We're approaching the end of the Avaratec-Intel Classic which started in early April this year. Today's semi finals was between Jaedong and Shuttle (Also known as YoonJoong), who's been surprising a lot of people by making it this far in the tournament.
Having clawed his way through the entire tournament, Shuttle had only dropped one game to fOrGG in the quarter finals during the entire tournament. Players like fOrGG, Xellos and Violet had all fallen before this protoss. Enter Jaedong, the monstrous zerg player who seems to have gotten back in prime shape after a slight bump in his play. Jaedong had the benefit of being seeded into the tournament and toppled both JangBi and Lomo among others on his way to the semi finals.
Game 1 - Katrina SE
Jaedong spawned at the 12 o clock position and Shuttle at the 9 o clock position. Jaedong opened up with a 9 pool, but his zerglings arrived at a well fortified Shuttle, who opted to take the bottom left expansion rather early. Seeing this, Jaedong immediately took both his nearby expansions and teched to lair. Shuttle had his stargate up and scouted Jaedong's base with a corsair, noticing both the spire and the hydralisk den that had been built.
Jaedong's mutalisked pounced shortly thereafter upon a hapless probe line, sending all of Shuttle's probes scurrying for safety and killing a good amount. Shuttle did macro up a decently sized force of dragoons, archons, high templar and zealots, but Jaedong had no problems holding Shuttle off with lurkers and zerglings until he had amassed a huge army. After taking out one of Shuttle's expansions under the cover of dark swarms as well as dropping a force into his main, Shuttle concedes the first game.
Game 2 - Blue Storm
Jaedong spawned in the bottom left and Shuttle in the top right. Jaedong opens up with a 12 hatch at his mineral only expansion. Seeing this, Shuttle starts his nexus up right away before getting his forge. Jaedong shortly sends a small force of zerglings towards Shuttle's natural expansion, where they squeeze through the tight gap and sends the mining probes running for safety. The cannon couldn't quite reach Jaedong's zerglings, who sat between the nexus and minerals preventing Shuttle from doing any mining until a zealot drove them off.
Seeing that Jaedong's mineral only expo is only lightly defended, Shuttle builds up a task force of zealots. These zealots run into a gang of Jaedong's hydralisks, and with some nice micro manages to pick off quite a few, pushing Jaedong back to his expansion. The rest of this game is rather similar to the first. Despite a number of nice storms, Jaedong's forces overwhelm Shuttle and a few deadly drops seal the deal. Jaedong is now up two games and is looking very strong heading into the third game.
Game 3 - Othello
Back against the wall, this is where Shuttle needed to pick up his game. Starting at the 7 o clock position, his scouting probe immediately found Jaedong at the 11 o clock position. Jaedong went for a 9 pool opening, forcing Shuttle to get cannons before getting his nexus. Jaedong gathered a group of speedlings and completely ignored the cannons, running straight into Shuttle's main. 4 zerglings were enough to completely disrupt all mining for Shuttle for quite some time and sniping a few before finally perishing. As this was going on Jaedong double expanded to get his economy into high gear.
This proved to be a little overconfident, as Shuttle managed to sneak a couple of zealots into Jaedong's second expansion and kill of a number of drones, evening the out the game somewhat. Further attempts at harassing with dark templar were fruitless however, and Jaedong was free to simply mass up a lot of units and proceed to roll over Shuttle, sweeping the series 3-0 and moving on to the finals, where he will face Flash or Backho, depending on the winner of next weeks game.
As usual, the VODs are available on the GomTV website linked below.
Links
GomTV.net - Vods
