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SBWI The Swedish BroodWar Initiative

Non-profit Organization — Event Organizer & Sponsor

To preserve and promote BroodWar tradition

VIP Sponsor

GLINSO.EU

Global Insurance Solutions — Insurance Brokers

In Name of Rus_Brain

Additional Sponsors: Reps)Plumbum & Surf-VI Theoretically, at this point, we should have a long(er) news about the season's end. As is tradition, we'd panic, because sometimes we only have outdated pictures. Then we'd come up with a lot of stuff nobody would read, except a few really happy Russians, because Russians are almost always happy, if they're not fighting bears. Great isn't it?



This time we actually had to do some work, as our marvellous ICCup Ladder Main Event will take off pretty soon — starting next Saturday and continueing on Saturday afterwards. If you missed it, you'll get all the important information.



Concept



The idea was simple: The best ladder players should get a reward apart from eFame or eSport Dollars. Every user registered correctly, who hopefully followed our ladder rules to the latter, did automatically participate, if he played the 1on1 Ladder. In two months hundreds of players gave their best, tried to improve, lived up for the challenge and had fun doing so. In other words, the 1on1 Ladder Season was the very first phase of the Ladder Main Event.



The Top 288 automatically qualified for the next three stages. Depending on their achieved ranking, they'll be seeded into one of the two preliminaries or the Main Double Elimination Tournament. Now, for the twist, only one account per player was allowed. If a player had more than one account within the Top 288, the next player moved up.



Now for the upcoming week and the details. The Top 288 were seeded according to this scheme:



The Places 288 to 49 will be randomly placed into one out of sixteen 16 Man Single Elimination Brackets. The places 48 to 33 (16 man + 15*16 players = 256 players) are seeded into one Bracket each. This way the most skilled players gained an additional bonus for their higher ranking and it hopefully rules out «Death Constellations», in which the best face the best, while sixteen other lucky low ranked players are in another bracket.



Anyhow, before we drift off, every winner of the Qualifier Tournaments will advance to the next round: Phase 2 aka. the Shoot-Outs.



The Shoot Outs will feature the winners of Phase 1 aka. The Qualifiers. This makes 16 players. The players ranked 33 to 17 will be seeded, so that each of them will face one of the winners of The Qualifiers. They'll be playing a Best of Three, from which the winner advances to the last phase aka. the Main Event.



The Ladder Main Event, the last stage, will feature the surving 16 players from Phase II, as well as the Top 16. The Ladder Main Event is nothing but a 32 Man Double Elimination Grid, in which the Top 16 are seeded — so that even the top ranking matters a bit. The better you scored, hopefully the «easier» your opponents will be!



Day 1: Saturady, 7th Dec.



Day 1 will be played next Saturday, the 7th of December. It will start at 14:00 CET with the Qualifiers. The channel to start from will be ILME for informations. Depending on which grid you're in, you'll have to go to the channelsILME-A1 to ILME-A16!







The admins will prepare the grids for you, so you don't have to do anything for the first two stages. The most known account will be placed in instead of the smurfs used for ladder; hence please check main account and smurfs for PMs. This information should have been sent to you via PM alreay, if not, you'll receive it in the near future — it could take a few hours to confirm the lower rankings, no worries, Gen's already in the 12th hour to confirm the standings. An updated overview of all players qualified for the First Stage can be seen in the forum, along with updates in which bracket you are, as soon as everything else is done.





Current List of Players & Seeds





The matches in the first stage will be Best of Ones, only the overall finale will be a Best of Three. Make sure you know the maps by heart, so you can pick the best strategies!





The matches in the first stage will be Best of Ones, only the overall finale will be a Best of Three. Make sure you know the maps by heart, so you can pick the best strategies! Starting Maps:





Round 1: Fighting Spirit

Round 2: Destination

Round 3: Aztec

Round 4: Electric Circuit





At 18:00 CET Phase II will start, the Shoot Outs. First map will be Python, afterwards it's Loser's Choice from the ICCup Map Pack 2.5. Pick Hunters people. Depending on the progress of Phase I, the Qualifiers, the matches could start sooner or later. The survivors should keep this in mind and try to be back. Shoot-Outs can theoretically be postponed. If you already know that you might need to postpone the matches, please



AtPhase II will start, the Shoot Outs. First map will be, afterwards it's Loser's Choice from the ICCup Map Pack 2.5. Pick Hunters people. Depending on the progress of Phase I, the Qualifiers, the matches could start sooner or later. The survivors should keep this in mind and try to be back. Shoot-Outs can theoretically be postponed. If you already know that you might need to postpone the matches, please use the forum thread to tell us in advance. No guarantees that this happens, though. If you, for one reason or the other (there ARE sometimes technical fuck-ups for which we can't control), received no notification that you'll be playing next Saturday. If you are among the Top 288, please simply assume you're going to play, because you should be. Assume it's the fault of our PM system. Read this paragraph, follow the explanations, and come to the designated channels next Saturday!



If you finished close to the #288, please wait for further instruction. There's a good chance you'll move up, given that there are still a few shared accounts hidden and that players might be telling us beforehand, that they have no time!



As for the Top 16 goes: These games will be played the Saturday after (14th December). For now, just wait for further instructions. Please prepare to use Defiler.ru — more information will be released in the upcoming week, most around Sunday the 8th!

Ladder End — Coverage

Now for the more interesting part of the news, if you can't participate. Let's have a quick overview of who we'll see next Saturday. We'll leave out a lot of the Top 16, because there will be news in between the two play days and because we only have limited time to cover things. First, let's check a few of the seeded players for next Saturday, the people ranked somewhere in between #33 and #48. On #33 we have the first really, really big name of our current scene. Marwin «smurfed» under a Swedish flag. Smurfed is a big word, as he currently recides in Sweden, much adding to the happiness of one of our sponsors, the SBWI. Before the SCII Beta the nice Ukrainian Terran was already a notable name, yet none too known. He scored high in the TLS 2 ladder and finished fourth in the WCG Ukraine 2009, where he only lost to hanniGan and White-Ra respectively, almost making it to the real big venues. Despite him being a highly skilled player, he went widely unnoticed, both in his clan RoX.KIS, as well as in international waters. This changed dramatically earlier this year, when he played a few show matches against guys like eOnzErG and joined iFU. Even though nobody knew him, he was able to beat his leader, the Spaniard, as well as taking games off names like Sziky, the arueably best European player at the moment. Hopefully Marwin will make it through, I'll definitely want to see more of him!













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Why did the Zerg fall over?



Because it was imbalanced



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A Zealot smoking weed is a High Templar

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This page misses :nicelis: and :mustafa:









… and we're back with more text!





On places #36, #47 and #48 we see three oldschool Zerg: the Polish Koget (36), Pike (#48) and the Peruvian CastrO (47). They know their way around Brood War, have a lot of experience and deliver proof, that the old elite didn't die of age yet. Even though it might seem that they already need a cane to walk, they should not be underestimated — a cane can be used the same way you can use a mace!



Another oldschool Protoss lures on place 43, reps)Tama, who wasn't seeded shortly before the server went down yesterday. In a long series against sas.ZaRaki he laddered up a bit and made his way into the seeded spots for the Qualifiers. He's one of the most reliable and stable Protoss players from Russia. His speciality: Sniping Terrans, killing in the Mirror, losing a lot more than you might think vs. Zerg. Usually, you think he's losing, then he just turns around the game and still wins. A highly skilled player, I'd like to see coming very far. He's always good for a giant surprise!



Last but not least, there'd be rank #41, the German Bakuryu. Lately, the Zerg had problems to play his best, losing in the STL against Poetic[AoV]. Granted, Poetic is very strong, still Bakuryu should've won. Then again, Bakuryu is known to sometimes explode, taking down names like Sziky or trutaCz in mirror matches. There's room at the top and Bakuryu is not a dark horse. I predict, that he'll at least qualify for the Main Event, if not advancing a bit further.

However, the most positive surprise might be #40 — Dr.Shrinker from Norway. He's been playing a shit ton of games, always streaming his progress and not dodging anyone. A very nice person, ready to give feedback and all. Always very nice to see a player improving, making the best of it and stuff. Go Shrinker, Go!





Futher down there are still a lot of really great players. Starting with TechnicS (50th), the player finishing third in the TLS 3, being very oldschool and one of the guys with a good shot to take the crown; there's ZaRaki, who returned after an injury and trains hard (57th), but also Terror (58th), winner of two Defiler gold medals and now leader of the strong Peruvian clan LaGFree, OctZerg (#83 LING LING LING), Dima (#124) and Biggus (#149), who we know nothing about, but that they're really strong with Terran (and in Dima's case are the third most successful players of Defiler), the lately very well performing Canadian Terran Bizzy (#165), orz (#186), one of the strongest Terrans from the past Defiler Tournaments, who meet shortly before the list ends with mySelf or something (#288).



Please note, that the above rankings and seeds might change in the next hours. They're not 100% accurate, but almost. We just didn't want to let you wait longer!







The Casters



Obviously, this event wouldn't be too great, if there would be no stream for the rest of the Brood War world. Thanks to three motivated contributors, ICCup will be able to give you hopefully a few hours of high class games, which you can observe comfortably from your home, likely while you eat chips and sit on your sofa. The three headed monkey caster team will be none other than: DRaW, BisuDagger and Talent! DRaW is the guy who you most likely know the best. He's among our Top 16 and will be participating in Day 2, if he doesn't have an excuse to not show up already. No worries, we'll force him to play. He's a great player, knows all about Protoss and Zerg, less about Terran and how to actually sign up for big tournaments. He's one of the pillars of his team, sas, and good at analyzing build orders and such. He's also very confused, doesn't know which operating system he uses, eager to tell the world about his affairs with the opposing gender and other stories.





BisuDagger will most likely handle the camera. He already did a few high quality casts of the current Korean scene, most times cheering for — Bisu. Even though I consider his devotion to Bisu a bit annoying at times, because I'm more the KT and Flash guy, he's a tremendous caster, funny, humerous, has a lot of insight and not super artificial like many others. He'll be the translator of DRaW's gibberish if push comes to shove.

The third guy at the microphone is Talent, who I know little about. He's a quite skilled player himself, will be participating in the Qualifiers and already streamed tons of his ladder games on the FISH server. He's certainly good and from what I heard also good for some stories of his own. He perfectly fits into the trio, so much is sure. Other than that, he's most likely known from uploading very… disturbing? erotic? there's no word… photographies of himself. Let's paint him like one of our French girls. The Stream will most likely be available at Defiler.ru and other cool pages!



Misc.

Please bear with us, we'd love to cover more about this event and plan to do so. There's a chance we release more hype news posts in the upcoming weeks, including good plays from the ladder phase — Battle Reports, bad Photoshops, interviews, we're not sure yet. However, our man power is very limited, all admins handling this event also have to maintain the current ladder, prepare the upcoming Clan League season or are helping out with projects of the SBWI. If you have a bit of freetime, want to have replay packs of our beloved foreigners faster than the rest, or want to see behind the curtains, please consider to write ICCup.Gen a message!

Also, we made a Luquid Article ( — Largo style) with a cleaner overview. Look at it or dont!

Until then, yours faithfully, with much hugs and no kisses (no homo),

The ICCup Staff.





Sources: Forum Thread (Players!) — Likkipiddy Article







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