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Well.. wrong.

I had colCruncher next, a protoss player. A very strange protoss player, who had two very distinct playstyles; either I'm getting ridiculously allined, or he'll turtle up.

"It's okay, he can't be better than Andy or Karl; no way!" I think to myself. I had a while to prepare, speaking to Shawn and others before my game, calming myself down. I tried not to think about how this was the guy who qualified in the TSL and took out some Koreans in the FXO tournaments a while back. I just thought, it was another protoss, how could I lose? My ZvP is awesome!

What map do I veto? You should know this by now..

First game, Taldarim Altar.

Eww. Not the best map. I start the game, thinking he's going to forge expand into 6/7gate. That's all I could see happening, and I decided I'd counter it by going for a fast +1+1 ling/muta style, allowing me to punish him as much as possible. The problem, however, was the spawns. I was at bottom right, he was at top right.

How do I take a third? I took the bottom middle, but getting drones there is a joke. My +1+1 was late by 15 seconds, and I mean 15 seconds, and that's all it took. His 6gate came, exactly as expected, and there was notta hhing I could do. I put my head down, feeling like crap. I wanted to cry, I felt horrible, but again Dan walked up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder and reassured me that I'd just bring it back the next game.

Alright, let's go metalopolis. That's my map. We get cross spawns on it, and he opens with a 3gate expand, and I take my 3rd super fast. This is my game to lose at this stage, as I had went roach/infestor versus his stalker/colossus ball, and I was keeping up on upgrades and keeping his colossus ball down.

My 4th is up as his 3rd goes down, I had been pressuring him and pulling his units out of position constantly. I'm feeling great at this point, playing at around ~300 apm purely due to how much of a nervous wreck I was. My creep was across the map, my hive was going up and my 5th was going up.

I engage him at his 4th just as he begins to take it, and kill everything but ~8 stalkers and a sentry. All his colossus are dead and his 4th isn't operational. My 5th is going up and my 4th is operational. I'm remaxing roaches, and can't even see how I can possibly lose from this point.

I remax my ball of roaches, and go again. I still can't kill his 4th. His blinkstalker micro is great and he has 3 colossus. I kill everything but 1 colossus and 6 stalkers, and realise... I can't remax again. I can only get to ~170 before I'm out of money. What the hell.

I take the gold and my 5th is up. His 4th is barely up. I'm still ahead, I just need to keep pressuring. I send my next wave, and I get decimated. My infestors get neurals off and I kill alot, but he pushes through with 20 stalkers and warps in reinforcements. I can only get to ~145 supply of roaches/hydras and he's killing my gold. I regroup and fight off his army, but he's still remaxing and pushing through.

My head lowers to the desk for a moment, as I know I've lost. I should've won this game, I should've rallied into his 4th during the first engagement and won there, but a simple mistake due to fatigue loses me this game, and I am absolutely devastated. I gg, shake his hand, and drop my head to the desk, wanting nothing but to go back to the hotel and turn in for the night; two games which I could've easily won down the drain, losing 3rd round to something I should've beaten, making me absolutely distraught.

I walk out to my team, explain that I lost, and they're all trying to cheer me up. Josh tells me that he's already happy with how I played, and that even though I went down 2-0, I definately put my name out there, beating Mihai 2-1 (which should've been 2-0) and pushing Cruncher very hard, even though I lost 2-0. I stick around, however, chatting to people and cheering on teammates until about 2am, when Shawn plays his last game, going 3-0 for the day, when we finish for the night and go home as a team, all in good spirits except Kevin, who had lost to Thorzain 2-1 in the very last game of the night, in a nailbiting, extremely long series. He walked home while we all took cabs. I understood exactly how he felt, because it was how I felt when I lost: Kevin is the only person who I have seen that is as passionate as me in this game, that takes losses as hard as I do.

I wake up around 11am to someone knocking on my door; apparently, they almost forgot to wake me up.

Wankers.

It didn't matter, I didn't play until ~2pm, but I wanted to be at the venue to cheer on my friends (Destiny had lost first round to Darkcell 1-2 in a ZvZ that he should've won, but he did well in the losers bracket). So, we get to the venue, and today was crazy. I meet thundertoss, ascend, UnderlineEnt and some fans. It was a great day. I go into my game feeling great; colFireZerg: He can't be that great. Shawn had told me he's just going to allin me twice. Ez.

He allined me twice, and he won. I was out, 0-2, feeling shitty. Again, I felt the same as Kevin did; I had lost two games where I should've won, as I knew exactly what was coming, and fell short of my goal. Nevertheless, I stood up, shook the guys hand and walked away, confident that I'll do better both in Korea and at the next LAN I attend.

After this, I don't actually play any more, I only hang around and cheer on my teammates. I love my teammates; we're family. I can't actually remember everyones results, but everyone in FXO played really well. My memory is pretty hazy at this stage, but most of the rest of the day was spent talking to random people and sitting down on the floor, really angry at myself at my losses. I just wanted to get back to the hotel to practice, or get to Korea to practice. I wanted to do better than I did, but as I don't own a time machine, I couldn't really do anything to fix it.

By the end of the day, a lot had passed; I had met pretty much everyone I set out to meet (apart from a friend of mine whos babysitter flaked on him, and thus, he couldn't drive out to the event) and had an amazing time so far. All that was left was to go home, sleep and get up for the finals day, Shawn carrying the hopes of our team on his shoulders going into the day.

We all wake up, getting out there nice and early to cheer up shawn. He's playing FnaticFenix, definately no pushover first round in the championship losers bracket, and is in good spirits.

However, he goes down 0-2.

Fast.

He lost to a 2rax which he expected to be a 1rax FE, and a strange hellion build that I can't quite remember; it just wasn't his day. However, being the nice guy he is, he stood up, all smiles, shook Fenix's had and then turned around to chat with his fans. It's amazing how nice he is.

At this stage, everyone I knew personally was either out or playing consolation matches. Shawn 'plays' his consolation matches (terran imba at coinflips) and then we head off for sushi at lunch, eager to watch the finals later that day. I met Naniwa, Sjow, Ostojiy and Odee (Dignitas manager) and the lunch, and they were all really cool. We joked as we ate, until Naniwa and Sjow parted us to go get ready for Naniwas match.

The days before this were nothing in comparison to the atmosphere today; every game had a tonne of onlookers, and every game had a crazy atmosphere. I wont go into too much detail, as they were all covered extensively in the MLG threads on teamliquid and other writeups themselves (and I couldn't do them justice), but it was insane. Watching MMA kill his own CC at the event; you can hear the crowd on the stream. Imagine that, only 100x louder. For the commentators to pick up the crowd, it has to be loud.

I mean, loud. I was actually standing next to Shawn when it happened, and he turned to me bewildered, and said "Why couldn't he do that against me?"

All in all, the event was amazing. I wont spoil any more games or go into detail, but I must say; if you can get out to an MLG, or any big event; do it. It's insane; the amount of people there, that all love the game that you love. Watching the players work their asses off to try and edge out that little advantage, doing what they can to win.

Hearing the crowd scream in excitement as something amazing happens.

It's extremely hard to convey in words how simply amazing it is.

At the end of the day, however, the event finished, we were kicked out pretty quickly by security and the afterparty began. FXO went out as a team (with raelcun) to have a quick dinner before we went to the bar to meet everyone. If playing and watching a game that you love with nerd friends isn't enough, going to a bar with your nerd friends to talk about the game must be even better, and I don't even drink.

Myself, Shawn and Catspajamas (whom is very wellspoken and a nice guy in his own right) left at about 2;30am with the intention of going to meet tastosis at their room, but decided against it when we heard they were busy kicking people out, as their room was basically over-run, so we hailed a cab and got home, exhausted.

I woke up reasonably late the next morning, with a day free to do whatever. Mingyun had left early in the morning (he had to leave for some reason, I forget), so we were down a laptop, but we were all happy and already back to practice.

But not before we did a cast of a game. I'll post that later.

This is where I learnt that Kevin is easily one of the smartest players playing SC2 right now. He spent 3 hours in the unit test map, testing different openings as he decided he wasn't happy with his current openings.

Later that night, we went to Latitude 41 for dinner, accompanied by Cheekz (as she lives in Columbus and is a nice person, I invited her along). So it was FXO, sans Mingyun. nom nom nomming. Was a pretty awesome dinner.

Come morning, I had Anthony wake me up at 8am so I could get packing. We had one last breakfast, consisting of myself, Dan, Karl, Andy, Kevin and Shawn, before Kevin and Andy bailed to the airport, as their flights were ~5 hours before ours.

Fast forward 5 hours, we check in at the airport and go through customs, leaving Karl to go off on his own (he was in concourse B, we were in concourse C, so we couldn't stay together ) and possibly the second funniest thing happened.

Shawn got airport security to go along with a prank. What the ****.

I go through the security checkpoint, Shawn goes in ahead of me and convinces them to troll me. So, I get through fine and two security guards say "Sir, we need to take you behind the screen there for about five minutes for additional screening"

Now, I thought this was bullshit, and probably a violation of some law, but being the guy I am and not wanting to make a scene, I wearily reply "Ok, sure, no problem mates."

They then turn to Shawn and say "Was that good enough?"

Prick.

So, after that, myself and Dan begin our 32 hours of travel, which was accompanied with a ~45minute delayed flight in Dallas which almost made us miss our connecting flight in LA (I sprinted across the whole airport and the doors were still shut, Dan popped his shoulder out whilst running and was something like 5 minutes behind me).

So.. here I am, back in Australia for a few days, waiting to go off to Korea to participate in the GSTL. We'll be practicing our asses off and trying our best to represent not America, not Australia, but FXO as a team. I'll keep updating this as I'm over in Korea, as well as hound Unstable to update his blog post aswell.

This was a good hiatus from practice, as well as helped me clear my head and arrange my thoughts. If anyone has any questions about anything I didn't cover, feel free to PM me here or on skype (tgun.143), and please leave comments.