Sheth falls to team-mate HerO in DreamHack Ro16

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The DreamHack AMD Sapphire Round of 16 ended with a team kill, a roll-over, a 40-minute Polish Protoss mirror and a huge upset caused by a Swede. Read on for the four stories from DreamHack.

Sheth falls to team-mate HerO in mind-blowing PvZ series
In a mind-blowing PvZ series Hero defeated his team-mate Sheth with a dramatic 2-0 victory. Game one saw HerO open with his trademark void ray/sentry prism drop but unlike other zergs in the tournament, Sheth displayed an unbreakable will to live, sending waves after waves of lings and maintaining queen production to keep the protoss army away from his hatcheries and even tech to infestors, which was the final step in his defence. The deadly fungals chased HerO away and the two entered phase two of their game, which grew into a sick macro ZvP. Sheth kept taking bases and so did HerO and soon maxed high-tier armies motleyed up the entirity of Shakuras Plateau. Brood lords met colossus/blink deathballs but the direct engagements never went heavily into one's or another's favor, even when HerO brought a mothership along. The key to HerO's victory actually lay in his pristine warp prism harass that kept hurting Sheth's economy until it reached a point where he could not longer support and reinforce a large brood lord army.

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HerO had it much easier in the second game, going for a pure warp prism sentry play. Sheth did his best to defend the rush but the small number of lings plus the amazing positioning of HerO mitigated the protoss losses to minimum. Minutes later Sheth's pool and spire followed the lings to hell and the zerg had to gg out.

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Seiplo defeats the DreamHack Summer 2011 champion
Seiplo, the Swedish sensation of DreamHack Winter 2011, went in to the playoffs with everything to win and nothing to lose. Paired against the DreamHack Summer 2011 champion HuK, many had ticked "HuK" as winner in the GosuBets. But after an hour, the Swede showed that yesterday's taken scalps were no fluke as he convincingly disposed HuK two to nothing. With an exceptional defense in the first game against HuK's aggressive style that included both dark templars and immortals. The very calm performance of Seiplo did not reflect his slim to none previous experiences in offline play. The Alien Invasion player could finish off the second game with another solid defensive stance. With a higher probe count he could churn out more blink stalkers and immortals than his Canadian opponent.

Polish clash sees Nerchio get ahead over MaNa
The Nerchio vs Mana series begame with a game that was very close to the epicness that was Sheth vs Hero. It took the players nearly fourty minutes to decide the winner until Nerchio could find strength to walk out triumphant. For the better part of the mid-game, Nerchio was on the loose launching multiple harass attemtps, aiming to decimate Mana's economy with both ling run-byes and mutalisk terror, but Mana's blink/immortal/forcefield control was close to impeccable. Thus, Nerchio had to transition to a composition more fit for head-on battles so he teched up to infestor/ultralisk. At the beginning, the zerg experienced great discomfort fighting the storm/archon/immortal centric army but the constant battering against Mana's front lies paid off with a gg.

In game two on Dual Sight, Nerchio opened with the relatively unorthodox decision of blocking Mana's expo with an evo chamber, delaying his timings quite a bit. The things for the protoss worsened as four lings of Nerchio managed to find their way inside Mana's base, putting him even farther behind. This advantage eventually escalated into a mid-game loss for Mana and Nerchio would advance to face Ret in the Ro8.

Ret outplays ToD to reach quarter finals
Ret won against ToD 2-0 in a very convincing series. In the first game he was able to catch ToD's dark templar tech to counter it well with hydras in time to push ToD back. He closed off the series with a three-base roach play against Tod's all-inish zealot, stalker, one sentry attack. He could then take charge of the map, and once the mutalisks saw the light of dawn and flew in to ToD's base the Frenchman quickly called game.

DH Winter playoffs

Round of 16