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Hi guys I'd like to Introduce my new blog series where I take an awesome experience in eSports and write some of my feelings about it and share part of that experience with the SCII community. I normally wouldn't have time to write this but with the wonderful support I've been receiving from my sponsors (Tt eSports, Gigabyte Notebooks, Mwave.com.au and AVerMedia) I've decided to use these experiences as a way to say thanks to them. As these blogs will be "brought to you by (insert sponsor here)" it mind sound a little cheesy. But the truth is, I wouldn't have time to write these normally. However if it's saying thanks to my sponsors and spreading the love then I will find the time!

ACL/GESC Weekend - Brought to you by Gigabyte Notebooks!


This is me writing a blog :P

Ok so where to start? This was an absolutely hectic weekend 7-8th July with the GESC $4000 tournament planned for saturday day and the $2000 ACL tournament spanning the entire weekend. Dot came down with me because she was dying to go explore Melbourne as it's one of our favourite cities to experience (amazing food too!) and is easy/cheap to reach from Sydney!

The first thing I remember is stepping off the plane Friday night and realising that for the first time in a long while I could see my breath forming clouds in front of me. Oh god, the Captain wasn't lying, it was 2 degrees outside, curse you Melbourne! Luckily we spent most of the weekend indoors (and the rest of the week as chance would have it...). This meant the rain wasn't TOO bad but damn was it cold! Mayo was nice enough to pick us up all the way from the airport and drop by McDonalds for some quick dinner before heading straight to his to get a good night's sleep before the weekend started. Then along came Saturday morning...


Here's some music to amuse you while you read this wall of text!



Day 1

Ok so you guys and girls reading this are for the most part gamers. Most of you probably have never experienced the horror of waking up at 8am and going out into the cold of Melbourne. I often tell people I don't understand that any time before 10am exists. I sure as hell don't get along with this time of the morning especially when I know I'll potentially have to be playing up till 9pm that night over 12 hours later. Ah well, the excitement of a big weekend like this does something to shake off the sleepiness and helps you shudder through the cold. All-in-all it wasn't too bad. We went straight to the GESC venue assuming we could get some food there but unfortunately the closest cafe thing was closed and we didn't know where the other shops were so I ended up eating chocolate and BBQ shapes for breakfast while I set up my PC. Little did I know that this necessary fuelling of my body with trash was going to set the scene for the entire weekend...


me before 10am...

The venue was at Monash University campus in a weird circular building. It was quite easy to find and nice and clean and we had PCs set up in the front of lecture theatres as our playing areas. It was a really clean and simple setup. As happens at all venues we had to pull back tablecloths (why do organisers always put these down? They move underneath your mouse when you play...) But it was quite nice. The casters were setup with a desk at the front of a small lecture theatre which was a pretty cool viewing experience.



I set up with no problems, warmed up a little, and then got into my games. I got the big ol' mOOnglaDe first round and lost a relatively close series 2-1. I remember thinking that the reason I lost the final game was that I tried to upgrade my lair when I was just short on gas from morphing banes and so when I tried to morph an overseer to scout a minute later, I realised I didn't have a lair. I was, well, a little screwed. Mutas started flying across the map and I basically knew I needed to make something happen. Except zerg don't have anything that shoots up at Tier 1. So my only option was to press his multitasking and hope he screws up. I instantly started splitting my lings and roaches and multi-prong attacking whilst throwing up a 3rd and 4th in opposite locations hoping one would escape glades notice and not get shut down by his fantastic muta-ling play. It wasn't to be, Glade was too good and just followed my slow-roaches around with his mutas shutting them down at every turn whilst denying my bases with his speeds and blocking my ling runbys. Ah well, I was outplayed.

In the lower bracket I managed to beat the diamond player who qualified from the uni as well as some narrow wins over cRedge before facing iMMafia. We traded the first 2 games in similar mass roach fashion until game 3 where Mafia did a gasless build and built a lot of drones, really really fast. I went for a more standard opener and ended up behind after my pressure didn't do key damage and took a steady 3rd base. Mafia hit an extremely powerful 1-1 or 2-2 roach timing as my festors were popping and overwhelmed me with his macro lead. Another 1-2 loss. Shit.

After being knocked out of Asus the week before it felt a bit shitty to lose these games. However as always I try to focus on the game at hand and I knew I played really well in the games I won. And I played quite well in those I lost with a few small key mistakes losing me the series. I felt if I warmed up a few more games maybe I would have been better off. I decided to make sure I was thoroughly warmed up at ACL! From here I got to chat to everyone, eat some pizza and watch system, zepph and zain cast some amazing ZvZs. I'm just sad I didn't get to stay to watch mafia v glade and glade vs Targa in the Lower and Grand finals respectively, I heard these were bloody amazing games. As it was though its always nice getting knocked out of a tournament (as silly as that sounds) because you get to socialise and talk to all your friends from the scene and then commentate and discuss those still in the tournament and usually you get to learn quite a bit about other ways of looking at the game!

Eventually the evening started to roll in and Dox' text messages started to light up phone screens telling them to come over and start playing groups at ACL. So off we went! 50 minutes in a maxi-cab later we all arrived the ACL venue, many of us half asleep in the darkness of the van. A this point I was getting that feeling of "oh crap I hope I don't need to play many games tonight I'm already a bit dozy".

The ACL venue was absolutely amazing. It was held in the "celebrity room" at Moonee Valley racecourse, which like many gambling establishments seems to have money coming out of its arse. The room was fantastic, really large and you walked in to be greeted by rows of fighting gamers playing Street Fighter and Smash Brothers. The first reaction was to think this looked really fun and the community with their awesome arcade controllers are really cool people.

After saying hi to everyone I set up and played a gruelling series vs NvDeth where in one game he nuked harass me till I started phasing out the sound of "nuclear launch detected" and was so focused on consolidating my final push attempt of 20 broods and 20 corruptors that I didn't realise I was walking it into a nuke on-top of my 4th base. Holy shit that was a nuke that should have been on stream lol! I actually burst out laughing when it hit and tapped out it was so comical to see such a large expensive army massacred by nukes. I'd pretty much given up that game already so luckily it didn't affect my mindset and I managed to close the series out in a close 2-1 victory. I felt I played a bit sloppy, I think we both did to be honest due to tiredness from the previous event. And I was very glad to be told that would be our final game for the evening.



We ate some more junk (had already had pizza for lunch, thanks to iM for buying it for us!) and then we headed back and hopped into bed and I fell asleep whilst watching some Homestory Cup on my Notebook. Tomorrow was going to be an exciting day...


Mobile Starcraft access!

Day 2 Blog will be posted in 24 hours!

Look out for me at WCS Australia casted by HD, Painuser and Tastosis as well as local talent Maynarde on 10-12th August. Immediately following which I'll be flying to Cologne, Germany to compete in IEM Gamecom 15-20th August. Cheer me on as I compete!


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