Alive was encumbered with the heavy burden to stop Brood War legend Jaedong
The first four matches of WCS Korea nationals with players like Jaedong, By.Sun, Curious, Parting and Alive have been played and things did not look good for the two KeSPA representatives.
The Korean nationals began with a surprising victory of SlayerS' zerg Miya over Horror in the only series that had all its three games played out. The IM Zerg, who's holding an average ZvZ win-rate of over 65% in international and Korean events, only took the second game on Cloud Kingdom before suffering a build order loss in game three. Horror's hatch first was hard countered by Miya's 7-pool for whom this was the first televised win in a Korean event.
The second match saw a ZvP between StarTale's Curious and SK Telecom's By.Sun (a.k.a. Rain). Rain suffered a quick loss on Entombed Valley after he failed to fill the holes in his wall off, welcoming banelings and speedlings right into his main, but succeeded in pushing it into the very late game on Daybreak. In disadvantage for almost the entire match, Rain stayed alive despite the dreadful brood lord/infestor army of Curious and built himself a shiny blink stalker/archon army. Nevertheless, when the ST zerg started using nydus networks to reinforce his fliers with utmost efficiency and to snipe bases with infested terrans in a blink of an eye, Rain had to tap out.
In the third series of the day, Parting calmly and perfectly played the match-up that he rarely loses. His opponent was MVP's terran sC who, like many others, tried to crush the protoss times and times again but only ended up with his armies being melted by faultless psi storms.
In the highlight series of the day, "The Tyrant" from Team 8 Jaedong faced Fnatic's Alive, where the latter was the clear favorite. Despite the apparent increase in JD's skill since his MLG performance till now, the Brood War legend just could not keep up. Jaedong started the series on the back foot after Alive's signature medivac drop abuse crippled his economy and as his inefficient baneling trades and the loss of one brood lord army did not help his cause, JD tapped out. Game two on Ohana was a straightforward scenario of a rax pressure snowballing to the point of an out-upgraded, out-macroed and out-microed zerg.
WCS Korea Ro32 Day 1 | ||
Miya | 2-1 | Horror |
Curious | 2-0 | By.Sun |
Parting | 2-0 | sC |
Alive | 2-0 | Jaedong |
This is not the end for Jaedong, sC, Horror and By.Sun, however, as they fall to the losers bracket. There, Jaedong faces another ZvT challenge in sC and By.Sun will play IM's Horror.
Finally, here is WCS Korea's schedule for the rest of the week:
WCS KOREA NATIONALS Polt | vs | IMmvp | TAiLS | vs | Happy | CoCa | vs | Seed | GuMiho | vs | Neo.G_Soulkey | Creator | vs | DongRaeGu | EffOrt | vs | Liquid’HerO | herO[jOin] | vs | Puzzle | YuGiOh | vs | Reality | dreamertt | vs | Genius | Squirtle | vs | BBoongBBoong | RorO | vs | Hack | Leenock | vs | MC | |