! There isn't as much I want to say about day two really - Kas and Nightend played out a pretty good TvP series (especially Game 3) in the quarter finals and Thorzain went on to take out Kas in some very beautifully played TvT Marine-Tank wars. The real story was in the lower half of the bracket - not only did Elfi 2-0 Lucifron but he also got revenge on TLO and took him down 3-1 in the semi-finals, abusing his hatch-first centric play with cannon rushes in two games.

Elfi is a player who was renowned for his PvP for a long time - I remember one IEM MrBitter describing him as "jumping in joy" when he got put up against JYP in the RO16 - something only a madman would do when other foreigners were mixed in. People view him as a relatively cheesey player - but this weekend he started to tell the haters that they were wrong, as he showed us some great macro games against Lucifron.

Then he got into the finals and sort of kicked all that to the side and resorted back to his good old ways of all ins. Two worked, but only two as he ended up losing 3-2 to Thorzain. A bit of an anti-climatic finals, even though it went to all five games, and personally I would say (although it is probably biased) that the better player won at the end of the day - though a big congratulations to Elfi who definitely made a point this weekend.

In conclusion this weekend had everything - interviews, upsets, break throughs, innovation and pretty much anything else you could have asked for. Hopefully this was only the first of many GD Invitationals!