So MLG Columbus is less than two weeks away so I thought I might make this post to generate some hype and encourage people to participate in the open bracket. Many have seen my postings around here before, but most people here who recognize my username recognize me as the diamond league player who almost took a game off of a round of 8 code S GSL player at MLG Providence. I’ve told very few people (even among close friends) the entire story of how it all went down and the weird coincidences and crazy rollercoaster of emotions along the way, so here it goes.









I guess where the story really starts is two weeks before MLG at a smaller tournament, The New England Starcraft 2 League. The decision to go wasn’t an easy one as I had a grad level biochemistry exam the next day. When I got there all the players were MUCH better than I was expecting. I was very much an outsider and to make a long story short I got absolutely mauled going 0 and 4, and embarrassingly attacked my own Nexus on stream for everyone to watch. My nerves got the better of me and my inability to move the mouse without shaking profusely buried me. To make matters worse it turns out I needed the extra study time, and ended up failing my biochem exam the next day.









So MLG Providence was rapidly approaching, I had already booked the hotel, and two of my friends who don’t play starcraft were coming with me. After my poor performance at NESC2 and my exam, I was in a pretty dark place. Even though most of my thoughts went to Starcraft, most of my play time went to LoL, and Skyrim which had just been released. The day before Providence I made an excited facebook post to which a friend commented below “No one cares.” I actually replied to him profusely apologizing, saying “You’re right I guess I got a little ahead of myself.”









Fastfoward to day 1. We load up the car with all sorts of tasty booze including Ithaca brewing co’s “Flower Power” (a delicious IPA). We check into the hotel and get to the venue and start doing some shots. I figured I had plenty of time so that a couple of shots would just kill the nerves. When we made it to the venue, I commandeer one of the computers on the mini-stage to warm up. As soon as I log in and people see “diamond league”, half the crowd walks away behind me. I lose a few games in embarrassing fashion and all that’s running through my mind is “It was a mistake to come here. You are going to lose badly and embarrass yourself in front of your friends and all these people, why the fuck did you think you could do this?”









We go out for lunch at a brew pub, I ordered a 9% ABV beer that was much much larger than I had anticipated when it got there. As we’re eating and I know that at this point I’m pretty much hammered I tell my friends. “Shit, I can’t play SC drunk, what always happens is no matter what I plan on doing I always just end up with a fuckton of zealots somehow.” So we headed back and I sat down in the players area across from my opponent and got ready to play.









It was a zerg player, and one of the few matches I had a clear plan in. The first game is going according to plan until I realize with my timing attack on his third that I had forgotten blink. My timing attack is shut down and I go 0-1. Game two is on Shakuras. I see him trying to hatch first so I cannon rush the natural, he spots it as it’s going up and pulls all his drones, my cannon barely finishes but only takes a single drone with it. I’m behind in tech and traded 3 pylons and a cannon for lost mining time and one drone. I realize the situation is desperate so I take a super-fast hidden third. My opponent goes for mutalisk play. I’m deflecting it rather easily with blink stalkers and pheonixs. About 8 in game minutes go by when he flies by my hidden base and panics, cannons go up barely in time to defend and my army catches a large group of lings b-lining it for my hidden expo, I’m fuzzy on the details (Hey, I was very drunk) but the next thing I know I’m maxed out and moving across the map with…zealots. So many zealots, I was maxed out off of almost a pure zealot force and I hear my friends howling with laughter in the background with a “He’s so fucked up, somewhere in there.” Call it bad manner (my opponent is sitting right across from me) but I had just had to laugh as well, and suddenly the voice in my head saying I couldn’t do it was silenced and replaced with “lets have fun, and let’s fucking do this.”









Maybe the booze was too much, but I don’t actually remember a single detail from the third game. The next thing I remember was Leenock walking by. I let out an audible “Leenock” more out of realization than anything, not expecting him to hear it. He did a full 180 and looked at me with a very intense focused look to which I responded “Oh…I am your fan.” I went and told the ref I won to which he replied “Good job, now head to the main stage.” To which I replied, “Ummm, I think I heard you wrong, I think you just said head to the main stage.” “Yeah you’re playing Puzzle.”









Now I haven’t really told anyone this before but, right before coming to MLG I made one tweet, that tweet was to SlayerS_Puzzle saying “See you in the open bracket.” I kid you not, you can even look it up, it’s still there. SlayerS_Puzzle at the time was probably the most inspirational person in my game play. I watched his stream all the time, and now I was about to play him.









I don’t consider myself bad under pressure, in fact quite the opposite, but to get a sense about how much being in front of a crowd affects me, my friends use to do this thing at lunch in highschool where they would all stare at me because they knew my brain would instantly go into panic mode and I would be incredibly uncomfortable. It’s just a reaction I have no control over it. So there I was, a lowly diamond league player signing out of Nestea’s account, getting ready to play on the main stage.









I looked to the ref who brought me across and said, “Hey man…I can’t do this.”





“What, isn’t this why you came here? Isn’t this why you entered?”





fucking diamond league” “Yeah, I mean, I guess. But I’m





“Listen to me, just cheese him. Get in his head, do you know that 3 gate, 2 proxied one in the main?”





“Yeah, I don’t know man, I think I had something else in mind.”









I did have something else in mind, in fact I had practiced it before. A specific build designed to beat someone who thought they were better than me, designed to beat a pro. The basic structure of it was a hidden stargate phoenix all-in that looked exactly like a DT rush. It was designed to force him into a robo build and then kill him. This was before phoenix all-ins were popular and I saw that it actually worked extremely well against blink builds, (you can’t blink while lifted). I had even thought of sneaky places to hide the stargate, places where pros don’t check.









Say what you want about MLG, but they do the booths right. I couldn’t even hear my clicky Zowie keyboard through all the soundproofing they had, which was good because after about 5 minutes I was in a very zen like state despite the lingering effects of the alcohol. The map was Xel’Naga, the game goes like any other game except for one critical mistake that I will never make again, I forgot to check the chronoboost on his nexus and as saw as I saw the second gas go down I left with my scouting probe. As soon as it left he canceled it and began to 4 gate. The second critical mistake was that when I went to intercept the probe, it came from the wide angle and was able to build a pylon up in my main. That was GG right there. From an observer standpoint it looked like he had just built a pylon in my base and the game was over. Even worse was I knew my hand had been played, if he watches the replay he sees the hidden stargate sitting there in the tasteless secret hallway and knows what is coming for the next map.









At this point what I’m thinking is, “Wow he actually risked doing a 4 gate vs a lower league player, that takes balls. With how he ended the game, he’s probably going to do it again.” Why wouldn’t he? I choose Shakuras for the second map because I want to threaten him with as many possibilities as I can, by choosing Shakuras I am threatening him with a possible expand in addition to everything else I can throw at him in PvP.









The game starts and I am doing everything to brace for a 4 gate, I’m doing a 2 gas defensive higher probe count 4 gate because you can transition to pretty much anything from there. I chrono out some sentries and see him posturing aggressively. As warpgate tech finishes I realized he fucked up and I can catch his stalkers, I forcefield the lower ramp and manage to catch 2 stalkers for free. A shot of adrenaline goes through me and I take inventory. My initial thoughts are, “Okay I NEED to press the advantage now, what are my advantages? Let’s see high sentry count quicker blink tech and more supply with him giving up those stalkers.” I press to his front and try to do the stalker scouting trick where you blink it back only to completely derp into 2 immortals and die. At this point my attack is all-in either as a hard contain which is still all-in or straight up attacking into him. I don’t want to go into macro game vs Puzzle. I realize my timing window is closing as once his blink finishes my sentry count will become nullified and his superior macro catches up. I know he has an observer either in my main or on my army, and I know my window might close in the time it takes for my ob to cross the map, so that’s when I make the decision to proxy my robo outside his natural.









The first thing I was looking to do was to snipe his ob if it was present, the second was to maybe catch him off-guard with some forcefields since he would have no knowledge of the robo. The move works out about as well as I expected it to, and even though his blink had finished the forcefields mess up his concave and catch some immortals, everything is going according to plan until I notice 5 stalkers walk into my base RIGHT after I had used my warpgates. It was actually perfect now that I think of it. If I see the 5 additional stalkers in his army there is no way I try to break his front, I just contain and expand. If he had taken any more or any less of his army he would have lost, given that at one point I had 4 stalkers of my own in his base uncontested forcing him to pull probes.









If anything had gone differently, if I had started making immortals after my gates went down, if my units weren’t attacking the neutral supply depot, if my blink micro was just a little better I might have won. But as soon as that game ended it felt like I had won anyways. I had stood toe to toe against one of the best of the best and had actually broken his front with a unique strategy. The crowd was going crazy as I exited the booth and I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was completely surreal, all of these people actually cheering for me. This wasn’t some charity, “get to play with the pros” event, this was the MLG open bracket where we were both giving it our all. “Should I do something with my hands? No wait I didn’t win. Should I shake Puzzle’s hand?” Instead I just waddled my socially awkward penguin self, back into the safety of the soundproof booth, grinning ear to ear.









rd row seats. We sat down with some cool people and I took a swig from my friend’s vodka and grape soda mix. The girl I was talking to gasped as she realized what my friends were telling them, that I had actually been drinking earlier was true, and I convinced her to partake as well. I spotted my friends who had miraculously managed to grab some 3row seats. We sat down with some cool people and I took a swig from my friend’s vodka and grape soda mix. The girl I was talking to gasped as she realized what my friends were telling them, that I had actually been drinking earlier was true, and I convinced her to partake as well.









It was a strange moment, I had the feeling that I accidentally fell into someone else’s body, someone important. I’ve never had regular people look at me like that before and I didn’t know what to think about it. I looked on stage, and Leenock was staring directly at me from one of the booths into the crowd. Thinking back on it, it STILL feels like a dream. Was I really the same person who had been so depressed just hours before?









The whole rest of the weekend I couldn’t stop smiling. I won another match before dropping to a damn good Zerg player. I met up with some old counter-strike friends and had an awesome time. Oh and that Biochemistry grad course? That has a happy ending too, I found out I needed to get a 98 on the final to get a B in the course, so I went ahead and got a 99.









The games vs Puzzle (Sorry MLG lost the VoD to the second match T_T): http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmhzdw_mlg-providence-2011-game-1-2-slayers-puzzle-p-vs-nikoras-p_videogames





Shout outs to my friends Jeff and Jorge who came down to watch the games even though they didn't play, the MLG ref who gave me some on the spot coaching, and those cool people we sat down with after the games.





For those wondering I am no longer diamond league I am indeed masters.