On March 16, 2009, Day[9] posted up his first podcast. He made them available for the entire StarCraft community to listen to, and they have remained a good learning tool for both Beginners and Intermediate players. Below is a list of all of his podcasts and a transcript for each of them.

Day[9]'s Original Introduction [ edit ]

Hello Everyone!

This thread will be a compilation of every audio recording I've done to date. They all will be uploaded in mp3 format for easy DL and use! Moreover, everything will be organized according to topic for easy searching! Excluding the first 2, all audios will have ID3 tags for iPod + media player use.

Additionally, this thread will be the official "request thread" for topics you'd like me to discuss. Topics could be on: general structure of play, match-up specific play, issues w/ particular builds, micro/macro tips, analysis of certain promatches etc. Feel free to be as vague or as specific as you'd like. For example:

-"what is the underlying difference between 3hatch and 2hatch vs terran? Why should I choose one over the other?" -"I'm terran and I'm having huge trouble beating protoss on Medusa." -"Why did Hoejja stick with lair for so long vs Bisu?" -"How should I hotkey my units as terran to control late-game big MnM armies?"

Also, if there are any formatting issues or broken links, PM me!! I'll fix them as soon as possible. Feel free to post or PM any feedback. Such comments will help future audios. Thanks!

(All audio recordings and podcasts are intellectual property of Sean Plott)

All Podcasts [ edit ]

Organized by Topics [ edit ]

Hallmarks of Expert Play Series (HOP) [ edit ]

A podcast series providing high level tips.

Mechanics Series (MECH) [ edit ]

A podcast series focusing on improving micro and macro by using proper mouse, keyboard, and management techniques.

Introduction to Mechanics provides an introduction to the MECH series. Definitely listen to first! Length 3:44

Mechanics #1 - Basics describes good placement for keyboard and mouse hands, hotkey setups and exercises to improve mouse accuracy. Length: 27:55

General Game Theory [ edit ]

Podcasts addressing broad issues in logic, learning, improvement, and game theory.

Building Triggers and the Imaginary Player discusses how to create and fine tune your own responses to deviations in the game. Though fairly advanced, this audio applies to anyone enjoys practicing and constructing precise builds and play. Length: 25:26

Why You Should Play Against Worse Players explains why it sometimes isn't best to be playing good players all the time. The audio describes how playing worse players helps your mind become more comfortable and creative, allowing you to take your game to the next level. Length 16:53

A New Look at Build Orders presents the appropriate way to think about build orders to allow for flexibility and understanding. Length: 34:18

Relative Timings explains how to plan timings that can account for variability and help optimize efficiency. Length: 14:29

Sidestepping: The Art of Abusing Weakness reveals how to take advantage of an opponents weaknesses rather than trying to punch holes in his strengths. Length: 22:39

Zerg Specific [ edit ]

Stopping Mech focuses on the general theory of how a zerg can crush terran mech play. With the rising popularity in mech, underlying mech logic is key to forming builds and countering opponents. This audio also includes a framework for a ZvT build order. Length: 23:48

Variations on 5 Hatch Hydra in ZvP explains the basic underlying logic of 5 hatch hydra, as well as the underlying logic of 3 distinct variations. Length: 20:16

Terran Specific [ edit ]

TvZ Midgame on Heartbreak Ridge: Fantasy's Play examines how to develop a good plan starting with the midgame. Fantasy's play on Heartbreak Ridge is used as an extended example. Length: 19:38

Protoss [ edit ]

Transitions and a Simple Goon Reaver Push uses a simple, effective goon reaver push as a case study for good transitions. Length: 13:13 IMPORTANT NOTE: I misspoke through this entire cast! I repeatedly say zealot after stargate. I meant zealot after cybercore. Not sure how i said "stargate" so many times when I was thinking about the core the whole time.

Podcast Transcripts [ edit ]

Stopping Mech [ edit ]

Section done by motbob

Hey everyone! This is Day[9], and I'm going to talk a little bit about defeating a Terran mech as a zerg player. So ever since Fantasy did his cute mech shit against GGplay, all anyone wants to do is mech. And that's fine; mech's cool; it's the current trend of the moment; it was never weak or strong. It's just an alternative type of play.

But the problem is that when I read the strategy forum or even watch the professionals play, I want to vomit. I feel like so much of the advice and the current ideas of how to play against mech is just totally wrong. Now, I'm a little unusual in that I've been around forever. I've been playing competitively for 10 years. There was a period way back when when mech was just as popular as it is now. That gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time practicing against and thinking about the dynamics of mech play. So I want to share a little bit with you guys about my experience against mech and what I feel is the correct way to think about and counteract a good Terran mech player.

So first, let's talk about the strengths and weaknesses of a mech build, then let's analyse what's wrong with current thought and play, and then I'll give some more concrete tips at the end and even a loose build that you guys can play around with.

So, let's dive right in and talk about the three major strengths and weaknesses of mech, in my opinion. Number 1: mech is good with big, one-punch-style pushes. Number two: mech is great at holding territory and playing defensively. Number three: mech is great at fucking with the Zerg early game.

Let's go ahead and talk about those three concepts in depth. First, I'll talk about this one-punch style army concept that I mentioned. This idea is that in small numbers, Zerg has an advantage over a mech army. In medium sized armies they're fairly even. But once you start talking about big, large armies, the mech army is way better than whatever Zerg can throw at it. So, the way this manifests itself in games is that Terrans will much often favor a timing push that is significantly later in the game, because early-game pushes are just so dangerous. In fact, it's often a bad idea to be very aggressive early on as a meching Terran player.

Number two: holding territory and playing defensively. With Siege Tanks and Mines and Goliaths, you can set yourself up and plant yourself and be almost impenetrable. Two great examples of this are Mind vs s2 on the Dec. 15th Proleague,

which is a great example of the way mech can "hold the line" in a way that MnM can't.

Another good example is Flash vs sAviOr on Baekmagoji.

EmbedVideo received the bad id "AW2h23lUisY&e" for the service "youtube".

Flash just had so much stuff that when sAviOr attacked with infinity Ultralisks, they evaporated immediately and Flash was just sitting there pumping his fist like a 15 year old.

The third thing is that mech is very good at screwing with the zerg early on. This is because they don't need that barracks, so they can do things like proxy barracks openings that don't really screw with the later stages of their mech build, and because vultures are so fucking obnoxious. They plant mines and dart around and kill drones, and whatnot.

So yeah, that is what a mech army is good at, and I'll constantly be coming back and referring to these things throughout this rant...thing. Now let's talk about what mech is bad at.

In order, the three weaknesses that mech has (in my opinion) are thus: one, mech has a huge problem with mobility; two, mech is not very good with applying pressure throughout the game; three, mech play has a weak mid-game (sort of an extension of the first two weaknesses). I'll talk about those in depth.

About mobility. Terran players often need to plant mines, but even if the Terran player isn't making many vultures, his tanks need to be sieged to maximize damage. So it's very difficult for a meched Terran to dart this way and that in the fashion that MnM does. And again (this is sort of an extention of the big push notion) the Terran can't really do these ninja-like things where it breaks its army into small pieces and splits up, because in small numbers, zerg is better against small groups of mech. So, Terran players suffer from a huge lack of mobility.

The second thing is the applying of pressure. Same thing: the Terran cannot break his army up and do dichotymous things, so the way mech players win is by doing huge pushes. Yeah, there's vulture harass in the mid-game, but I'll talk about how to negate that in a moment.

The third thing is the meched Terran's weak mid-game. That is the point in time when a Zerg player really needs to attack. The Terran player must play defensively in the midgame, because it can't push, and if it does vulture harass, it gets completely crushed by hydras. This is the point where Zerg can take a lot of expansions and win economically.

So, to recap, a meching Terran is very slow, but extremely strong. So the Zerg player cannot win by being cute. The Zerg player can't win with three lurkers and a dark swarm and feel clever. The Zerg player needs to win by having a lot of shit. And the way the Zerg does that is by creating a powerful economy by exploiting the Terran's midgame immobility.

Now, before I talk about good ways to deal with mech, I have to point out what is so bad about current theory and practice against mech. I can sum it up with the following: people play against mech the same way as they play against a MnM Terran. You just can't so that. For some reason, people think that you play a certain way against Terran, and it doesn't matter what Terran does. But against a meching Terran, you should treat it as a totally different match-up.

So let me list some things that are bad that you should not do. And yeah, there are obvious exceptions but on the whole, you should not do the following things.

-Don't go for a really fast mutalisk harass. I see a lot of players think they're really clever, getting their 3hatch, their spire, and going to kill a lot of SCVs, but the problem is that that doesn't work against goliaths. Against MnM it's great because the MnM sometimes gets isolated from each other and you can pick some off, and the SCVs can be taken out because the range upgrade is delayed blah blah blah... but goliaths have like infinite range and deal a fuckton of damage against air, so when you run in feeling so fucking clever, you leave with a bunch of dead mutalisks and the rest are red health. And that effectively gives you no advantage. It is very difficult to abuse a meching Terran with really aggressive harass. I mean, if you can pick off an SCV, do it, but don't make the cornerstone of your gameplay about getting an advantage with fast harassment because it will not happen.

-Do not rely on lurkers against a meching Terran. Against MnM, lurkers make perfect sense. Six lurkers can kill off like infinity MnM. I mean, you only need two lurkers to defend an entire expansion against Terran in the midgame. And again, a major purpose of lurkers is getting a little bit of map control in the midgame, because he doesn't have mobile detection. Meching players are already immobile in the midgame. They're not trying to attack in the midgame. They're going to wait until the later stages of the game where not only will they have detection, but they'll have an army that will completely kill the shit out of your lurkers. They'll have tanks and goliaths, which take many hits from lurkers and have very long range. So the fact that the lurker attack stacks is completely meaningless. In fact, if you do the math, you'll find that lurkers are extremely cost-ineffective at killing tanks, when compared to zerglings etc.

-Do not rely on defilers to beat a mech player. Now, this argument is a little tricky, but it's absolutely crucial that you understand this, or else your play against meched Terran will be crippled. Let's think about defilers against MnM. Defilers make perfect sense, because your lurkers that were oh-so-good in the midgame are now in serious danger from vessels and tanks. But hey, don't worry, you can throw down some dark swarms, and now you're totally safe against the MnM army. Now, against mech, it's not that defilers are bad, it's that defilers are significantly worse against mech when compared to MnM. Picture yourself getting ready to attack a mech army. It's spread out with tanks. The units are physically big, so even when they're as clustered as they can be, they're still fairly spread out. When the Terran has all his tanks sieged, and occasionally he'll have mines there too, your army will be eaten alive by the tanks, even in dark swarm, by the splash damage. You're dealing with 15-25 tanks against mech. You're not dealing with the 3-5 tanks you usually see against MnM. So, you just need to have a lot of units. You can't rely on the dark swarm. It is good, it might be the thing that tips the balance in your favor in a big battle, but you can't lock yourself into that mindset of "OK, I have my Hive, I need to get my defilers so that I can stay alive." That's the mindset that you have against a MnM player, not the mindset that you should have against a meching Terran player.

-Don't build Ultralisks. Ultralisks are great against MnM because the Ultra armor is so high that MnM shots barely do anything. The problem is against mech, it is the exact opposite. Ultralisks maximize the damage that a tank does. When a tank fires at a zergling, it can do at most 35 damage, because a zergling has 35 life. Against an Ultra, the tank does the full 70 damage, not including upgrades. When you throw splash damage and mines in there, Ultras get EATEN A-L-LIVE by a mech army. For an example, watch the second Youtube video. You will laugh at how many Ultralisks sAviOr lost at the end of that game. Now I actually did a calculation on this, about Ultraling against mech. It's shocking how ineffective Ultraling is against mech in terms of damage taken vs damage dealt. A much better spending of your money is on simple ground units, like zerglings and hydralisks. Those are going to be the core of your army, because again, against mech, you're not trying to make a "cute" army, with defilers and lurkers and Ultralisks. You just want an army that is a lot of shit.

Section transcribed by qrs

And part of the reason, I think, that ultralisk/zergling is so popular is that players will develop an enormous economic advantage in the midgame—correctly so—and at that point, it hardly matters what the Zerg does in terms of unit combination. Ultralisk/ling just happens to be what the player does to win, so he incorrectly learns that ultralisk/ling is the proper counter, when it is in fact not. Again, all of what I've been talking about: this whole medic/marine mindset: it's all just ways of saying that the Zerg is not taking advantage of the fundamental weakness of a meching player, and that is the midgame immobility. A Zerg player needs to establish an extremely strong economy then, and then crush the Terran in the later stages of the game, when Terran is trying to do that big one-punch push.

OK, great. Now that I've said all that stuff, I want to give a few general tips of how to deal with a meching player, and then I'll finish things up with a build that I've done that's extremely effective, and you guys can play around with it and do whatever. It's just a good solid base:

First thing: Hydralisk/ling should be the bulk of your ground army. That minimizes the amount of damage that your army is taking as well as maximizing the damage-output that your army is doing.

In addition to that, you need to continue to make a lot of mutalisks all game long, as just an important part of your army. It's not going to be a big component of harassment; it's just really key to ensure that the Terran player is continuing to make lots of goliaths, and plus, when you expand (as much as you end up doing against mech), you can build up a very large mutalisk army anyways: you'll have like two control-groups of mutalisks in addition to your big ground army, and that is really what you want to be looking for.

Now, in terms of transitioning, when you get that hive-tech up, an excellent method for busting a stationary push, or just, you know, a Terran line that's just sitting defensively and holding a whole bunch of expansions: a great way to bust that, when you get the hive-tech, is to get guardians. You can get 15-20 guardians without much difficulty, because, again, you're delaying your hive-tech by opting to expand much more in the midgame, so by the time you get hive, you have a really strong economy and a ton of mutalisks already. And that is what's going to really help you bust that push, because they have equal range to goliaths, and they can break the tank lines really well for your ground army.

In terms of defilers: Defilers should really be the latest evolution of your play, it should be the last thing you transition to and incorporate into your army, because, again, just having the units is the most important thing, and having the expansions. Once you get a defiler, it will always help your army some, but you want to make sure that that army is substantial enough.

And, in terms of ultralisks, you've already heard my thoughts on that: I wouldn't recommend playing with it unless you're really comfortable with your play, because frankly ultralisks are very difficult and technical to use, in that match-up.

And finally, the most important tip that I can give against a meching player is that minerals are more important than gas. When you get an expansion, don't make that first drone—make a geyser (sic). The bulk of your army is going to be zerglings and hydralisks and mutalisks, and you're going to want to be expanding lots and lots. Gas is not important as any of those, and minerals are critical. What's also great about the fact that minerals are the key resource that you need: it opens up the potential for taking a lot of mineral naturals that a lot of players just seem not to have been considering against a mech player. So, yes, again: minerals are the key resource.

So let me finish things up with a really strong build-order that's brought me a huge amount of success through the years. I don't know if people think about builds the same way I do, so hopefully I make sense....But on the same note, I'm trying to make a video series about how to construct a build from scratch, and please keep pressuring me to work on that, 'cause i need motivation.

So yeah, here's my build: So, as a Zerg player, you 12-hatch at your expansion, you open completely normally, and your basic opening is just the 3-hatch opening.

Now, if your opponent bunker-rushes, you just need to be able to deal with that. You should also be checking up on your Terran, because there's three basic things that a terran can do early on: Going 2 barracks, early expanding, and then getting fast gas. You need to find out pretty early on if he's going fast gas, because that's where the deviation occurs. You start off with the 3-hatch, because if he's going medic/marine you deal with that accordingly, and if you see him going mech, you veer off into the build that I'm going to say right now.

So if he's going a fast gas, the things that we need to worry about are:

some sort of gentle early harass, with vultures, like a hidden 1-factory

or there's 2-factory aggressive play

or there's 2-port wraith

Those are the three big things: 1-factory, 2-factory, or 2-port wraith.

This is the build I recommend: You gas on 18 (and you have 3 hatches at this point). You gas on 18, making overlords at the appropriate times. With your first 50 gas you get a hydralisk den, before your lair. And then you get speed for hydralisks, before your lair. And you're going to be making between 6 and 10 hydralisks. And you're also going to be getting your second gas at an appropriate time: not too fast, but when you fiddle with this build you'll feel about when it feels right.

And also, have your overlords clustered in your base, in a way that your hydralisks are ready to defend against 2-port wraith, but also so that those overlords are ready to start wandering out into the middle of the map, because you need them as spotters against mines.

OK, great. The reason this build is doing so well for us right now is we have negated those three big things (the 1-factory harass, 2-factory harass, and the 2-port wraith), and for everything else Terran does, we're still OK. "Anything else Terran does" is like a fast dropship, or some sort of fast-academy build, and when we have speed-hydralisks we can still deal with that, because they don't have tons of medic/marine. In other words, we're not dead yet. There's nothing that we're facing that has killed us or has some sort of huge advantage.

I'm not going to talk about how to deal with 2-port wraith, because, again, the focus of this is dealing with mech. I'm just saying those initial variations to let you know that you are still OK against those things with this opening.

Now, at this point, you'll be fairly certain that your opponent is doing some type of mech build: he's planted mines in the middle of the map, say, you've—I mean, if he went 2-factory aggressive, you see a lot of mech units, and at this point, Terran is focusing on trying to get that expansion up.

As a sample map, let's say we're playing on Destination and we are at the north position. We have those overlords at our natural, ready to slide to the right expansion and ready to slide out our front ramps to spot those mines. Now, in this build, we've made 6-8 hydralisks. We have speed. Do not get range with the next 150 gas.' Get a lair, and start planning on expanding. Your whole goal for the midgame is to have 4 or 5 hydras move out to an expansion and just sit to defend, you'll have another 4 or 5 hydralisks at your front and in your main, to just sit and defend, and then you're going to start expanding while getting mutalisks at the same time, and—and this is really key--and sending overlords to locations where you want to expand, because you need to clear out those mines.

Now, when that lair finishes, we're going to be going for a spire, and at this point, you're wondering: we're going for a spire and we have like 8-10 hydralisks, or whatever: what do we do with the rest of our larvae? Well you're powering drones like crazy. Because you're not worried about an early Terran push: he can't really push aggressively early on. So you're making tons of drones, you're taking one expansion at the right that's defended by those hydralisks, and you're on your way to getting mutalisks.

When those mutalisks pop out, they're great because they force the Terran to delay his push a little bit, which extends the Zerg's midgame advantage. Those mutalisks pop out, the Terran has to stop making tanks, stop making vultures, and begin pumping out goliaths. Now, you don't want to do aggressive harass, but you want to be in his face just enough to let him know that you have a lot of mutalisks. You only need to make like 9-12 at this point, and at this point you can start expanding to the top-right natural and the left natural, and you've already been making a whole ton drones and expanding a lot, and you can begin throwing down more hatcheries and some evolution chambers. And at this point you just start making tons of zerglings and hydralisks, favoring hydralisks, initially: don't start making a lot of zerglings early on, because that's a little weak. You want to start with a lot of hydralisks, and then you can add on zerglings and hatcheries at the same time.

And what ends up happening is, as the midgame progresses, he's forced to delay his push, and when he does come out, you have an absurd number of expansions: you have your main, your nat, the right natural, the left natural, and the top-right corner. And you can back-upgrade: you can get the hydralisk range, the metabolic boost for zerglings, and overlord sight-range, if you want, and just begin spreading around the map, and you will be surprised at how easy it is to have total map-control and a raging economy—and you still have a lair.

You can start teching towards that queen's nest after a little bit, but again, the emphasis of your play is going to be adding hatcheries, both as production units and at expansions, and then, for the rest of the game, you'll just have this amazing advantage.

Now, against a really good player, it's going to be difficult to make that advantage very large, so I do need to talk a little bit about later-game transitioning. As you get your hive up, it's a great idea to get guardians, but really the most important upgrade for hive is the adrenal boost for the zerglings, 'cause now you have a bunch of cracklings that are really cheap, in absurd numbers, against lots of tanks, lots of goliaths (because you've still been making those mutalisks), and a handful of vultures. (The mutalisks actually help to cut down on the vulture count tremendously, so that's really great.)

So yeah, and the rest of the game is fairly straightforward. If you're having a lot of trouble in the later stages of the game, it's a good sign that you did something wrong in the midgame, or that you're going ultralisk/zergling, which I told you not to do.

So, yeah...I hope that this rambling was useful to some people because I would have made a post, but I don't like writing as much as I like hearing myself talk. So, yeah....Merry Christmas, Team Liquid. Cheers!

Building Triggers [ edit ]

Section transcribed by qrs

Hey everyone, this is Day[9], and I want to talk about a pretty advanced concept called Building Triggers and the Imaginary Player.

So I created the Gimme questions thread a while ago, asking about questions people had, just for me to rant on about, and a huge number of them were about builds, like, If he does this, how do I respond with this? or, When's a good timing push, what's a good build, on this match-up, on this map? And so, rather than going into specific advice and trying to answer those questions, I figure it would be really nice to give some general advice that you guys can apply in a wide variety of situations. And I mentioned two at the start: the first is what's called "Building Triggers" and the second is what's called "The Imaginary Player". So let's begin with building triggers.

The notion of a trigger is pretty straightforward in itself: that if A happens, you do B. And even though this is really a sort of simple idea, it has powerful, powerful applications for improving you play. So let's begin with some really simple examples that I know everyone is familiar with: As Protoss, when your shuttle is halfway done, you start building a Robotics Support Bay. That way, when your shuttle finishes, you'll be able to start the reaver right on time. Or, in another example, when your Spire is at 300 hitpoints, you stop making things at all of your hatcheries: that way, when the Spire finishes, you have three larvae ready to roll at each hatchery, and you can pump out a whole bunch of mutalisks.

Virtually everyone has experienced the two triggers that I just mentioned, because they crop up in almost every single game. Any time Zerg is going for a Spire, he's going to be obeying this sort of Law of Larva-Timing. But, in terms of other triggers, people seem to treat them as though they're this mystical knowledge, that there's this oracle that appears every hundred years and dishes out some sorts of timings or whatever. But the fact remains that any player can build his own triggers if he does so in a simple incremental fashion, which is exactly what I'm going to talk about, with a personal example of my own:

Let's talk about Zerg vs. Terran on Gaia, one of my absolute favorite match-ups ever. Now, assuming that I'm not in vertical positions with my opponent, I love going hydralisk/lurker, because of the way that the middle of the map is kind of wide open but also kind of looks like a large path. Now, the problem that I have when I go hydralisk/lurk—or really that any hydralisk/lurk player has—is that if the Terran gets too many tanks, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop Terran pushes. If you have some number of medic/marine and 15 well-placed tanks, it's virtually impossible to break that with any number of hydralisk/lurkers. So, in the logic of constructing my build on this map, I knew there was a point where I needed to get Guardians, and the question is: when do I get Guardians.

At this point, a critical mistake that so, so, so many players make is to think that when late-game rolls around they can just feel it out: they'll be able somehow to "feel" when Terran has too many tanks and then they'll get the Hive. That logic does not work and you should avoid this at all costs. I mean, consider early-game: suppose I'm Protoss and I want to 2-gate rush a Zerg player: I never "feel it out". I never just say, "Well I can just wing this 2-gate rush." Instead what I do is get a precise, exact, optimized build, and follow that every single time I want to 2-gate rush a Zerg player and I make subtle adjustments based upon what the Zerg player is doing. There is no reason why you can't do this late-game. And that is exactly what I'm saying: that you want to have a precise plan of what to do late-game by creating your trigger and then you make subtle adjustments based upon what's going on. With that in mind, let's discuss how I came to answer the question, "When do I get Guardians in Zerg vs. Terran on Gaia?"

Step 1, and by far the most important step in building your own trigger: I chose a timing completely arbitrarily. I said to myself, "Let's get a Hive at 125 food: that's when I'm going to get my Queen's Nest and start teching up to Guardians." And I told myself I would play at least 10 games using this exact timing to see how it felt. In the actual games, I got crushed by tank pushes every single time: the Guardians were way late. So, great: now, all of a sudden, rather than trying to "feel my way" through the late-game, I instead established a hard decision with a very clear adjustment, which was: "Get the hive earlier." At this point, I backed off a little bit, and said, "Well, let me try doing it at 90 food." And when I did it at 90 food, the results were better—I was able to hold off the pushes a little bit more effectively in the late-game, but then, all of a sudden, I was losing in the middle-game: when the Terran's first push came out, I just didn't have enough hydra/lurk to kill it off. So immediately, I know that the trigger I'm looking for, the timing I'm looking for, is somewhere between 90 and 125 food, and I ended up settling at around 100 food as a decent time to start making the Queen's Nest and teching towards those Guardians.

An important note is that I didn't need to use food as a basis for establishing these triggers. I could have used any number of wacky things. I could have said, "I'll start making my Queen's Nest when my +1 attack upgrade is 75% done." Or I could have said, "Gee, let me start making my Queen's Nest when I get my gas done at my fourth base." I mean, anything you want to use as your trigger, totally go for it. Again, the most important concept in building your own trigger is first choosing a starting point and then incrementally adjusting that based upon your experiences in play. And the most important word there is "incrementally". By far the biggest mistake that you can make when establishing these sorts of triggers is to be too hasty in making your adjustments. That's why I said that I devoted 10 games to getting my Hive at 125 food. I devoted 10 games to getting my Hive at 90 food. Because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't making some sort of fluke in those games that would incorrectly make me adjust my play in a wrong direction.

There are two key aspects of this example I briefly want to touch on. The first is that this is a late-game situation. Many players feel really daunted by late-game scenarios, because it feels like there are so many variables and deviations, and there's a million ways you could have gotten there, and it seems like an intractable problem, trying to close down on a solid solution. But, as we saw in this example, I had a very simple question and there was a very simple process I followed. And, remember, if you just break it down into small enough chunks, there is no problem that is too hard for any player at any level to solve.

The second key point—and this is so, so, so important: if there is one thing you remember from this entire recording, let it be this—I never stopped to question whether my play was right or wrong. That is, I never said, "Should I be going Guardians?" I never stopped to do that; I never stopped to question whether I should be going hydralisk/lurker or anything like that. Rather, I said, "I am going hydralisk/lurker on this map, it feels like I need to go Guardians, when do I get those Guardians?" and I tried only to answer the question when. That is it. That is so important in the improvement of your play: to focus on a question and work on that. There are countless players in StarCraft who think the goal is to find "the right build". You see these players all the time: they're 2-gate rushing, you know, one week and then the next week they're going early-expand, Bisu-style, and then the next week they're just doing whatever the current trend in Proleague is. They keep changing and changing and changing. That is not your goal. Your goal in StarCraft is not to try to find "the right build"; rather, it is to find a build that you like that is based on solid logic, and then to adjust that build, and to work on it, and to incorporate newer, better triggers that make that build work.

Section transcribed by tribal_warfare

For example, one day I woke up and said "You know what, I'm tired of going mutalisk/zergling in zerg vs zerg. I want to go hydralisk." and I spent one season on PG tour just working on that build, making adjustments, trying to form new sets of logics, doing different openings until finally I had a solid build down. The following season I went 56-1 against zerg, I was playing an A+ level; and I say that not to brag but to point out that there was absolutely nothing special about my play. I simply started with some logic and then adjusted and adjusted and adjusted. I mean the one loss I had, was not to a phenomenal player at all. It was one of the first games I played that season. But he showed me that when I was doing my opening I needed to get twelve zerglings instead of ten. I had been relying on getting ten but it was just too little for his aggressive nine pool opening. And after that adjustment I could face nine pools in the future and hold that off. Again it was just these subtle adjustments.

I'd like to take the time now to answer a question I saw in the questions thread I created as well as to dicuss a conversation I had with Xeris about this very topic of building triggers, so I apologise in advance for potentially butchering your name but Oystein from Norway asked, "When you have taken expansions outside your natural in zerg vs terran do you ever make units from the expansions or do you stick strictly to drone?" I love this question because it has a clear motivation, it has an answer with some foundational logic and it can be turned into a question that can help develop a trigger to improve your play. So first of all, let me begin with the motivation. This totally was a question that came up in my experience as a Zerg player. You know, say the map is python and I take my main and my natural and then I take another main because I'm going for the standard sort of hive tech defiler play and what not. And I remember early on in my life time I would wonder when I had that expansion, should I just keep making drones? It seemed to make sense because I wanted to have my economy slowly getting better and better and the more drones the merrier right? Moreover, I could have a nydas canal linking my main and this expansion so I could have units in both places at once, and also when I take the natural as my fourth base I can just transfer drones from that expansion on down. It seemed like I could keep making drones. At the same time I saw all sorts of benefits to making units from that expansion. If I'm making a lot of units at that expansion then I'll have a small little army that I can just move right down the ramp and I can use that to defend my newly building fourth expansion. Also, if I'm occasionally making a defiler and some lurkers at that third base I can use those units to counter attack and a good example of this is GGplay vs Iris in the everstar[sic] league finals game five.

So I saw benefits to both. That said, to answer your question Oystein, yes, there is a time you want to stop making drones from that expansion and begin making units and the logic to this is that you have all your hatcheries make the number of drones that you want to get to the level of economy you want and then that hatchery can join in unit production and that ends up being much more efficient then just slowly adding drones one at a time at that expansion. But what is so key about Oystein's question is that now we can ask ourselves, when do we stop making drones? What is the appropriate level of economy? And now we are just starting an exercise in building a new trigger that will help us improve our play. And again, what I love so much about Oystein's question is that it has a natural motivation, it can be stated as a simple problem and all we have to do is use some simple logic to reword that that as a trigger building exercise.

In another example I was talking to my friend Xeris on the phone about one base dragoon/reaver on Requiem. Because Requiem has really close starting positions, one base and its aggressive play is really great against Zerg because the zerg has to stay low econ in the early game. So if you can get a really good timing push in there with dragoon/reaver it's surprisingly difficult to stop. As I was discussing this build with Xeris he asked me, when do I get Dragoon range? I know I want to have range when I make my push but I'm not sure if I need to get it earlier, you know, to hold off some sort of hydra/ling bust at my front. And I think that is a perfectly worded question for a trigger building exercise. So lets just outline the process that we would use in that situation. It's now time to pretend that I am a budding, young protoss super star. That I have taken it upon myself to figure out precisely when to get dragoon range on Requiem.

Step one. I need to choose an arbitrary time to start getting dragoon range so I have some place to work with, so I have some benchmark for comparision. When I say arbitrary, it's important to note that I do not mean stupid. You should always use some sort of logic to make sure you have a reasonable starting point. So, in my eyes a reasonable starting point is to get dragoon range to finish right before I make that dragoon/reaver push. So I'll say to myself that I want dragoon range to finish right as my reaver finishes. All of a sudden I have a complete army with shuttle, reaver and a bunch of dragoons with range, so now is a good time to attack. So my arbitrary timing might be, start dragoon range right when my reaver starts. What I might discover after a game or two is that the reaver finishes much more quickly then range. At this point I might say to myself, "Ok, I need to back range up. I'm going to start getting range when my shuttle begins as opposed to when my reaver begins." and lets say that timing works perfectly. So now, right as my reaver pops out, my dragoon range finishes and I'm ready to roll out. Then suppose at this time I find that my push gets crushed over and over again. I think to myself, "Hmm, I need to get that second reaver before my attack." As a result, I no longer need to get dragoon range so early. Let me start getting dragoon range when my first reaver begins, as opposed to when my shuttle begins. And then lets say that timing lines up well, and right as my second reaver pops out dragoon range finishes and I'm ready to roll out once more. I've made a minor adjustment based upon the success of this push and again, kept the focus in my mind on when that dragoon range upgrade was beginning. Further suppose that at this point I play made ten, fifteen, games and against every hydralisk/ling player, this push crushes them. I'm steamrolling zerg after zerg and I'm feeling much more confident in my play until I get to a player who is going two-base mutalisk instead of doing this zergling/hydralisk on opening. Against this sort of player I might find myself helpless against his mutalisks early on because I don't get dragoon range until right when these reavers finish so I might be having a huge difficulty dealing with mutalisk harass. It's important then to say, "Well, gee, maybe I should get dragoon range earlier." And then you plan it and try to get the timing aligned for when his mutalisks pop out. Having adjusted the dragoon range timing, I need to make sure my push hasn't been delayed too much because if I'm really good at holding off mutalisks players now I need to make sure that I don't equally suck against the hydraling players. What may be the case is that I find that I can get away with upgrading dragoon range early to hold off mutalisk players and my push has not been delayed so much that my push can't crush the hydraling players. Although this was an entirely theoretical exercise I think it is a completely reasonable exercise of how you would be adjusting play game after game. Note, I never stopped to say, "Is dragoon range good on Requiem?" I just began with the assumption that it was and tried to adjust the timing until I found one that worked just right for me.

As I mentioned earlier, what you'll sometimes find is that there are situations when you can delay dragoon range sometimes and will have to get it earlier some other times. All your logic will eventually condense down into a theorem that will allow you to precisely get dragoon range at just the right time every single game.

I've spent a long time talking about building triggers so now I want to talk about an abstract and very related concept called the imaginary player. This is the notion that, because you cannot see what your opposing player is doing through the fog of war you have to account for all possibilities of his play until you know exactly what he is doing. For instance, if I'm playing against a terran player and he went one-base fast gas and I can't get up his ramp to see what he's doing he could be going for a fast two-factory push, he could be going for a fast two-port wraith, he could be going for fast dropship, he could be going factory vulture harass to an expansion. I just don't know what he's doing yet. So I must assume that I'm playing against all of those possibilities, all of those imaginary players until I know precisely which one my opponent is. To many of you, I'm sure this sounds like I'm saying, "Be sure to account for these possibilites." but the notion of the imaginary player is in fact much, much deeper than that and it's critical for you to work out all sorts of timings and triggers to truely become a great player.

Once I have a build that I really like, that I think is solid, what I do is I get about five replays of that build against all the possible types of players I could play against. So, for example, lets go back to my zerg vs terran on gaia. Lets say I really like my lurker\hydralisk build. I'm going to make sure I've played this build style against fast expand, two barracks fast factory, fast gas and all the variations I mentioned earlier, against two rax fast expand, and against weird sorts of all ins and bunker rushes. I make sure I have replays against all of these variations. And that is when I figure out the timings for imaginary players. For example, I'll watch five replays of a terran who goes two rax into medic marine fast expand and I'll mentally line up all his timings with mine. I'll say something like, "Ok, I'll see his command center when my lair finishes." and I'll line up other things like say my evolution chamber generally finishes when his engineering bay starts or he makes his academy when my hatchery has this many hitpoints from being finished. All these sorts of little things. I can even doing things like "He makes this building when my food is at this much." I mean, every player is used to saying things like, "I make my overlord at eighteen." and I'm telling you that you should think things like "When I make my overlord at eighteen, that's when he makes his academy." and then I'll extend this further. I'll watch five replays against a player who went two port wraith and I'll get all those timings worked out: when his starports start and finish in relation to my lair. Against a two factory player I know exactly when that push leaves his base based upon what my food is. After hours of studying these replays I now have a complete mental picture of what all possible Terrans are doing based upon my play and the numbers I get from my build. When every game begins I'm always aware of all the things my imaginary terran opponents are doing and throughout the early parts of the game I'm constantly thinking to myself, "Which imaginary players can I cross off?".

Which brings me to an absolutely critical idea that all high level players abuse relentlessly, and that is what I call the non-trigger. The basic idea of a non-trigger is that if you know your opponents timings well enough, you know that if you see nothing at certain points in time you can cross imaginary players off your list. For example, suppose my terran opponent goes two rax and that's all I get to see. He could be going for a fast tank push, medic marine and early expand, or some sort of aggressive one base play. Those are the three imaginary players I have in my mind, and three imaginary players whose timings I know intimately. For example, if my player is early expanding I know exactly when I first see that command center and I can go "three, two, one," and if I see nothing I know immediately that he isn't fast expanding and I can begin preparing myself for a fast tank push and preparing myself to play against a one basing terran player.

This seemingly counter-intuitive idea is unbelievably powerful. That you always know exactly what your opponent is doing. That you can cross off all imaginary players until you have pin pointed exactly who your opponent is purely through key periods of nothing. Many players incorrectly assume certain situations in StarCraft are rock, paper, scissors because they don't acknowledge the power of non-triggers. They'll watch two professional players play and neither of them will scout each other very much, and when they finally confront each other the first player will have an army that absolutely crushes the second player. Many amateurs will look at that and say that "Oh well, the first player just won because of his opening build." but the fact remains that the opening player is constantly adjusting his opening because he is seeing nothing from the second player at key periods of time. Never assume that StarCraft is rock, paper, scissors. There is always a solution there. If you spend time practicing keeping track of all the imaginary players, focusing on what the non-triggers tell you, you will never be surprised in StarCraft. I probably get surprised by what my opponent is doing once every thousand games because I'm always keeping track of all the possibilities in my head.

Well, that about wraps up my rant for today. Hopefully some of you found that useful. I really hope that you guys can incorporate the ideas of building triggers on only to generally improve your play but also to discover timings in the builds that you like. Because there is no point playing a game like StarCraft if you're having someone elses fun. I also hope that you can incorporate the notion of the imaginary player into your play. Not just because it's obviously helpful and it will greatly bulster your confidence in game as you'll never be surprised but more importantly, I think that one of the most rewarding feelings I get in StarCraft consistently is just knowing what my opponent is doing, and then when I rewatch the replay, I was right. That is just such a powerfully cool feeling to be able to go "I know he's making his academy here and his engineering bay here and his expansion should be finishing about now" and when you rewatch it you're just dead on the money, and that's just such a confidence booster that you're right on track. Hopefully you'll use the imaginary player logic to build your own clever non-triggers that will give you perhaps the greatest joy possible in StarCraft - being accused of being a map hacker. That concludes my rant. This is Day[9], thank you very much for listening. Cheers.

Hallmarks of Expert Play Introduction [ edit ]

Section transcribed by qrs

Hello everyone. This is Sean Plott, a.k.a. Day[9], and today I'm going to be presenting the introduction to my brand new audio series, "The Hallmarks of Expert Play". So, the whole point of this series is to provide little short audio clips—like, maybe five to ten minutes long—each of which focuses on some important element of play, or just some thing that you can incorporate into your own play to improve. So, as opposed to some of these really long, 25- or 30-minute expositions I do about, you know, deep game-theoretic concepts, each one of these is going to essentially be like a tip of the day. Each of these audio recordings will have the same basic structure: each will begin with sort of a proposition, or a statement or a situation. Then I'll talk about the logic and some of the theory applying to that particular situation, and then I'll give an example, so that way everyone kind of knows what I'm talking about. And these—again, these audios don't have to be watched in any order at all; they're just the sort of things you want to pick up along the way, that are always useful.

So, yeah: I hope everyone finds these audio clips both stimulating and exhilarating. Good luck, everyone. Cheers.

Hallmarks of Expert Play #1 - Winning with an Advantage [ edit ]

Section transcribed by darkmarksman

Hello everyone, this is Sean Plott, a.k.a Day[9], coming at you today with the “Hallmarks of Expert Play #1: Winning when you have the advantage.” So this entire audio is motivated by a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine who's getting back into StarCraft again and he's been playing on ICCup. And the problem he's been having is that whenever he gets the advantage, he never really knows what to do. And in a lot of games, its clear to him that he has an advantage, and yet he'll still end up losing. And I think that's an entirely valid question: “What do I do once I have an advantage?”

I find this question interesting because it highlights a big issue in the natural evolution of a player from weak to strong. A lot of players, when they begin and they're sort of low to mid level players, their entire play revolves around these tactics or plays that are designed to win a game. Not give an advantage, but win outright. So an example of this would be in Terran vs Zerg. A terran player does a fast tank push build against an early expanding zerg. The goal of the tank push is to bust down the sunken colonies, you run in with a bunch of Medic/Marine, and the zerg is supposed to leave shortly thereafter.

However at some point, such players move on to plays that give an advantage, rather than win outright. So for instance again, let's say that same terran player all of a sudden now starts early expanding against zerg players and is working on that first timing push. That is designed to give to give the terran player an advantage. That middle push often times doesn't win, but kind of pins the zerg back to his natural and his expansion, as the zerg makes his way towards defilers. Now, for a good player, that's exactly what he wants. He loves having the zerg pinned, and he loves playing off that advantage. But for a player who's been relying so much on things that cause wins, its a very uncomfortable feeling when you're in an advantageous situation and you don't really know what to do.

So the advice I ended up giving my friend Tristan, and the advice I'm going to give to you now, is a list of four ideas that you should always keep in your mind anytime you're in the lead. You can think of them as sort of like a mental checklist to make sure you're not doing anything wrong to lose your advantage. Each of these items is going to focus a lot on the sort of mistakes that players make when they're in the lead, and how to avoid them.

Number One: Always make sure you have an endgame plan before your game has ever started. I see so many players that have a build that will lead them to some advantage and then when they get there, they arrive at this advantageous situation, they suddenly have no idea what to do. Their macro gets screwed up, they don't time their expansions or the rest of their attacks correctly, and that's what ends up losing them the game. And the way to avoid this is just have a very general, straightforward sense of what you're going to do in the endgame. And I'm not talking about anything specific, or anything crazy, just some basic framework that you can always be trying to go for.

So lets say you're a protoss player against a terran player. An endgame plan might be something like: “I want four bases, two stargates making arbiters, and fifteen gateways.” There's nothing too complicated or even very specific about this framework, but again, if terran comes out with a big push and you kill it, you know what you're going for now. You can maybe take those expansions earlier, or add-on more gateways, and the arbiter more quickly. But you still have something that you're going for. Your brain will always feel a lot less disorganized if you do this sort of thing, like, pregame.

Number Two: Scout every expansion on the map. I know a lot of players will say things like: “Scouting is very important,” and everyone is always aware of that. But it's so key the instant you have an advantage, to just take that little extra time to send a probe, or a, you know, a zergling, or some unit, just to make sure every single expansion is clear. Because I'm sure everyone has lost countless games where you're totally containing your opponent, you feel like you're about to win and then you go to the right side of the map and he has the entire main covered with a whole set of, like, tanks and marines and everything... it just ruins your day.

Number Three: When you have an advantage, don't try to win immediately with a big attack. This idea is sort of rooted in the fundamental theory of a better player. In any game, if you have two players, the better player, theoretically, wants the game to continue as long as possible. Because the longer a game is, the more decisions both players are faced with and on average, the better player will make more correct decisions. In other words, if a good player is against a worse player, the good player's lead will naturally extend itself over time. So, when you have a big lead there's no need to try to attack immediately to finish him off. You should focus on just letting the game play out, and again, focusing on that endgame plan that you have in your mind.

You know, in fact, so many games that I watch July play, he'll do this genius build and he'll get in this great situation and then he'll just start attack-moving the player's front and he'll end up losing. And it's so frustrating for me to watch because he's clearly just throwing the game away. You don't want to give that extra advantage to your opponent. That said, if it's clear you can win immediately then yeah, definitely go for it. But there's nothing wrong with letting the game play out and trying to win later and later with, like, hive tech units, or arbiters, or, you know, the huge maxed terran army, that's all fine. Always feel free to let the game play out.

Number Four: Make sure you're sealed up tight against harassment, and also, don't try too hard to harass your opponent either. This idea's underlying logic is similar to that of the previous idea in that when your opponent is at a disadvantage he needs to try to take big risks to pull himself back in the game. And a lot of those risks involve making a costly dropship or shuttle to try to do some major damage to you. So naturally, I should make sure that they can't kill me in any way.

But the second half of that, don't get too excited about harassing, yourself, seems a little counter-intuitive to a lot of players. Cause a lot of players will say, “hey, I have this big advantage, why shouldn't I use this as a good opportunity to do some in-your-face harassment?” Again, harassment is pretty risky if you're not careful. I mean, for example, a shuttle that has a dark templar and two high templar in it. If that dies somehow, that's a pretty big loss for the protoss player. That said, harassment is good because it helps give you an advantage. But think again. If I'm already in a position where I have an advantage, I don't necessarily have to get an even bigger advantage.

So for example, if I'm a zerg player and I've contained a terran player with a bunch of lurkers. That terran player doesn't have vessels yet, so I'm sitting, you know, happily outside his base. That doesn't mean I need to get a bunch of lurkers and do drops in his main to try kill off SCVs. I'm already in a good position to get defilers and push right into his main. And if I did try to be really aggressive with harassing and dropping with lurkers, I run the risk of losing too many lurkers and then the contain at the front of his base becomes very weak and I end up tossing my advantage away.

With these four ideas enumerated, I want to give a sort of big, concrete example that synthesizes everything together, so it's pretty clear how this entire checklist applies in a concrete situation. Suppose I'm playing a zerg vs terran on Tau Cross. I open up with a three hatch lurker/ling build, that is I don't do the standard mutalisk sort of opening. And then let's say the terran player tries to hold my front with a bunch of medic/marine and stop my lurkers, but I'm able to surround that medic/marine group, kill it, and now I can park all my lurkers right outside the front of his base.

At this point, I have an advantage. First of all, I've killed off his first pack of medic/marines, so we know his medic/marine numbers are going to be a lot lower. Second of all, I've contained him with lurkers, so I don't need to worry about a whole bunch of marines running around the map. As a result, I can feel free to make a lot more drones and expand to the places I want to expand to, when I know that this terran player won't be able to bust out until he gets science vessels. Third, because I have him contained, I know that the terran player is going to have real trouble scouting me and knowing what's up. So right now, I am in a good position. Terran is playing blind and I have map control.

Step One: What's my endgame plan? Well first, I want to take a third gas expansion, get another hatch, make sure I have two evolution chambers upgrading, and get a defiler mound. That's the first sort of component to my endgame. I'm not going to do anything crazy like expand three times or anything cause I have him contained now, I'm just going to do exactly what I was going to do before. Except now I know that I have the opportunity to maybe make a few extra drones there when I wouldn't have been able to before. Later on down the line, I will take more expansions and tech towards ultralisks, but for now, my game plan is to make sure I get that defiler mound, those hatcheries, and those upgrades running.

Step Two: Scouting. I take one of the zerglings, sometimes two, and I just briefly run around the whole map, both to make sure there aren't any expansions, and also to make sure he's not doing anything dumb, you know, like making four barracks in the corner of the map so he can sneak stuff around. That stuff can be really annoying. So this is just to make sure that the map control I think that I have, actually is there.

Step Three. I'm not gonna attack. A lot of times, terran players will make three or four bunkers when they lose their first medic/marine group, just to make sure that you can't bust in and kill them with a bunch of lurker/ling. The best part is, the terran player does have to make a lot of bunkers and get ready for this attack. Cause if he doesn't, he runs the risk of losing. However, though he's built all those things, you don't necessarily have to attack at all. So essentially, not only did the terran player lose his first medic/marine group, but now he's forced to make buildings he doesn't want to make. Buildings that you're not even going to attack at any point. So again, we're not gonna to attack, and throw our game away.

Step Four: Harassment. I immediately surround his base with overlords and make sure I have a bunch of scourge patrolling to make sure no dropships end up sneaking out. And I also am not going to go for drop and do any harassment myself. As I said earlier, it's inconsistent for me, with this advantage, to risk losing lurkers in a harassment attempt that will both delay my endgame and weaken my contain. So yeah, from terran's point of view, he pretty much has to play a straight-up game against me. He can't do any weird dropship harass, he can't sneak medic/marine around and delay my expansion, he can't sneak an expansion anywhere else. He has to play straight to kill those lurkers at the front of my base and then deal with whatever endgame army I have.

I'm in a great situation because I exploited the advantage that I gained early. I now am in the position where I can get defilers and push into his base to win; I can get a whole bunch of ultralisks and just attack-move to win. It's very clear now, what I'm doing with my advantage to sort of seal the deal in the game.

To recap, if you have an advantage, you should first always make sure that you're following your endgame plan, which is a plan that you devised before the game happened. Number Two, make sure you're scouting every expansion on the map, to make sure there's no hidden stuff that can have the game slip out from under you. Number Three, don't get overexcited and attack a whole bunch, or even get overexcited and expand a whole bunch. Just continue to play the game out. And, number four, make sure that you don't get harassed, and don't do any sort of harassment that would potentially cost you your endgame plan.

So yeah, I hope that this was a useful exercise for some of you who are trying to move more towards the advantage type play, and away from the 1-2-3-punch-win type play. So yeah, good luck everyone! Cheers!

Hallmarks of Expert Play #2 - Redundancy and Purpose [ edit ]

Section transcribed by TheAntZ

Hey, what's up, everyone. I am Sean Plott, aka Day[9], and I am experimenting with musical interludes. That said, this audio is Hallmarks of Expert Play part 2: Redundancy and Purpose. The two concepts I'm going to present in this audio are simple enough to state, but they have really powerful applications all throughout your gameplay, and the idea is that by keeping both of these in mind at all points in time, this will help you clean up your play a little bit and smooth things out.

With that in mind, let’s begin talking about redundancy. I was recently watching a friend of mine playing Zerg vs Protoss, and when his Protoss opponent went corsair my friend responded by getting both an evolution chamber to throw down some spores and he got a hydralisk den as well. Immediately I pointed out he should do one or the other because by getting both he's in essence double-defending against corsairs. That is, his play is redundant. You never wanna end up defending against the same thing twice because it's a waste of resources and, considering how fragile of a game StarCraft is anyways, spending extra money defending the same thing more than once can lead to huge problems later on in the game.

The notion of redundancy appears earliest on in a players evolution in terms of defence. Dont make too much static defence because having a big army accomplishes the same purpose: you dont need a huuuge pack of cannons at the front of your base if you have enough troops to adequately defend an attack. One or the other will do just fine. I'm sure at this point many of you are thinking to yourself, "Yeah, well, obviously I don't want to have redundant elements in my gameplay." That said, I'm bringing it up because it’s really easy for this redundancy to kind of sneak up on you, that in the moment of gameplay, you'll perform an action that seems totally reasonable, but it's really important to take the time and reflect and make sure it's not an unnecessary action.

So let's do some examples. A lot of Terran players nowadays really like that Flash style really fast +1/+1 upgrades for their mech army. The problem is I’ll see a lot of players get this armory but then they'll also get an engineering bay and make a whole bunch of turrets around their base to hold off a shuttle harass. If you get the armory that quickly, you can get goliaths to defend against the attack instead; by getting the armory with goliaths and then getting a bunch of turrets, you've effectively wasted a whole bunch of minerals on the engineering bay and the turrets. On Blue Storm you'll see Flash oftentimes, when he does his signature build, he'll end up getting a handful of goliaths to fend off the attack and then all that money that would have been spent on turrets and an engineering bay, he can instead spend on a command center, expanding once again really, really quickly. So by eliminating that little bit of redundancy he had these extra resources that he could use to his advantage. The type of play that Flash does in his style is what I would call removing redundancy outside of the game. Flash sat down before the game even started and planned out how he was gonna hold off that shuttle harass and get the +1 attack upgrade.

So, let me also take the time to illustrate someone playing redundantly by making poor decisions within a game. In many of the Zerg vs. Protoss games that I’ve played on Requiem, my Protoss opponents will opt for a two-gate zealot rush aggressive opening, because the starting positions are so close and because gaining control of someone’s front ramp is absolutely critical to gameplay. Let’s say I’m playing one of these types of games and the Protoss player prevents me from getting an expansion and I’m sitting in my main with two hatches and a bunch of zealots at my ramp. In this situation, I like to go lurkers because it’s a good way to sort of bust the ramp and since the Protoss has me walled, in he totally gets the opportunity to see exactly what I’m doing. So now I have a Protoss opponent who opened 2-gate and knows his Zerg opponent is going lurkers.

At this point in time my opponents generally make the exact same mistake every single time that allows me to win: they get both cannons and observers. Logically it seems to make sense because if you make the forge you can make a whole bunch of cannons on top of my ramp to, you know, to sort of bolster that wall-in. Additionally, you're gonna get the observers so that way you can see the lurkers too. However, this is how the game ends up playing out: I get 4 lurkers, a bunch of zerglings and I easily break the zealot cannon contain at my front. Afterwards, by the time I get to his base, he has 2 or 3 dragoons, and an observer that happily get to have vision of the lurkers and zerglings that proceed to kill him. By getting both the cannons and the observers the Protoss player ended up with not enough units. He was so mentally focused on detection, that he sort of forgot the idea that he needs to both have stuff to kill the lurkers and be able to see the lurkers at the same time. Ideally, the Protoss would do one or the other. If he opts for observers he could go 3-gate zealot/dragoon with observers and do a pretty good job of holding off this lurker zergling push which is what happened in my experience. Alternatively, he can get the forge and the cannons, and make a bunch of cannons at my ramp holding me in, as well as a bunch of cannons outside his natural expansion, so once I do break this contain, I get to his base and I can’t do anything more because there’s a wall of cannons and a handful more units, and then the Protoss gets to play from there.

As you slowly improve in StarCraft, not only will you see more ways to eliminate redundancy in your play but you'll also get the opportunity to eliminate it in ways you couldn’t before by using your new ingame skill. So for example, if you're really good at watching the minimap and moving your hydralisks around, you can delay getting scourge against dropships, because your hydralisks can hold off the drops just as well. Terrific: now you're a player who’s excellent at eliminating redundant components to his play.

Now this brings us to the next part of this audio rant which is the notion of purpose. Again, the notion of purpose is very simple to state, but has tremendously powerful applications to all levels of play. The notion of purpose is this. Any of the decisions that you make, such as units to build or buildings to make, make sure that each of them always has a purpose, and make sure it doesn’t just have a one-timey sort of purpose, make sure the purpose continues all game long.

The simplest example of this concept comes in Protoss vs. Zerg when the Protoss player early expands. He gets that forge so he can put cannons at his front and not die to any sort of early attack however it seems a little bit wasteful to get a forge that fast if its only purpose is cannons. As a result, we see a lot of Protoss players get the +1 attack upgrade really quickly. As a result, the Protoss player comes out with a really big fast +1 zealot legspeed army. Likewise, if you're a Zerg player against a Protoss player, and your opponent goes for a really fast corsair play, if you want to make an evolution chamber and spores to hold off the corsairs it would be a very good idea to start upgrading that +1 carapace upgrade very early, that way your evolution chamber isn’t going to waste just to hold off these corsairs.

At very high levels of play, making sure everything has purpose is the birthplace for some of the best builds and the most revolutionary styles we've seen to date. Consider Fantasy's Terran vs Zerg mech build that he used in the OSL semifinals against GGplay.

In these games Fantasy opened up with really fast vultures and then got a dropship and expanded really quickly, and he used the vulture harass in the Zerg’s main with his dropship to allow this expansion to get up and running safely and to potentially do a lot of damage to the Zerg. Now that opening by itself is very clever because its a great way to get a safe expansion and transition into mech. However Fantasy brilliantly started going valkyries the instant he got his armory up. That starport which he got so fast for those dropships: its purpose didnt end with the dropship harass. It was immediately put into use with all these valkyries. As a result, Fantasy didn’t have to spend so much money getting a bunch of factories and a bunch of turrets early to hold off a fast mutalisk counter-attack all Fantasy needed was two factories and these valkyries—valkyries that were key to his early game play.

In another example, let’s consider the modern state of Zerg vs. Protoss. A lot of Protoss players picked up on this Bisu-style build, which was dominating Zerg players for a very long time, until Zerg players started focusing on getting a bunch of scourge early and then getting hydralisks. That way, the scourge would sort of negate this air control that the corsairs provided, and the hydralisks would allow the Zerg player to get a little bit more map control. however a lot of Protoss players started to stop making corsairs when they saw all these scourge, 'cause naturally the Protoss player thinks, "Oh, a bunch of scourge? I'm not gonna get air control". So Protoss players would give up the attempt to get air control now, Zerg players have put that spire to more use, they've given that spire a greater purpose in the mid and late game stages. You'll see Zerg players get a delayed pack of 12 mutalisks like around 90 food, like really late pack of mutalisks, and because the Protoss player has given up on air control, the Zerg player has the opportunity to snipe off templar and to even potentially walk into the back of Protosses main.

Such examples demonstrate how necessary and powerful it is to sort of eliminate redundancy and to provide purpose to everything you do in your play. With players getting better and better and better, you end up walking along these razor-thin margins of resource management. So if you're spending too much of your resources in one direction, you'll end up losing very very quickly. Rarely will you hear me say that any particular style of play is best. Rather, what I encourage is for you to construct your own builds, for you to find your own solutions and to definitely keep these high level advice and idea in mind.

Why You Should Play Against Worse Players [ edit ]

Transcribed by qrs

Hey, what's up, everyone? This is Sean Plott, a.k.a. Day[9], and today I want to talk about why you should play against worse players. Now, I know 90% of you hear that and you just scream, "Blasphemy! Crucify Day[9]! He's dead wrong! You should only play against the pros!" People argue that, somehow, by playing against worse players, you will stagnate in this disgusting cesspool of newbies, and that you'll never learn about "gosu builds" and "gosu tricks" so that you can become "gosu x2". Obviously, though, I'm not saying that the path to improvement involves finding ten people who suck and only playing against them. And I'm not even arguing that you shouldn't play against players who are somewhat better than you, if not way better than you. However, I really want to emphasize that, not only is it OK to play against players worse than you, but, in fact, it is an integral component to your improvement. It is critical that you regularly play against players that are worse than you, to improve to higher and higher levels.

With that said, in this talk I want to do the following:

First, I want to spend some time talking about this "common mindset" I was referring to, this idea that you should only play against good players.

Second, I want to take some time to break that argument down and demonstrate why that doesn't quite hold up; that is, I want to illustrate the flaws in that line of reasoning.

Third, I want to spend some time backing the logic of why it's good to play against worst players,

and then last, I want to wrap everything up by giving a concrete example, by kind of walking you through one of my own personal experiences of improvement, and why playing against worse players was so important.



Let's go back to the beginning: let's start off by talking about what the current mindset of playing worse players is. One of the big things I hear people say a lot is that when you play against a worse player, you can simply have fundamentals that are strong enough and end up winning without having the correct strategy. So, for example, you log onto ICCup, you play against a D-level player, and he just has so few units that, really, it doesn't matter what you do. You just walk out, and you win every single time. Since you're winning so easily, your opponent isn't forcing you to change. He's putting no pressure on you to win; he's putting no pressure on you to adjust your play to something better.

Kind of along the same line of reasoning, people say that, therefore, you should play against the best players you can: that when you play against a truly good opponent, he'll be crushing you so badly that you'll start to realize that a lot of your tricks don't work, and you'll start to see which ones are remaining somewhat effective, and then you'll end up converging towards a better style of play.

For the most part, though, this whole view can be summed up with the idea of, "I want a challenge. I want to force myself to overcome some obstacle," because that's what people's idea of improving is: overcoming obstacles. With that in mind, I want to take the opportunity to move on to part II of this audio.

Let's break down this argument and see where some potential issues are. In StarCraft, build orders and styles play a key role in play, and a lot of times people will work on one style and then, for whatever reason, want to try a different style. If you're trying this new style for the first time ever, it makes no logical sense to try it against the best player possible. You want to go out and play it a few times and get the opportunity to run through your build from start to finish and build up some comfort with it, and then, that way, you'll start to say where your advantages and where your disadvantages are. A huge danger is that a lot of times players will dabble in certain styles, but they'll be playing against players who are too good, and these good players will crush these new styles, and then what happens is the player thinks to himself, "Ah. These new styles didn't work out so well. Look how badly I got crushed. As a result, that player ends up mislearning, because all his attempts at these new styles have resulted in failure.

Moreover, let's say you did stick with one style; let's say you really wanted to work something out. If you're playing against a better player, you just don't get the opportunity to become comfortable. The better player is spending so much time convincing you that a big attack is going to come here (and doesn't) or that a big drop is going to happen that doesn't, that a lot of times you start getting into your own head--there's these mind games that are going on that totally throw you off. On a less complicated note, sometimes, just the fact that his army is moving around the map, in good patterns, can make you feel so pressured that, you know, you forget overlords, you stop looking at the mini-map, and you might even get thrown off your build a little bit.

Most importantly, though, good players are very good at hiding their weaknesses. There's that Protoss player who will have two cannons at his front and the Zerg player will feel too intimidated to run in with zerglings, when he totally could have. I mean, how many games have you played when you go look at the replay and you say, "Oh man, if only I'd attacked here, I would have won!" Against better players, that thought oftentimes never happens when it should. You'll watch a replay, and at time x, if you attacked you would have won—but as you're watching the replay, that just doesn't register. You see the situation, and you think to yourself, "No, no, I definitely couldn't have attacked."

So clearly, in terms of learning, if you're only trying to play against the best of the best, or even players who are slightly better than you, you not only end up learning in the wrong direction by discarding potentially good strategies, but the strategy that you are choosing to work on, the build order you're doing every game: you might miss out on the opportunities that are present in that build, and you might not even be executing it as well as you could be. With that in mind, let me move on to the most important part of this audio.

Part III: Why it's important to play against worse players.

This entire section can be summed up with the following: Against better players, you learn what not to do. Against weaker players, you learn what to do. There's a great discussion about this in David Sirlin's book, Playing to Win. And what he says—which is true across a huge number of competitive games—is that good players are very good at hiding their weakness. Good players don't look weak when they actually are. Weak players, on the other hand, wear their weaknesses and exploits on their forehead—you know exactly how to crush that player. So what you want to do is you want to play against some worse players and see where those huge weaknesses are, or those glaring holes are, and start to abuse those. And then, as you start playing against better and better players, you still attempt those same abuses. And you adjust them to see if they work—or to try to force them to work.

It's true that playing against only good players will force you to readjust your strategies and your tactics and your tricks. The problem is that if you're only playing against good players, you're not expanding that enough; you're not expanding out to new builds and new tactics and new tricks; you're kind of sitting in this stagnant pool. And the problem with this is something I call working yourself into a logical corner.

Players stuck in "logical corners" are oftentimes the ones you see who just teeter between C+ and B-, with a record of like 150-180. And they just play tons and tons of games, and you look at their APM and they're fast players, so clearly they have the hand-speed, but for some reason, they just can't seem to broach[sic] those higher levels. You'll hear them say things like "No, I can't do that because I'll lose to this, and then I can't attack here, and then I have to make these-all defenses now, or else I'll lose to this"—and the problem is, though they've had experiences where these things were true, it doesn't make them rules that have to dictate the rest of their play for the rest of their life.

This kind of player should stop and say to himself, "What are some big problems that I'm having?" For example, let's say in Protoss vs. Zerg: "I don't feel like I'm attacking enough; I feel like every time I want to, I either get scared or I convince myself through some past game that I can't and that it won't work." So let's say that this player has been early-expanding in Protoss vs. Zerg and going corsair/reaver into mass ground—sort of the Bisu style of Protoss vs. Zerg. Let's suppose then he wants to be more aggressive: he should drop down to D-level and he should say, "OK. I'm going to start really harassing at this stage of the game."

Let's say he starts harassing at stage x or time x, just to throw, you know, a variable out there. Let's suppose that against D-level players he gets absolutely smashed when he does this: his harassment doesn't work, it's totally defended, and he thinks to himself, "Wow, that clearly is not a good idea, if it's already losing to D-players." However, let's say he readjusts it, and starts doing it a little later than time x, and he says, "Wow, I have so many more corsairs! But now I'm starting to do a huge amount of damage. In fact, now I'm winning games almost way too easily." What's great now, is that this player can then work his way up until he gets that time just right, and then, when he's back at that C+/B- level, he now has this time-frame where he's abusing this corsair/reaver aggressive harass. It might be a time that he never even thought of or saw in his previous games, because he was so scared of so many Zerg units.

The fact that he's abusing this reaver/corsair timing might help him bump from B- to B. But most importantly, he will gain a huge amount of confidence in Protoss vs. Zerg now, because all of a sudden, Zerg doesn't feel invincible. And that confidence will show in his play; he will play much more comfortably with his style, and that comfort might be what helps bring him from B to B+.

In short, it's always very useful to alternate between playing against weaker players and playing against stronger players. Playing against the weaker players will allow you to flesh out your ideas and see new opportunities that you couldn't before. And then you'll want to take those ideas and you'll want to test them against better players, once you're really solid. And once you've tested them, that's how you adjust them and change them and choose what works and doesn't. Alternating is what keeps the mind fresh and makes sure that you're always learning new things and not working yourself into some dreaded "logical corner".

I'd like to finish up this audio recording by sharing a personal story of mine: an experience where I played against worse players and I ended up improving far more than I would have had I just stuck with playing very, very skilled players. A few years ago, I was preparing for the WCG tournament, and this is when they had removed Estrella as a map from the map pool and they put in Peaks of Baekdu. So now the maps were Gaia, Azalea, Paranoid Android, and Peaks of Baekdu, so since WCG was coming up, I was naturally only playing on those four maps. And PGTour (or ICCup—I still tend to call it PGTour) was really, really useful, because that was one of the maps of the week, so I could always get people to play me, and it was against random opponents, so I was getting a huge variety of styles, so again: just totally normal, preparing-for-tournament style stuff.

However, I encountered a huge problem, because the first few weeks, the maps of the weeks were Azalea, Gaia, and Paranoid, the old three WCG maps. And on Week Four, I'd worked my way up to A-level, but the new Map of the Week was Peaks of Baekdu—a map that I had never played any games on. So when I began, I started by taking builds I liked on other maps and trying to translate them onto Peaks of Baekdu, and even though it felt kind of OK, I still got smashed by all these other A-level players. And in fact, I started to lose almost every single game, and I started to try different builds, and whackier strategies, and literally nothing was working.

And I remember I had just dropped down to A-, and I encountered a player, and we ended up playing about ten games, and of the ten games, I lost seven of them. And I remember that it just felt so hard, and even the wins I did get didn't really feel satisfying: I kind of had this {shudder} feeling about Peaks of Baekdu. And there came a point where I was getting close to dropping down to B+, that I said to myself, "I really just shouldn't even be playing against these A-level players. I'm clearly not good enough at Peaks to be here. And I'm not even learning anything. I'm just losing and getting pissed off."

Since school had just ended that week, I created a new account at D-level, and started to slowly work my way up again. So I was playing tons of Peaks of Baekdu—I was actually playing probably like 12 hours a day—and I started to really see what was good about the map and what sort of abuses there were, and I watched a whole lot of VODs, and formulated builds, and got to practice them against these weak players. And some of the builds that I started off with felt really uncomfortable even against the D-level players, and again: I immediately said to myself, "I'm totally not going to do this." And then, I converged to the style I really liked, that felt really strong, and I worked my way all the way back up to A- by the end of the week.

And when I was A-, something amazing happened: that player who I previously went 3-7 against, I encountered him again, and we were going to play another set of games together. And it had only been a week, but I had had a huge amount of time to sort of reformulate my play against these weaker players. And when I played against him, he was doing the same sorts of styles that he was doing before, but I ended up crushing him, like eight games in a row. And in fact, in those games? It felt so effortless. All his units felt slower and stupid, and his entire build felt glaringly flawed, and there were all these exploits that I abused all game long, and when his big attack came out, I had like five times as many units as he did.

In fact, in every single one of those games, I never felt like I was going to lose at any point in time. And that, right there, is probably the best feeling in StarCraft. Because it's really difficult to get an absolute measure of how good you are or how much you are improving, because even statistics like your PGTour or ICCup rank—that kind of varies depending on who you're playing against and whatnot. But if you get the opportunity to play the same player twice in a short period of time, and the second time you play him you feel overwhelmingly better, you suddenly realize that you have improved. You have taken your play to the next level and have left him behind.

The way I was able to do that was by playing against bad players. I reset my account and it allowed me to really see at a very, very basic level what was going right and what was going wrong. And then, once I had all this sorted out in my mind, I had the period of time from the C level up to the A- level to become comfortable with this build, to work out all the nuances and all the subtleties. Moreover, the style of play I developed was something I would never have seen just playing at the A-/A levels, constantly losing and saying to myself, "Oh, I've got to suck it up and, you know, just try to deal with these losses and learn." Only by dropping down to the D-level play was I able to actually see things much more clearly. As a result, Peaks of Baekdu became, eventually, my best of all the WCG maps, and actually still remains one of my favorite maps of all time.

In short: I want all of you to remember that by playing against bad players, you end up learning what to do: you end up seeing the true advantages and disadvantages of your play. And then you should take what you learn and test it against better players. It's always good to be bouncing back [and forth] between worse and better players, and in fact, if you can get that range of play to be right around your skill level, like players slightly worse than you and players slightly better than you, then you'll find yourself skyrocketing up, in terms of improvement, and skyrocketing up to higher ranks on PGTour.

So, I hope this audio rant was useful. Good luck, everyone. Cheers.

Introduction to Mechanics [ edit ]

Transcribed by Pokebunny

Hey, what's up everyone, this is Sean Plott aka Day[9] and today I want to provide an introduction to my series on mechanics. Before we begin, I need to stop and take some time to define what I actually mean by mechanics. When I say mechanics, I mean a players ability to enact his decisions, not a players ability to make correct decisions. Let's say we have a Terran player who's making a lot of medic/marine against a Zerg player. The mechanics of this situation are the Terran player's ability to control all those medic/marine very effectively, and the Terran player's ability to constantly make medic marine out of all of his barracks. Elements that would not be part of mechanics would be that player's decision to go medic/marine, instead of, say, mech.

Mechanics are absolutely critical to a player's success. I mean, for instance, there's probably many of you who have played games where you are against a worse opponent and you may have done a strategy that was bad, but because you were able to get so many more units, and to control them so much better than your opponent, you ended up winning. On the reverse side, it's actually horrible when the player is doing the correct strategy, but his mechanics prevent him from executing that strategy correctly. What ends up happening, is this player, who is thinking correctly, ends up deciding that his strategy is wrong, and he learns in the wrong direction, and we don't want that. Not only does strong mechanics allow a player to perform at a higher level, but most importantly, strong mechanics allow a player to learn correctly, and learn much more rapidly than if he had weak mechanics.

You know it's even kind of funny, because mechanics are so important that it sometimes can be detrimental to focus too much on strategy, especially for a beginning player, even though StarCraft is a real-time STRATEGY game. You'll end up with players who have a gimmick against each race, you know, they'll go lurker-ling fast against a Terran player, or they will go slow lurker drop against Protoss. They have all these different strategies, but they never focus on executing them very well. And then after a while when they're against sufficiently strong opponents, such players will end up having no options: none of their strategies work. And it's at times like these when players feel particularly lost in their play, and that's just a terrible feeling that I don't wish for anyone. However, if players focus on mechanics, not only do they end up being able to beat better and better opponents, but the strategy becomes much deeper. Because now, with things being executed so well, there's all of a sudden great options, I mean, having players be able to control vultures really well against Zerg has opened up an entire arena of mech play against Zerg players.

And so, since mechanics are such an important component of strong play, I'm creating this audio series to provide tips on how to hold your mouse hand, how to hold your keyboard hand, how to use hotkeys and F-keys, ways to practice and improve to get those mechanics honed down really well, so you can perform those strategies just the way you want. Some of these guides will be general in nature, others will be race-specific, I'll just be doing my best to answer any potential questions or issues you could have in regards to mechanics. So with all that said, I really hope you enjoy my audio series on mechanics. Good luck, and cheers.

Mechanics #1 - Basics [ edit ]

Section transcribed by Yaqoob

Hey, what’s up everyone? This is Sean Plott a.k.a Day[9] and today I want to present to you Mechanics Part 1- The Basics. In this audio, I want to describe what the essentials are for having strong mechanics. I want to begin by talking a little bit about how to hold your keyboard hand and then how to use hotkeys and the F keys effectively in your play. I’d then have to talk about the mouse hand, how to holding your mouse hand correctly, tips for improving accuracy, and general advice on how to control your units the way you want too. Naturally, I will be discussion mechanics with the ideal of improving micro and macro so I will be trying to give lots of examples relating back to that. Great, let’s start talking about the keyboard.

So I keep my keyboard pretty close to the end of my table. Now if you take your left hand and you face it towards yourself, in the bottom right corner of your left hand you’ll a feel a really solid bone if you push there with your thumb. That is the bone that you generally want to have as your pivot point. So I generally keep my hand rested on that bone. Now something that is really really important that you do is that you keep your pinky at your left hand of the keyboard – or let me rephrase that - you make sure that your left pinky does not rest beyond the left end of the keyboard. Essentially what I am addressing is a problem that a lot of players develop when they first started to use hotkeys. Often times when player’s first learn about hotkeys and want to hit Ctrl-1, they hold the Ctrl key with their left thumb and press the ‘1’ key with their index finger. Obviously this isn’t a big deal if you only play StarCraft twice a year at a LAN party or sometimes but there is a lot of players that want to improve that get stuck with this sort of bad habit from the get go. I will go to Tournaments and see players who hit control 123 with their thumb on the control key. As a result when they want to do 1a2a3a, they tend to hit ‘1’ with their middle finger and ‘a’ with their index figure, and then ‘2’ with their middle finger and ‘a’ with their index finger, and ‘3’ with their middle finger and ‘a’ with their index finger. Obviously this is grossly inefficient because you are essentially bending your arm around the left side of the keyboard and hitting the keyboard sideways; moreover your fingers are incredibly far away from the keys that are used to build workers and build units and buildings and stuff.

You want to be holding your hand in the middle of the keyboard so that the CTRL key is hit by your pinky and then the 12345 keys are hit by your index finger or your middle finger or even your thumb for a lot of the higher keys, like if you wanted to hit CTRL + 8 or something. Moreover, don’t be afraid to have your hand move around the keyboard a lot. For example, when I want to do CTRL 0 and CTRL 9, I take my left hand and I move it to the right CTRL and then I hold CTRL with my thumb and press 0 or 9 with my index or ring finger. As a result, I don’t have to do something that is ergonomically inefficient like hitting CTRL with my left pinky and swinging my thumb all the way up to hit 9 or 0. It’s just as easy to move my hand a little bit to the right to take care of that.

In essence, I just don’t want any of you to think that you should ever keep your hand still. I’ve provided a sort of good default that you should rest at the left side of the keyboard but make sure that you’re constantly bouncing around. Not only does bouncing and moving around a lot allow you to do better things in Starcaft, but also it increases the movement and hence the blood flow to your hands so since you’re getting a lot of blood flow toy your wrists and your hands that will help to prevent a lot of symptoms of carpal tunnel and exhaustion and what not. Alright Awesome! So now everyone has an excellent positioning for their left hand.

Let’s talk about hotkeys a little bit. First of all, allow me to say a rule that you should never ever break. Here it is: Do not every click on something that you could build or do by pressing the key on the keyboard. I’m going to say that again: Do not click things if you can use the keyboard. Don’t do it. Don’t be one of the Protoss players who says the ‘p’ key is all the way on the right side of the keyboard. I guess that means I will just click on the probe icon whenever I want to build a probe. That is horrendously newbie. Do not ever ever do that. I don’t care if you’re playing BGH and doing a 2v2v2v2 and going mass scouts. You better be pressing ‘g’ if you want to upgrade scout speed. Now, if you don’t know the hotkey, you should mouse over it, look at what the hotkey is and then press it. Then you will start training your brain to move your hand to the right position on the keyboard. Do not fall into this trap where you just start clicking on things that are somewhat inconvenient. The keyboard is just as powerful a tool as the mouse. You should use it.

I want to spend some time now discussing hotkey setups. When I set up hotkey setups I mean what you do you have CTRL 1-2-3 and all the way up to 0 set to but before I do that I want to talk about the ‘F’ keys. F2, F3, F4. A lot of players do not use the ‘F’ keys because it feels a little inconvenient on the fingers to reach that high however they are absolutely essential for strong play so I am going to 