Image: Homestorycup.com
The 14th HomeStory Cup ended in the early hours of this morning with a close battle between two of the top Protoss players in the world, Afreeca Freecs Patience and Zest.
A long road faced the 8 players returning for the final day of competition with games starting at 3pm and not finishing until 1:30am.
Undeterred, battle was joined with the quarterfinals. Zest was able to narrowly beat aLive, who looked strong all weekend, 3-2, making the two time GSL champion the first to advance into the round of 4. This left Zest needing an opponent in the next stage and Rogue was happy to volunteer for the challenge, putting away sOs 3-1 and moving on to complete the first half of the semi-final bracket. Stats took on Solar in the third quarterfinal, managing to advance by a score of 3-1. Solar quadrupled his total maps lost for the tournament with this loss. Patience faced SortOf, the only remaining foreign player for the last spot in the semi-finals, and competition between the two was tough, but Patience was able to steal a win on the final map to take the series 3-1, and moved on to play against Stats.
Now having warmed up, our two eventual finalists looked a bit more comfortable in the booth during the next stage, showing much more dominant performances. In the semi-finals, Zest defeated Rogue 3-1, while Patience took out Zest’s ex-KT Rolster teammate Stats by the same score.
The final round of the tournament was quick and aggressive, with Zest taking a fast 2-0 lead. By the middle of the third map on New Gettysburg, things seemed to be on the edge of a cliff for Patience and he found himself well behind. With $6,000 separating victor and runner-up, Patience held on and out maneuvered Zest’s slow, heavy Tempest army to steal the map and reignite his tournament ambitions. From this moment on, a new Patience sat in the booth, now more confident. The following games were all very aggressive battles where Patience seemed prepared to take huge risks to get an advantage. With some solid disruptor play from both players, the series reached 3-3. However, Patience’s aggressive play, centered around some very risky forward blinking with this large Stalker-based army, paid off in the final map of the series. Patience won this close battle 4-3 taking home the $10,000 first place prize, meaning Zest still leaves with a considerable $4,000 for this showing here.
VODs for the entire event are available on SC2links.
Over the last 6 years, the HomeStory Cup has created its own place in the eSports scene due to its unique atmosphere. It presents a tournament, while still extremely competitive, that is focussed more on relaxing and enjoying Starcraft rather than going home with as much money as possible. Dennis “TaKe” Gehlen spoke briefly to close the stream and expressed his gratitude to MIFCom (German), NEED for SEAT, Twitch and Sennheisser for sponsoring the event.
