It won’t be an understatement to say that this year’s IEM Singapore will have to work hard to outdo the emotional charge that the New York edition before it left in the viewers. The October competition was not only the last premier event of 2013 to hand out WCS points, which is an incentive to watch by itself, but also brought along a palette of stories which turned it into one of the most exciting events of the year. From Naniwa’s deep run and daring comebacks to Life’s return to power, IEM New York dealt more excitement with each passing series, gluing almost 100,000 concurrent viewers during its peak.
A month and a half later, IEM Singapore arrives on streams to land directly into several layers of overshadowing. Having to compete with its own IEM brother will be a tough task but that’s not everything. It is apparently IEM Singapore’s ill fate to coincide with DreamHack’s crown jewel and for a second year the two events will share the same weekend. While there’re still ten hours of difference between the events due to time zones, content oversaturation has never helped anyone (there’s also WCG at the same time as IEM Singapore but, to put it gently, nobody gives a damn about the former anymore).
Thankfully, a lot of big names have made it to Singapore again so the tournament is not completely void of storylines. Some of them begin in less than twelve hours from now with the Stage 1 double elimination brackets.
Several years ago, this bracket would have attracted insurmountable hype. Before the decline of their careers, NesTea and Squirtle stood atop their respective races and their tournament appearances were enough to ignite the crowd. The perfect Zerg mirror player and a Protoss so difficult to crack that he almost made the comeback of 2012 against Mvp.
Today, only the legacy of their names remains and, together with the Code A regular Avenge, NesTea and Squirtle make for one very unconvincing Korean trio. While the Zerg king is still a Code S competitor, his form is lackluster. Despite being paired against the Singaporean underdog Blysk and likely being the best out of the aforementioned three, the chances of making top sixteen for NesTea are small.
This leaves San of Yoe Flash Wolves as the top Korean contender in Bracket A. After the launch of Heart of the Swarm, San has been doing decently well and holds a silver medal from ASUS ROG Summer, gold from ESET Masters Season 1 and one all-kill against Axiom in ATC. Still, he’s the last player you will call consistent and although on paper he looks dashing (at least open bracket-wise), in reality an early elimination tomorrow will not be among the most surprising of events.
Last in this part of the competition is the foreign trio of TargA, Feast and PiG. The former two will face each other in the first round, meaning one will have to go through the entire lower bracket if he wants to make it out (an unlikely scenario). Of the two, TargA is the better WR2 candidate as although he hadn’t had an impressive run since WCS Europe Season 3, he at least didn’t abandon StarCraft 2 for two whole months.
Then there’s PiG, the Australian who’s likely to take a spectator seed before tomorrow is over despite his great run through the SEA Championship series. A first round face-off against Squirtle might not be the scariest thing in the world considering the Korean’s current form but that’s still the goddamn Squirtle.
Without a doubt, Bracket B is the more exciting of the two. There’s great skill to be found in its competitors but also renown, good track record and past legacy.
Curious comes out as the logical favorite of the eight. The StarTale Zerg, while quite inconsistent throughout his career (his dropping out of WCS Korea this last season as the most recent evidence of that), remains a player that should have no trouble winning a handful of matches in the early stages of a tournament. Same goes for his eSF brother Dream who knows the IEM grounds well, having won the runner-up money of IEM Katowice in 2012.
There are two more “Korean Koreans” with potential to dominate the bracket that have made their way to Singapore. The first is EG’s Oz, runner-up of the IEM Shanghai event of this year (a tournament he won by also starting in the double elimination bracket) and a top four finisher from the last WCS America. Next to Curious, Oz is the second favorite to make it out of the pool and having a round one game against Singaporean no-name Revenant will likely give him a flying start.
The other player is none other than Effort, the Zerg ace of KeSPA’s CJ Entus. Once an OSL and BlizzCon champion back in the BroodWar days, Effort has not been in his best shape in StarCraft 2 but was the main engine behind CJ’s success during the hybrid Proleague and among the fifteen best players of the last edition of the league. Mostly a weapon of the team leagues, Effort has not really seen individual success, however, and with Bracket B so stacked he’ll more likely than not pass on the group stage promotion.
With neither of Has and Revenant having results recognizable by the wide audience and with SeleCT heavily struggling with StarCraft 2 since his return from Dota 2, the foreigners are left with a single hope in this bracket in the face of SaSe. Sadly for his fans, though, the Swede that was once among the most fearsome Europeans has blended into the dark, untelevized corners of the scene. His move to Taiwan parted him from his fanbase and the few tournaments he played this year had unsatisfactory endings. Being paired with a lesser name in the first round is some consolation but there’s not enough strength in the Swede to go past the top Korean dogs.
