After a long day of StarCraft 2 in the Ukrainian capital, the fourth stop of the Intel Extreme Masters could not come to a happy ending as Group B 's decisive match still hangs unresolved.
As you might know from our previous news on the event, IEM Kiev opened with Naniwa losing 1-2 to Strelok but then the Swede announced that he is to forfeit his remaining games due to lag issues. Some time later, the protoss returned to the competition having found a better computer to play on.
Eventually, Naniwa came to top his group, scoring two 2-0 wins in a row against Titan (his first match after cancelling his forfeiture) and next against the then current group leader WhiteRa. The Swede performed on a top level, completely outplaying and outmicroing his protoss opponents, showing why he was regarded as the heavy favorite not for the group stage only but for the entire tournament. Despite the bumpy start, group A was played out seemingly unhindered.
The mishaps at Kiev, however, were not gone for good as the lag issues returned with the matches in group B. Midway through the run during a game against Korean zerg Zenio, Grubby voiced his protest as an observer lagged out, violating the normal flow of the game. Although a re-game was not ruled out in the long run, Grubby's words were a testimony that the technical misfortunes had returned to Kiev CyberSport Arena. In the end, Group B would end up unfinished as after two sets of ZvP, NightEnd and Zenio had to put the decisive match on hold. After a two hours of discussion with the IEM administration, the decision of the match to be remade has been reached. It will be up to Zenio to decide if this will affect the whole series or just the third map. The only sure thing is that Kas has his quarter final spot secured after managing to play and win all his group stage matches, qualifying with a 6-1 score.
| IEM Kiev Day one results | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Group A | Group B | |||||||||||||||||||||||
  Naniwa | 5-2 |   Kas | 6-1 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| WhiteRa | 4-3 |  NightEnd | 3-3 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Strelok | 4-3 |   Zenio | 2-2 | |||||||||||||||||||||
 Titan | 1-6 |  Grubby | 1-6 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Strelok 2-1 Naniwa WhiteRa 2-1 Titan Naniwa 2-0 Titan WhiteRa 2-0 Strelok Strelok 2-0 Titan Naniwa 2-0 WhiteRa | Kas 2-1 NightEnd Kas 2-0 Zenio Zenio 2-0 Grubby NightEnd 2-1 Grubby Kas 2-0 Grubby Zenio 0-0 NightEnd (to be played) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
At the end of the day, Michal Carmac Blicharz came out with a public statement, posted on the TL.net forums. Carmac went through every problem that was experienced yesterday, the measures that IEM administration took to resolve them and offered his formal apologies.
- "To whomever was disappointed with today: I am obviously very sorry that you did not receive the kind of entertainment that we always want to deliver. I can say with all honesty that we did our very best to fix the issues and make sure that the rest of the tournament is flawless.
Please give us some credit and save the pitchforks for after the finals."
Day two of IEM Kiev is schedule to begin today at 12:00 CET and is to see the completion of the group stage and the pairing for the playoffs.
Links
TeamLiquid.net - Carmac statement
