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eSports Report for April 2, 2012

By Lawrence Sonntag | 02 April 2012 | 3 Comments   

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MATCH HIGHLIGHTS:

Rather than spoil a week’s worth of matches, I’ll just toss to a match or two I saw this week that struck me as particularly awesome.

GSTL — MarineKingPrime vs. FXO_Leenock (Set 8)

marineking

MarineKing has been experimenting with fast mech vs. Zerg for a while now, but that usually ends up with a a smattering of dead tanks and a chaotic mid-game. His match versus Leenock in the GSTL looked wildly different. He built up to three Thors and though conservative play, managed to keep them alive until a really strong push at around 15 minutes, which is a really weird timing.

It’s great to see Terran experimenting away from building up a death swarm of tanks. Playing the positioning game is all well and good but I feel like there’s a lot of strategic depth to TvZ that players are starting to scratch into. I’m hoping we have players that will use mules for on-demand repair and (dare I say it), hunter-seeker missile.

COMING THIS WEEK:

IPL 4 / GSTL Season 1 Finals – April 6 – 8

Thanks to some bitchin’ cross promotion, we’ll have the finals of the IPL 4 (StarCraft II, League of Legends) as well as the GSTL 2012 Season 1 in the same event in Vegas. They’re promising 1080p streams for the event — two StarCraft II, one League of Legends, and a floor cam. 480p streams will be free, but it looks like the IPL will be using this event to push their $5 / month subscription through Twitch.tv.

Texas Showdown – April 4 – 8

This is another one of those Road to Evo tourneys, taking place during Anime Matsuri in Houston. Nearly every major fighter is on offer here – Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Street Fighter X Tekken, King of Fighters XIII, on and on. They even have some smaller fighters like Arana Heart 3 (unsurprising, this is an anime convention after all) and Skullgirls.

The Gathering – April 6 – 8

Norway’s largest LAN, and only second in the world to Dreamhack, The Gathering will host another StarCraft II tournament with streams provided by IMBA.tv. The player pool might be a little think thanks to the IPL 4, but this should be a great showcase for Europe’s up-and-comers.

3 Comments

  1. Posted by Joa on 02 April 12 at 6:14pm

    Lawrence,

    Are you at all related to Susan Sontag? for those who care, that would be really cool haha.

    I would have like to see the match between Marineking & Leenok, if it only wasn’t for a subscription to GomTv required to access the video. Anyways, enjoyed today’s blog in general, Keep it up!

    • Posted by Lawrence Sonntag on 03 April 12 at 9:04am

      RIGHT, I forgot about that subscription thing. I’ll try and suggest free matches from now on. That explains why I couldn’t embed it on this blog post…

      And I’m not related to Susan Sontag as far as I know – our last names are slightly different too (hers is INCORRECT, damnit).

  2. Posted by Ash on 03 April 12 at 5:13pm

    Just a quick question, why is League of Legends hardly ever mentioned on the Esports Report?

    It has one of the biggest esports scenes of any game currently. Just last weekend the 4PL pulled in 40k viewers on the LoL stream and a few weeks ago the IEM Championships had way over 100k viewers just on the LoL stream.

    Nearly every single week there is a big tournament or invitational pulling in tens of thousands of live viewers and when there is no tournament the Pros get almost that much just on their personal streams.

    Would be nice if you included LoL in the report more considering the LoL esports scene is probably bigger the SC2 now.

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