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Team Blog
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Brief Perspective on ESL Finals Groups |
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Posted on February 01th, 2010 at 6:05 PM |
(1) Comments |
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| Age: 22 |
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| From: Orlando, FL |
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| Tags:
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The Groups Are In! My perspective?
Group A
Shane 'rapha' Hendrixson
Chance 'chance' Lacina
Maciej 'Av3k' Krzykowski
Anton 'Cooller' Singov
Alessandro 'stermy' Avallone
One Player from the Asian Championships
Group B
Tim 'DaHanG' Fogarty
Sander 'Vo0' Kaasjager
Alexey 'Cypher' Yanushevsky
K?vin 'strenx' Ba?za
Magnus 'Fox' Ollson
One Player from the Asian Championships
First I think, for the record, I will claim that group A is the stronger group of the two. At least that's the way it appears. From my personal [biased?] perspective, the top tiered players are rapha, me, cooller, av3k, and cypher. Only one of those other four are in a group with me. However, this is the global finals and no single player is an "easy" match. I don't think the top two placements of the Asian Championship sway the strength of the groups one way or another. The strength of these players will be revealed in a few days though, so we'll see.
Chance is happy about his so-called "group of death". He likes being the underdog and the way group play usually works out, there are upsets. Particularly when it comes down to the tiebreakers, it's really anyone who can advance. Nobody will get to top4 anyway without playing some very tough opponents.
Interestingly, pfb made an argument for the strength of Group B that I agree with to an extent. Firstly, it's worth mentioning that he made a sick prediction in the North American Championship. He literally predicted dkt would not get to top4, and that vo0 would. Very few would have made such a prediction with him, but he had his reasons. Now, he thinks group B is stronger than A for similar reasons. Vo0 in tournament mode is a beast, and he views strenx is a monster in general. Like I said, these may seem like bold statements, but he was completely on regarding his last gutsy predictions.
For me, I'm pretty satisfied with my group. If I were forced to select players based on the arrangement of the pools I must select in their respective tiers, I don?t think my group would be much different (if the premise is that I must advance in the least difficult fashion [on paper]). If one?s goal is 1st place though (like everyone's should be theoretically) then groups don?t matter. There?s no way that one can achieve 1st place without playing the best competitors in an event.
Ok well, enough of my silly rationalizations that aren't even relevant to performance. I will go into detail as to how my preparation is going as the tournament approaches, but right now going through some hardware changes means I?m not 100% comfortable as of yet.
In other news, ESWC announced a quake live tournament. Notice there is no exclamation point behind that sentence. This is because of the G7 boycott, and the uncertainty regarding whether or not ESWC will pay past prize winners. There is also uncertainty as to whether they could even pay out future winners because there are no sponsors for the tournament (at least visibly, so it seems). So we will see what is up with this in the near future as well.
Just dropping by, more to come!
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