Code S Group H: Baby bye bye

The Round of 32 is over and it is as many feared - with the almost complete annihilation of the protoss race, a lot of ZvTs are inbound.

The Code S schedule is somewhat cruel to the eSports writer. Just yesterday, we were telling the story of a young aspiring ZvT bully and today we have no choice but to do the same: the similarities between Leenock and Life are just overwhelming. It almost feels odd that in the sea of all those zergs, they are the only ones that truly matter.

Life played a lot of ZvTs at Dallas this weekend and seeing how he went 12-2 in the match-up, his 4-0 against Ryung and Baby is no upset. The reigning champion was ruthless in the way he reduced the terran armies to scrap and stood indifferent in the face of hellion openings and double proxy rax. It took him less than an hour to plough through the opposition, allowing just the second game against Ryung to go past the 20th minute.

To compensate for Life's swift climb to the top, the fight for the second spot was long, tense and not lacking entertainment. The dramatis personae included Vampire, a stylistic protoss who enjoyed opening triple forge, fast third nexus or to base race with zealots against terran, and Ryung, now with a new jersey on his shoulders and a great love for drop plays.

Frankly speaking, it has been a long time since someone fought with such ferocity for the continuance of his race's legacy. Vampire had a tough lot, sharing a group with the reigning champion and other prominent players, but desperation never took hold of him and he had grabbed the hope for a Ro16 spot with teeth and nails. In the end, he'd end up being the only player in Code S thus far to play a full set of nine games before finally following his brethren down to Code A.

Code S Group H
Life	4-0	To Code S Ro16
Ryung	4-4	To Code S Ro16
Vampire	4-5	To Code A Ro32
Baby	1-4	To Code A Ro48
Life 2-0 Baby Ryung 2-1 Vampire Life 2-0 Ryung Vampire 2-1 Baby Ryung 2-1 Vampire

The race distribution after today's matches is heavily in favor of the swarm with exactly half of next round's players being zergs. Six terrans and two protosses fill up the quota, meaning there won't be a great variety of match-up in the coming days. What is more, zergs are represented almost exclusively by the strong of the day with Leenock, Life, DongRaeGu, Curious and Symbol all through while the other two races lost their star players early in the competition. With Mvp, Taeja, HerO, Rain, Squirtle and Seed now out, it is not unwise to be worried about how will the Code S picture look like come playoffs.