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Howdy friends, I figured I'd post up a little recap of my time at ACL Sydney last weekend! The LANs I've attended this year have been some of the highlights of my year, so I was incredibly excited in the weeks prior to enjoy another great event and also get a chance to visit Sydney, somewhere I haven’t been in years but always loved. Being the penultimate event of the year, I practiced hard in the lead up looking for a good finish to round out the year in solid fashion.


After a late shuffle of the pools a few days prior to the event I ended up in group B alongside Pig, Hut and Arze. I was pretty confident overall that I could make it out of this group, but at the same time slightly wary. My PvT hadn't been as strong lately as in the past so I thought my series with Hut could go either way. I was really worried about my match with Arze as I hadn't really been practicing a solid PvP at the time, but found a build I was pretty comfortable with pretty quickly and got some really good results on ladder with it in the days immediately preceding the tournament, so I gained a lot of confidence back. Still, Arze was a good player and you could honestly never be sure in PvP. My PvZ had been my strongest matchup since around ACL Melbourne and had only improved since then, but obviously Pig is a beast so I was never going to be particularly confident going head to head with him. That being said, I knew I was an outside chance to score an upset there.


After a long afternoon session with a few delays, the group stage matches finally got underway as I sat down to bash out my series against Pig. The first map was bel'shir vestige and ended up surprisingly being a relatively comfortable win for me after a few repeated snipes on the zerg fourth put me in a pretty commanding spot and I was able to close it out from there. Game two took place on whirlwind and unfolded slightly different with Pig going for a swarmhost based midgame rather than the roach hydra ultralisk composition he used in game 1. After trading some bases I found myself in a pretty solid position, having finally secured a fourth and fifth base myself and containing him to just four, with only one mining. The game had been lagging periodically for the entire match, and around 30 minutes in the admins decided to restart the router to try and fix the issues, pausing the match for a few minutes.


The break gave me some time to evaluate my position in the game and think about how I could close it out going forward. I deemed myself in an almost match winning spot, but sadly within a couple minutes of the restart Pig made a few power-plays and everything began to unravel really fast as he sniped a bunch of my core units with abducts and proceeded to destroy my two mining bases. Upon reflection I was too impatient in wanting to go for a kill move, switching over to carriers without having a force quite stable enough to hold back the waves of locusts besieging my fourth base and hence lost a lot of momentum when I lost a few colossus in one fell swoop. With all my gas being dumped into carriers, I didn't have enough AOE to deflect the siege. It was probably the first time ever in competitive Starcraft someone got punished for going carriers (…) but it was a good lesson to learn nonetheless.


For our ace map we took to Frost, where the game quickly devolved into a quirky base trade with mutas. Pig's experience carried him to the victory as he made all the right moves and timely counter attacks to eventually eliminate all my structures. In the end it was a 1-2 defeat, but I was proud of how I played overall. As always, there were some great lessons learned from the losses, so all in all I finished the series in pretty good spirits heading into my next set of matches.


My next two sets were against Hut and Deth, who joined our group from the open bracket along with Alopex. I don't remember the individual PvT matches quite as well, probably due to the fact that I didn't have vods of them to watch when I got home like I did the first series, or possibly due to the fact that my mind tried to block them out because I got worked by both those dudes. Hut crushed me with some great medivac harassment into an SCV timing, while Deth played a really aggressive style with early bio pushes into late game victories with bio/ghost play. In the end, I crashed to a 2-0 loss to Hut and a 2-1 defeat to Deth, leaving me at 0-3 overall in the group. Incredibly disappointing after a promising start to day, but thems the breaks. All wasn't lost and I tried to remain positive, as I knew I was still in with a shot if I could get convincing wins over Alopex and Arze as I had a decent map score despite being losing my sets.


I played Alopex last up that evening and won 2-0, leaving just Arze remaining the following morning. It was do or die for both of us, as the loser would be out of contention completely, while the victor would wait upon the result of Hut vs Deth to see if they would advance in third place at Hut's expense.


I opted to use the ultimate PvP mind game on Arze – open with the same build every game. Strangely enough he was on my wavelength and went for the same strategy in the first two games too, a 3gate oracle pressure against my (very) fast expand build. He did too much damage with his initial pressure in the first game and destroyed me with a follow-up void ray timing, but luckily I was able to adapt in the second game and deflect the same push with a dark templar. The PvP gods were in my favour for the third game as his DT rush was countered pretty much as hard as it could be by my FE → robo build, so I took a crazy lead early on and was able to finish it quickly after. With that, my chances of advancing hinged solely on whether Deth could defeat Hut or not, but alas it wasn't to be as Hut pulled out a clutch 2-1 to secure himself third spot and relegate me to fourth.



After getting eliminated I spent the rest of the day hanging out and watching the games. As usual, I loved getting a chance to watch a deep championship bracket run from PiG. I enjoyed his games against Moonglade, but his series against Iaguz was top notch viewing, particularly the second game on Bel'shir Vestige. I think everyone that was watching will remember that game for quite some time.


I really enjoyed getting a chance to talk with a bunch of people I hadn't met/only briefly met before. I loved having a bunch of fellow protoss' to chat to about the game throughout the whole weekend too, so huge shout outs to my brothers of aiur. By the time the next ACL rolls around, I'm confident we're going to finally see some deep runs from the protoss of the post-Ray era. The Sunday night dinner and drinks was a highlight as always, a great way to cap off a fun weekend overall. It's a bit of a bummer that there won't be another ACL event for months; this has been my first year on the circuit and it's really been an absolute blast. I know I'll definitely be back for more next year, and I can't wait to see what 2014 has in store for our scene and our players.


As always, a massive thanks to my team Exile5 and our sponsors Nvidia, CM Storm and CoolerMaster for giving me the chance to experience another great event. Shoutout to my sister for putting me up for the weekend and even coming to watch on Saturday despite knowing next to nothing about Starcraft or gaming in general! Cheers to everyone I got a chance to hang out with in Sydney and throughout the ACL events this year, and a big thank you to everyone involved with ACL for putting on an awesome tournament once again.


Look forward to seeing you all next year!