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ACL, Grandmaster, plans and trials and tribulations!
 

Hello there everyone I'm terribly bored at work so decided to write myself a probable long winded and exciting blog so grab a spare pair of underwear sit back relax and get ready for a wall!

To start of this titillating story I managed to qualify for an event called ACL Sydney where it was hyped, and with good reason, to be the most competitive Sc2 Australian LAN to date. This hypothesis did not disappoint! Featuring easily the best 22 players from Australia, Jazbas from New Zealand, oh I played too. We competed in 4 groups of 6 where only the top 2 survive. This format for me felt a little to cut-throat as a lot of very good players unfortunately had to miss out, in a perfect world I would suggest a format where the 1st place skips a round in the ro12 bracket then the 2nd and 3rd placed people from each group battle it out from there. This however is really neither here nor there, the event was a huge success and congrats to everyone who placed where they did and to moonglade (not gonna bother trying to memorize how he capitalizes shit) on winning!

Prefacing my practice regime for the even I'll say this, my own results I felt were extremely disappointing, highlighting just how much practice you _actually_ need to put in to catch up to, and thus compete with the current top-tier people in the scene.
For about a month working ~8 hours a day then practicing around 5-6 hours playing approx 30-40 games a day on kr/na/sea I trained my little heart and a few other organs to the bone(r). In this time I became more confident in my play, I learned things I hadn't seen other players do to my knowledge, I grew slightly more arrogant and my Effigial opinion of the SEA pros diminished as I improved. A lot of my improvement is to the thanks of some players I bugged for practice games - Pig, Mafia, Delete, Techtron, Zoom, team nrv, fourby, pinder, and various other I can't remember!
Then a few days before the event the groups were released! I thought I had gotten a good group, and to be honest I had. Pig, Pinder, Myuu and 2 from the open bracket, likely to be yoon/jaz/yang/some zerg because its SEA. I was extremely confident in my zvz, especially against myuu who i bested in the qualifiers for the even 2-0, Recently with pig i had relatively close games but his skill definitely surpassed mine, and Pinder who is a very solid macro style protoss that I generally play well against.
None of my expectations came to pass.
First game came up against Pinder on daybreak. My current strategy of 3 base opening into 5 base muta into ultra with quick 3/3 that was previously unbeaten in practice and ladder did not go to plan, with great warp prism harass, annoying Virign like defence of my throbbing mutalisks attempting to penetrate his base, and general solid macro player Pinder managed to take game 1 in quite an epic 30 minute debacle of how to play protoss, and how not to play zerg. Game 2 went fairly similarly.
Pig destroyed me, bout all there is to it;
Myuu quickly followed except games were slightly closer (albeit not by much)
Then I find out Jazbas and Yoon come into my group, suddenly I'm frightened I would do what we called in 1.6 "Donutting". Going an entire competition with no victory to my belt. ZvT at the time (and still probably is) was by far my worst match-up, and yoon is a boss. By luck a roach bane bust that I attempted in all 3 games worked, and I felt I played fairly well.
Against jazboss I learned I need to improve my muta v muta battles and jaz showed extremely good muta control and positioning when generally against lesser opponents I could just crush my way through them.
So I finished the group at an extremely disappointing (thank god for auto correct for the life of me I can't spell that word) 1-10, hanging my head in shame I joined the rest of the spectators as we geared to watch the ro8 a.k.a the day that zergs infested everything.
So that about wraps up ACL, it was an extremely entertaining event, again, meeting everyone and talking shit with the people I already knew was and will always be the main reason I keep coming back to these things and I cannot wait for ACL Melbourne!

So after my failure at Sydney, A week of barely any play and I decide to pick up the mouse again and continue practicing. For months I have been searching for that mystical Grandmaster Position and for many more months it has eluded me. Like the unrequited Love for the girl that will always see you as just a friend Grandmaster had teased me, flirted with me, shown just the right amount of skin and goaded me into believing I could actually posses it. My friends, this month I Finally was able to get a roofellen into that girls drink, knock her unconscious, and SUCCEED MY LONG QUEST TO INFILTRATE IT! The enormous relief when that majestic gold emblem bidding me congratulations for achieving the highest notoriety of skill in the ladder was unfathomable. Finally I could be recognized as a relatively good player who achieved GM (to be fair its not AS big achievement on SEA).
Shortly after my closest companions wished me congratulations and I ate them up with jubilation for they knew how much trials and tribulations and the ache I had for not yet achieving such status.

So that just about takes us up to present day. Still working pretty much full time and playing/watching sc2 with just about every free minute of my day I hope to do much better at future major events! Such as ACL Melbourne, qualifiers for [WCS] Australia and whichever other events SEA has to offer and boy has there been a metric shit tonne of them recently which is amazing to sea (geddit). Other plans are to go traveling, perhaps to America to experience an MLG first hand, or perhaps to Europe to chase young European lasses with a photo of my grandmaster status since I'm just about out of for conventional pick-up lines. By now I've probably earned many a TL;DR but for those still reading I thank you for your attention!
See you all on the forums/ACL Melbourne!!
*Edit*Oh yeah I Joined TA too, bunch of top blokes