Descent Tourneys Joined: 10 10

The PiG Tales - Part One



Caffeine. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Sport. Working Out.



For Australias Jared PiG Krensel: its Starcraft 2.



I began neglecting my uni-work and the decision [to play and coach full time] was kind of forced onto me. I'd sit down to write essays and all that was running through my head was Starcraft."



At the time, many would have called this a destructive addiction, but that is not how PiG would describe it.



... but I guess the difference with SC2 is that it never felt like a destructive addiction. I felt like I was becoming smarter and better at applying myself and discovering new things constantly. I actually felt like studying and practicing this game was making me a better person.



This was in 2010. Since then, PiG hasnt missed a beat. Hes travelled the world. Hes competed with World Champions. Hes had his fair share of rivalries. And through all of this, he stands out as one of Southeast Asias best players.



For the past five years, PiGs life has been Starcraft.





Image source: http://www.sc2sea.com/showthread.php?t=8934

In the Beginning



Growing up, many of PiGs fondest memories were in Real Time Strategy games: Warcraft, Command and Conquer, and even the original Starcraft. However, with the hype that surrounded the impending Wings of Liberty release, PiG came close to not even buying the game that would make him a star.



I wasn't excited for [the] SC2 release as I'd heard so much hype. I notice that most games that are heavily hyped suck really badly so I wasn't going to buy it (I was also a very poor student at the time). Luckily my group of friends were so excited they finally pressured me into pre-ordering it and away I went.



It took him a long time to get his head around the game though. At first, the Zerg mechanics were too hard. Protoss was easier, but the ideas still didnt seem to fit: I never upgraded Warpgate tech because I thought it was dumb to not be able to queue up units. The game was hard. And it was overwhelming. And if it wasnt for the same friends that convinced him to buy the game, PiG might not be where he is today.



Any professional player can tell you the first tournament that they entered. Theres a rush that you only feel when youre competing; especially if youre winning. For PiG, this experience came when City Hunter hosted a tournament just after the official release of the game. It had a decent prize for the one-on-one and two-on-two tournaments, and PiG entered both with his brother: We were using the internet cafe gear and default settings on the PC and thinking back Im pretty sure it was constantly spiking and playing at like 20FPS (Frames Per Second), but I was too noob to even think about fixing that stuff up. If you told PiG after his first one-on-one tournament match, where he was 6-pooled twice that he would become a star in the game, he probably wouldnt have believed you.



But the two-on-two matches went different. To read PiGs retelling of the time that he beat Moonglade in a teams match, you would think he had just won the championship.





Image Source: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...7020162&type=3 [taken by x5.Dot]

2v2 was a different story, me and my brother got put in a group with [Moon]Glade and his 2v2 partner, and luckily we played them last, so we got to watch them execute a 2-rax bunker + 9-pool spine rush on each team and win very quick and easy games.



Knowing they would do the same thing I decided to do a 9-pool and my brother just did a standard bio opening. They both came for me but couldnt break in vs my zerglings at first, and instead were forced to contain me. They kept getting eager to finish me off but I held off with lingbane on 1-base, forcing them to add tanks and slowly step forward into my base to finish me off. As I looked like I wasnt going to last much longer my brother who had gone untouched landed 3 full medivacs of stim bio inside one of their base, completely obliterating him.



They realized they needed to do damage and started trying to break into my brothers base but he had a tank on the high ground massacring the units as they funneled up his ramp. Meanwhile my brother had lifted into the other base and completed wiping out the rest of their production and economy.



We had won! We were so excited jumping up and down and hi-5ing and all the other guys from our group who were watching us were cheering and yelling super excited too, wed beaten the big boss Glade! And knocked him out of the tournament lol! Best of one, only top team advances in a group of 4 lol!



And while it might not be the most traditional first win over a big name, it is one of the most interesting.



On The Rise and A WCS National Championship



It took around 6 months for PiG to be relevant nationally: when he won second in a community open, and first at a City Hunter charity event in Jan. 2011



I was addicted to competing and was laddering and playing online cups almost every day of my entire summer uni[versity] holidays to get to that point.



Following this, PiG made the courageous decision to drop out of university and play full time. As one of the first to do this in the country, he was setting his own rules and his own precedent.



How do I explain to my girlfriend what I'm doing? What do I tell my family? My friends? I had no idea I could actually make it as a pro so just trying to "go pro" wasn't enough. So I decided to become the best coach in the starcraft scene (I couldn't believe people charged money for such crappy coaching that I'd seen) and work on getting my play to pro level on the side.



So PiG started out charging $15 an hour for his coaching. And he was pretty good at it too. He was getting a lot of interest in his coaching, and was eventually able to make ends meet.



As I withdrew in the middle of a semester of uni I did have centrelink for a few more months while I got my coaching business up and running but beyond that I was completely self-sufficient, and actually saving some money despite charging only $15/hour and often giving 60% extra time in each coaching session. Some weeks I was coaching 40 paid hours in 2011.



But in the lead up to WCG Australia, he didnt coach as often. He decided to focus on getting better, and getting the best results that he possible could. In Melbourne, he was knocked out in the third round of the winners bracket. However, he managed to fight back through the losers bracket, and was within two games of qualifying for the event. Unfortunately, the visiting Norwegian, Targa, dashed his hopes.



His final chance would come in Brisbane. And his winners bracket was impressive, despite a number of players having already qualified, therefore, not competing. He made his way through the winners bracket, and to the grand final where he would face clan mate, JimDaddy. Even though the pair had already qualified for the WCG Australia, there was still the bragging rights on offer. JimDaddy would take the first set off of PiG, but due to his winners bracket advantage, he would manage to come back and take the second set, but not before losing another match in the process. At the end of the day, all of their matches combined would amount to 6-4, in PiGs favour, but only just.





PiG winning the WCS Australia Nationals; Photo Credit: x5.Dot

The finals would be a different beast altogether. Sixteen of Australia and New Zealands best players would be in attendance. After a bye in the first round, PiG would match up against Tgun. The first match between the pair at a big event, but it wouldnt be the last. Tgun however didnt have many issues with PiG, cruising past him without losing a map, pushing his fellow Zerg player into the losers bracket.



PiG has a hard losers bracket run. There was no denying that. He had to go through Rossi and YoonYJ, two of the better Terran players, and then through MaFiA, another great Zerg. And finally, there was Iaguz, who, despite taking a map off of PiG, failed to stop his run. That would lead PiG to once again matching up against Tgun, who had just lost to the man PiG had beat in that 2 vs. 2, Moonglade, in what must have felt like eons ago. .



The match once again ended 2-0, with PiG on the losing end. This gave him third place, but a third place to be proud of.



If I rewind to WCG 2011 I think I just had no idea how to beat Tgun's style, but was so overwhelmed to have come top 3 in Australia in our most important tournament of 2011 that I wasn't very upset haha. I was still just so excited to be eating up the travelling feeling and the atmosphere of the first interstate tournament that I didn't have to pay for myself!



After that, a year of coaching went by, and PiG qualified as one of the players at the WCS Nationals in Australia. This was one of the biggest tournaments that Australia had seen, even surpassing WCG the previous year. There was a lot of pressure on players to perform.



I'd taken a big risk not coaching in the leadup to ACL Melbourne the month before, nor in the entire month before WCS and lost a LOT of money by fully committing to training.



When it all came down to it, PiG had invested all of himself and more into this career, and this would be when it all came together.



In Sydney, Australia, it would all go down. Sixteen of Australias best, and six would move on to the Oceanic finals the next day.



PiG would have stiff competition. Ninja and Edge, both incredible Zerg players, would each take a game in the best of three. His next match would bring him up against his nemesis. The man that knocked him out at WCG 2011. Tgun.



Now, if you dont know. Tgun was a great Zerg player - playing in MLG tournaments, playing in the GSTL tournaments in Korea for FXOpen. Hes now on one of the top teams in League of Legends. He has a natural talent.



And when it came down to the pair, PiG got his revenge, taking down the Sydney Zerg 2-0.



If you asked anyone who the best player in Australia was in 2012, most people would have said Andrew Pender. Moonglade. A man who had represented Australia in Warcraft 3 and in Starcraft 2. The best player in the region.



And he too fell to PiG, but not without taking a map.



With that, PiG awaited the winner of the losers bracket. A losers bracket with Tgun and Moonglade. With Rossi, Light, Mafia and YoonYJ.



Moonglade would emerge the winner after a hard fought battle with MaFia.



Once again, the showdown was set. Moonglade and PiG. Pender and Krensel. Zerg and Zerg.



Moonglade won the first series. But with the winners bracket advantage, PiG would have another chance to take the series, but he was struggling. I think I was a bit upset, there was so much pressure on me, and I was so excited and pumped to play my best. Id committed more practice for an event than I ever had before.



So in front of thousands of online viewers, and in front of famed commentators, Artosis and Tasteless, PiG would once again take the stage against Moonglade. Now though, he had figured it out.



I think the key moment was stopping on the way back from the bathroom to talk to Dot and her pointing out that Glade just kept getting ahead by cancelling my 3rd base, and if I just delay it and take it later, I can get to the mid-game where Im very confident. She pointed out that Glade seemed to not want to play a macro game and go to the roach-infestor wars, so I just needed to make it to that point where I was strongest.



And with that knowledge, PiG won the second set, 2-1. He was the champion of WCS Australia. And while he couldnt go on to replicate that success in the Oceanic finals, he could walk away with his head high.



It felt so amazing to win that tournament just thinking about it makes me feel very emotional.



I finally knew that hard work would pay off and all those doubts telling me I should just be a coach/caster/personality were blasted out of the water.



Part Two featuring Dreamhacks, the Europe Trip and WCS coming up eventually





DISCLAIMER: It's been a long time since this all happened, and I was unable to find any of the VoD's for any of the WCS matches, otherwise I would have gone into more detail. Thank you to PiG [and Dot for the photos, who I really should have asked and I'm sorry but I really wanted to get this up. At least, I'm pretty sure she took those photos, if I'm wrong, can the real person please contact me, but I'm pretty sure it was Dot :P.], who provided excellent answers, and I'll be sure to include both interviews I've had the pleasure of doing with him, one in 2013 and one for this piece here, at the end of Part Two. Thanks for reading if you've made it this far! Everyone has their compulsion.Caffeine. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Sport. Working Out.For Australias Jared PiG Krensel: its Starcraft 2.I began neglecting my uni-work and the decision [to play and coach full time] was kind of forced onto me. I'd sit down to write essays and all that was running through my head was Starcraft."At the time, many would have called this a destructive addiction, but that is not how PiG would describe it.... but I guess the difference with SC2 is that it never felt like a destructive addiction. I felt like I was becoming smarter and better at applying myself and discovering new things constantly. I actually felt like studying and practicing this game was making me a better person.This was in 2010. Since then, PiG hasnt missed a beat. Hes travelled the world. Hes competed with World Champions. Hes had his fair share of rivalries. And through all of this, he stands out as one of Southeast Asias best players.For the past five years, PiGs life has been Starcraft.Growing up, many of PiGs fondest memories were in Real Time Strategy games: Warcraft, Command and Conquer, and even the original Starcraft. However, with the hype that surrounded the impending Wings of Liberty release, PiG came close to not even buying the game that would make him a star.I wasn't excited for [the] SC2 release as I'd heard so much hype. I notice that most games that are heavily hyped suck really badly so I wasn't going to buy it (I was also a very poor student at the time). Luckily my group of friends were so excited they finally pressured me into pre-ordering it and away I went.It took him a long time to get his head around the game though. At first, the Zerg mechanics were too hard. Protoss was easier, but the ideas still didnt seem to fit: I never upgraded Warpgate tech because I thought it was dumb to not be able to queue up units. The game was hard. And it was overwhelming. And if it wasnt for the same friends that convinced him to buy the game, PiG might not be where he is today.Any professional player can tell you the first tournament that they entered. Theres a rush that you only feel when youre competing; especially if youre winning. For PiG, this experience came when City Hunter hosted a tournament just after the official release of the game. It had a decent prize for the one-on-one and two-on-two tournaments, and PiG entered both with his brother: We were using the internet cafe gear and default settings on the PC and thinking back Im pretty sure it was constantly spiking and playing at like 20FPS (Frames Per Second), but I was too noob to even think about fixing that stuff up. If you told PiG after his first one-on-one tournament match, where he was 6-pooled twice that he would become a star in the game, he probably wouldnt have believed you.But the two-on-two matches went different. To read PiGs retelling of the time that he beat Moonglade in a teams match, you would think he had just won the championship.2v2 was a different story, me and my brother got put in a group with [Moon]Glade and his 2v2 partner, and luckily we played them last, so we got to watch them execute a 2-rax bunker + 9-pool spine rush on each team and win very quick and easy games.Knowing they would do the same thing I decided to do a 9-pool and my brother just did a standard bio opening. They both came for me but couldnt break in vs my zerglings at first, and instead were forced to contain me. They kept getting eager to finish me off but I held off with lingbane on 1-base, forcing them to add tanks and slowly step forward into my base to finish me off. As I looked like I wasnt going to last much longer my brother who had gone untouched landed 3 full medivacs of stim bio inside one of their base, completely obliterating him.They realized they needed to do damage and started trying to break into my brothers base but he had a tank on the high ground massacring the units as they funneled up his ramp. Meanwhile my brother had lifted into the other base and completed wiping out the rest of their production and economy.We had won! We were so excited jumping up and down and hi-5ing and all the other guys from our group who were watching us were cheering and yelling super excited too, wed beaten the big boss Glade! And knocked him out of the tournament lol! Best of one, only top team advances in a group of 4 lol!And while it might not be the most traditional first win over a big name, it is one of the most interesting.It took around 6 months for PiG to be relevant nationally: when he won second in a community open, and first at a City Hunter charity event in Jan. 2011I was addicted to competing and was laddering and playing online cups almost every day of my entire summer uni[versity] holidays to get to that point.Following this, PiG made the courageous decision to drop out of university and play full time. As one of the first to do this in the country, he was setting his own rules and his own precedent.How do I explain to my girlfriend what I'm doing? What do I tell my family? My friends? I had no idea I could actually make it as a pro so just trying to "go pro" wasn't enough. So I decided to become the best coach in the starcraft scene (I couldn't believe people charged money for such crappy coaching that I'd seen) and work on getting my play to pro level on the side.So PiG started out charging $15 an hour for his coaching. And he was pretty good at it too. He was getting a lot of interest in his coaching, and was eventually able to make ends meet.As I withdrew in the middle of a semester of uni I did have centrelink for a few more months while I got my coaching business up and running but beyond that I was completely self-sufficient, and actually saving some money despite charging only $15/hour and often giving 60% extra time in each coaching session. Some weeks I was coaching 40 paid hours in 2011.But in the lead up to WCG Australia, he didnt coach as often. He decided to focus on getting better, and getting the best results that he possible could. In Melbourne, he was knocked out in the third round of the winners bracket. However, he managed to fight back through the losers bracket, and was within two games of qualifying for the event. Unfortunately, the visiting Norwegian, Targa, dashed his hopes.His final chance would come in Brisbane. And his winners bracket was impressive, despite a number of players having already qualified, therefore, not competing. He made his way through the winners bracket, and to the grand final where he would face clan mate, JimDaddy. Even though the pair had already qualified for the WCG Australia, there was still the bragging rights on offer. JimDaddy would take the first set off of PiG, but due to his winners bracket advantage, he would manage to come back and take the second set, but not before losing another match in the process. At the end of the day, all of their matches combined would amount to 6-4, in PiGs favour, but only just.The finals would be a different beast altogether. Sixteen of Australia and New Zealands best players would be in attendance. After a bye in the first round, PiG would match up against Tgun. The first match between the pair at a big event, but it wouldnt be the last. Tgun however didnt have many issues with PiG, cruising past him without losing a map, pushing his fellow Zerg player into the losers bracket.PiG has a hard losers bracket run. There was no denying that. He had to go through Rossi and YoonYJ, two of the better Terran players, and then through MaFiA, another great Zerg. And finally, there was Iaguz, who, despite taking a map off of PiG, failed to stop his run. That would lead PiG to once again matching up against Tgun, who had just lost to the man PiG had beat in that 2 vs. 2, Moonglade, in what must have felt like eons ago. .The match once again ended 2-0, with PiG on the losing end. This gave him third place, but a third place to be proud of.If I rewind to WCG 2011 I think I just had no idea how to beat Tgun's style, but was so overwhelmed to have come top 3 in Australia in our most important tournament of 2011 that I wasn't very upset haha. I was still just so excited to be eating up the travelling feeling and the atmosphere of the first interstate tournament that I didn't have to pay for myself!After that, a year of coaching went by, and PiG qualified as one of the players at the WCS Nationals in Australia. This was one of the biggest tournaments that Australia had seen, even surpassing WCG the previous year. There was a lot of pressure on players to perform.I'd taken a big risk not coaching in the leadup to ACL Melbourne the month before, nor in the entire month before WCS and lost a LOT of money by fully committing to training.When it all came down to it, PiG had invested all of himself and more into this career, and this would be when it all came together.In Sydney, Australia, it would all go down. Sixteen of Australias best, and six would move on to the Oceanic finals the next day.PiG would have stiff competition. Ninja and Edge, both incredible Zerg players, would each take a game in the best of three. His next match would bring him up against his nemesis. The man that knocked him out at WCG 2011. Tgun.Now, if you dont know. Tgun was a great Zerg player - playing in MLG tournaments, playing in the GSTL tournaments in Korea for FXOpen. Hes now on one of the top teams in League of Legends. He has a natural talent.And when it came down to the pair, PiG got his revenge, taking down the Sydney Zerg 2-0.If you asked anyone who the best player in Australia was in 2012, most people would have said Andrew Pender. Moonglade. A man who had represented Australia in Warcraft 3 and in Starcraft 2. The best player in the region.And he too fell to PiG, but not without taking a map.With that, PiG awaited the winner of the losers bracket. A losers bracket with Tgun and Moonglade. With Rossi, Light, Mafia and YoonYJ.Moonglade would emerge the winner after a hard fought battle with MaFia.Once again, the showdown was set. Moonglade and PiG. Pender and Krensel. Zerg and Zerg.Moonglade won the first series. But with the winners bracket advantage, PiG would have another chance to take the series, but he was struggling. I think I was a bit upset, there was so much pressure on me, and I was so excited and pumped to play my best. Id committed more practice for an event than I ever had before.So in front of thousands of online viewers, and in front of famed commentators, Artosis and Tasteless, PiG would once again take the stage against Moonglade. Now though, he had figured it out.I think the key moment was stopping on the way back from the bathroom to talk to Dot and her pointing out that Glade just kept getting ahead by cancelling my 3rd base, and if I just delay it and take it later, I can get to the mid-game where Im very confident. She pointed out that Glade seemed to not want to play a macro game and go to the roach-infestor wars, so I just needed to make it to that point where I was strongest.And with that knowledge, PiG won the second set, 2-1. He was the champion of WCS Australia. And while he couldnt go on to replicate that success in the Oceanic finals, he could walk away with his head high.It felt so amazing to win that tournament just thinking about it makes me feel very emotional.I finally knew that hard work would pay off and all those doubts telling me I should just be a coach/caster/personality were blasted out of the water. Last edited by Descent; Sat, 31st-Jan-2015 at 9:07 PM .