CHoBo started the season with a simple enough goal, practice his off races and get his new account into grandmaster.
since that only took him 2 weeks, he redirected his focus to a loftier goal of winning the SEA ladder this season. he switched back to terran and started grinding those 30 minute search times for 2 points at a time (or 20 point losses all too frequently). when that got too frustrating he would take a break by playing team games. there are no prizes for the ladder, all you get is a better number next to your name. anyone who takes it seriously competes for the sake of competing in it's purest form. chobo, like everyone in AsG, is super competitive.
since he is on vacation now and not playing any more this season, we can analyse how our hero went:
WOW... as far as profiles pages go, that's about as impressive as it gets (i guess he could have a dark voice portrait or something, but it's a new account and he already uses dark voice on his other account). if you hold your mouse over those flashy blue star symbols, they will all say rank 1. this is the profile page that every silver player dreams about when they finish answering a question with "...but i'm top 8 platinum in 4v4s"
unfortunately, that yellow star at the top will tell you a less impressive number...
(all following images are screenshots from sc2ranks.com set to SEA server, the yellow writing is bonus pool remaining. bonus pool during the lock appears to be bugged in that everyone keeps gaining BP but can't use the 'extra BP')
close but not close enough iceX3 dominated this season and wasn't about to let a terran win the SEA ladder! ice finished the season strongly to finish on top. whether it was those extra wins for 4 points each, or just being simply better (i know chobo beat ice at least once this season, not sure of their record though)
almost every player in that top 10 is (or was) sponsored, it's an unrealistic dream for someone like me to ever be on that level. i'm hope that looking down that list and being able to say "i do much better than tgun on ladder" takes some of the bitterness out of falling just short of winning.
unlike 1v1, blizzard doesn't put the best teams into a GM division to make it easy to see who the top ranked on the server is. so we don't know how much those mouse overs all saying "rank 1" really means. luckily we have sc2ranks.com ...
i know he really wanted to win something this season. and i tried, but i could only carry him so far . equal third for the entire server is still pretty good, but it's a step down from his 1v1 result, and team games are supposed to be easier than 1v1!
another 2nd! i'd start calling him MKP but his bio micro is too good to compare them
and finally 4v4s
team AsG barely in the top 5 for the SEA server? at this point i'm actually really disappointed with that
on the plus side i've learned that it's surprisingly hard to get 4 players online and keen for 4v4s at the same time. and when it happens you're going to be faced with long search times and be favoured a lot. or the other team will be amazingly good, there's not much middle ground. using bonus pool is hard
last effort, maybe his NA account has some success...
... only a 70% win rate...
at least he can say he did better than any of these players... http://sc2ranks.com/ranks/am/master
(destiny, ret, yoonYJ, enderr, incontrol, dragon, darkforce...)
well done chobo for outperforming anyone's expectations this season! i hope you can win a tournament with actual prizes soon to make up for the disappointment of not winning ladder. hope you can keep up results like this on top of your studies next season!
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i guess i need to learn how to play now...
im proud I gave chobo a chance as a TGM coach when no one knew who he was. looks like hes becoming a very very strong player and a good coach as well!!! hope a pro team picks him up soon
At first i was a bit skeptical of his ridiculous mech pushes. Then I realised he didn't just blindly follow stupid builds there tended to be reasons for his timings and was actually always very difficult to face. Respect yo.
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