serral vs inno
serral vs dark was good to watch.
he doesn't look as strong as last year but still he's there in the finals.
Inno had some great games (game 3 vs rail with a crazy move was something).
Maru is clearly in bad shape compared to his GSL peak, he makes some massive mistakes/slighty worse multitasking and the serie vs inno was not great.
Anyway really impressive that innovation is still at this level after so many years

Somewhere there was a screwup starting the stream, so we begin 19:00 into the game. It's kind of a split map, Scarlett has ~8 of the 18 bases on King's Cove, Maru has ~6, seems like he's turtling and playing defensively.

Eventually, Maru starts doing the hyper-lategame Terran thing of building ghosts and tons of nukes and just nuking the **** out of Scarlett's defensive positions to slowly but surely push the creep back and take over some of her more extended bases. There was a period of time where it was looking like Scarlett could get a mining advantage - she took the 9 o'clock base for awhile and looked poised to take the 3 o'clock - but eventually Maru takes both of those, and he's also doing about 10k better in resources lost.

He keeps advancing on Scarlett's positions, and Scarlett oddly...refuses to fight back. She picks off nuking ghosts here and there with fungals/abducts, but otherwise slowly but dutifully retreats everywhere Maru pushes. She doesn't do so unscathed - there's one or two juicy nukes that land, one kills maybe ten infestors, another hits her corruptor ball and takes out several, which becomes important in a mined-out lategame. Additionally, a single ghost in her main killed all her tech (she didn't send anything back to deal with it, so it got hive + spawning pool + infestation pit + greater spire) forcing her to rebuild it elsewhere.

Eventually this slow advancement of Maru's army continues until she's down to just a few hatches (like, around where her first 4-5 bases would be), seems like if she loses any fights she's dead simply by virtue of not having any larva left to rebuild stuff, even if she's got an okay bank still. And so finally, we get to a point where she has no choice but to start fighting his army.

Skip to 53:00 in the game, which is at 56:00 of the Twitch VOD. You're welcome for the 34 minutes I just saved you.

the ending is the dumbest thing you've seen in quite some time.

Did I just witness some high-level poker in sc2? Scarlett knows the best she can do is draw, but when Maru offers one, refuses it so that Maru will think she's got a corruptor hidden away somewhere, giving her a shot at winning by a bad surrender. Or maybe I'm overthinking it and it was just dumb as the above poster said. At any rate one of the more interesting games I've seen.

Also innovation GOAT

man that game 1 of the winners match of the most recent GSL (Ro16 group B) such a great game

classic vs rogue is basically #PROTOSS in a nutshell

cannon rush, free win
lose a macro game
lose a game with a weird shield battery strategy while not microing
adept all in
storm drop killing 12 drones into free win

excited to see Dark wreck him and get to a finals tho!

Game 2 was really fun to watch, I agree that Dear would have made things a lot easier on himself if he made a shield battery outpost for his tempests. Good micro closed it out for his only win.

Game 3, Maru's push on the 3rd drove a perfect wedge between Dear's defenses, was great to watch.

Game 2 was fun, but the better player won.

WOW Trap in rare form, he played really well this series!

I really want Dark to ship also, he's due