[ASL14] Ro4 Preview: The Best Matchup

The last stop before the finals, not only do we get 2 TvZs from some of the best players in the matchup right now that will knock the socks out of any fan of starcraft and remind people why TvZ is the best matchup to watch for longtime fans of the game. They’re also Bo7s.

both Royal and Soulkey look to make a finals quality series with their history and their capabilities in the matchup being some of the more innovative players right now, while Rush and hero have a storied history and look to adding another chapter to it.

Banger After Banger

Royal is the first of two Terrans competing in the AfreecaTV Season 14 finals. It’s not often as writers, we get to tell you the end of the book before it has happened, but this is the ending. Just as the semifinals was the last stop for Protoss players, Zerg players will meet their ending here and now. Coming off his series against Shine, Royal has now only lost a single map against his last 10 ASL Zerg opponents. In the interview, Royal said that he wanted to show the world he could beat Protoss too. With the elimination of Bisu, the world in return is giving him his hardest Zerg challenger to date.

The first quarterfinals match pits Royal against one of the most electrifying Zerg ZvT players of all time. In 2011, Soulkey showed us for the first time how to truly use queen play to destroy a Terran meching opponent. Over the past 10 years, mech vs Zerg has become an extremely unpopular play style. This is a direct result of Soulkey’s playstyle influence. Soulkey isn’t just a stylistic game changer. At every era of Brood War, he has proven to be a winner time and again. In 2018, Soulkey went through another one of his peaks and won the KSL Season 2. He went 8-1 against Last and Sharp on his way to a career defining gold finish.

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Know your history

This year Soulkey and Royal have faced off 66 times in sponmatches. Soulkey holds a 2 game edge, winning 51.5% of the games. Only Rush has a closer winning percentage by just 0.5%. Soulkey holds a 58% average winrate vs Terrans and only struggles against this season’s Terran bash brothers. Royal has played over 300 more ZvT matches then Soulkey while maintaining a successful 55% winrate. Royal has a winning percentage against all other competing Zergs this season except against Soulkey.

Royal ended up picking Nemesis Vermeer and Odyssey.
Soulkey picked Neo Arkanoid Allegro and Sylphid

Final map pick is Butter

Expected Odyssey and Sylphid to have been Royal’s big picks. These are the only two maps with a winning Terran percentage in ZvT. Butter and Allegro were most likely Soulkey’s big picks. Royal has only suffered one map loss and that came on Butter. Expect this map to be a huge point in Soulkey’s pocket and its a huge deal that it ended up the final map.

Vermeer was a great pick on Royal’s part. Soulkey has struggled on Vermeer going 0-2 this season. Royal won’t have the game 7 edge and will top it off with the drive to finally find his place in the Grand Finals. Soulkey has struggled on Sylphid in the past making it look like a solid point for Royal. Just overall across the whole map pool, it’s hard to imagine the series doing anything but going to 7 games.

Royal advances to the Finals 4-3!

Hype or Crash

Both hero and Rush have had ASL seasons when they’ve made it to the finals and both players have also known what it’s like to completely crash and burn. Both players have also been in this exact same spot before in ASL12 and Rush came out on top then. Will hero be able to overcome Rush this time or are we doomed to repeat the same performance?

hero is coming off of one of the most dominant Ro8 performances in a long time, very much grinding Snow into a fine powder and throwing him into the wind, extinguishing the last bit of protoss hope for this season of ASL.

Rush on the other hand just barely managed to push past Light but it was a victory well earned and squarely puts him in contention if not already in the category of the best active Terran player, but any talk of being the best is sealed without championship gold and for that he must go past hero once more to make it to the finals.

ZvT has always been hero’s weakest matchup, usually attempting to overcome his shortcomings by way of using clever tactics and less standard strategies to get around his weakness against terrans rather than being the more mechanically sound strategist he is in his ZvP play. In layman’s terms, while in ZvP hero always plays like he knows exactly what he and his opponent are doing at all times but in ZvT he always looks like he’s trying something but not nearly as sure of what the outcome will be.

Rush’s TvZ on the other hand is one of his better matchup holding an overall career 61.6% winrate in online and offline matches combined in the current era, although having thus far completely avoided playing against Zerg this season its hard to say how he will perform against hero on these maps this season, but this could also mean that he’s more or less completely hidden his competitive strategies for the map pool.

Aside from their ASL history, Rush also has a huge lead on their overall head to head rivalry online with their results being 117-74 in favour of Rush over hero, the most skewed to one side rivalries on both player’s parts. Another point to Rush.

Odyssey being the map that Rush picked is fairly obvious, we’ve yet to see terran lose on the map so far in the ASL, Allegro has had its fair share of games but favors zerg in terms of results and hero really needs to win on the map so he can secure the lead on Arkanoid which continues to be the bane of non-zerg players, Vermeer and Nemesis look like maps for Rush to take and Butter does favor Zerg, but not by much, overall with good ol’ Sylphid being the final map, I would say overall its a good pool for Rush over hero.

Rush to Advance to the Grand Finals 4-2!

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Writers: BLinD-RawR, BisuDagger
Graphics: v1
Editors: BLinD-RawR