[famsytron]

Not too long ago the qualification process for Intel Extreme Masters tour stop Shanghai, China was held for South East Asia. Hopeful Starcraft 2 players attempted to qualify through a two-stage process leading to only one seed at IEM Shanghai. Players signed up, predictions were cast, and in the end it was Ethan Zugai, aka, Frenetic Array iaguz who came out victorious.

This will be iaguz' second time going to China for an IEM event. Previously he competed at IEM Guangzhou where he was nominated for "Sick Nerd Baller of Quangzhou". IEM Shanghai is shaping up to be an extremely difficult competition. Being the only South East Asia/Oceania representative in the main tournament, we wanted to catch up with iaguz and ask him a few questions about the upcoming event and more.

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Hi iaguz, how are you? What have you been up to since your big win in the IEM Shanghai Qualifier?
I'm pretty good thanks just came back from a win at AVCon down in Adelaide. I won 2.5k there which is my biggest win in terms of regular cash prizes so I'm going into Shanghai with some solid momentum.

You seem to be on quite a tear. What is the motivation behind the recent string of success? New practice regimen or?
Nothing too special, I practice most of the day almost every day normally. I think Terran strategies and new HotS units are very strong particularly with the TvZ style that I like to play. I guess it's my time or something.

Could you take us through your daily routine of practice, etc, leading up to the tournament?
My normal practice regime is hitting Find Match on korea a lot of times, with the occassional session with a practice partner. I generally have a few stratgies that I go into a tournament with so I try to play them out a lot of times so I know what to do in certain situations and to identify what aspect of them needs the most attention for the strategy to work.

For this tournament I'll be doing that as well as a lot of studying my opponents for any exploitable weaknesses and inplementing them into my play. I'm a bit lucky in this respect since I'm enterring this tournament with a much lower profile then everyone else and with much less information that can be sourced.

A lot of big names have qualified for the tournament already, INnovation qualified yesterday and Carmac jokingly Tweeted that he would put you against innovation in the first round.
It's a premier level tournament it's inevitable that there will be high level korean opponents. It's actually kind of humbling since innovation and polt are two terrans whose builds I've stolen for my own games. The prospect of having to play against them is a bit scary. I guess I'll probably spend the whole weekend just watching over innovations shoulder.

To read the rest of the interview where Frenetic Array iaguz talks about WCS, IEM, Australian SC2 and more - click HERE!