Monday, July 8, 2013

Competitive Roundup (Part 5)

Introduction

There are so many tournaments going on at the same time that it can get overwhelming trying to keep up with them. In this series of blog posts, I will share matches which I have found notable and worth watching in the past week or two.

This week I only have one match to share: I watched a lot of matches, most of them weren't good / interesting enough to post here.

Tongfu vs Na'Vi

  vs  

Tournament:  Alienware Cup (Upper Bracket Round 2)
Teams: Tongfu versus Na'vi
Stream: Beyond The Summit

I have not yet featured Tongfu in this series - they are a strong team, placing 7th in 2012 Internationals, and recently winning the Dota2 Super League.

This game between Tongfu and Na'vi is well worth watching despite it going on for a full hour - plenty of turnarounds and comebacks, with Tongfu at one point holding an over 10k gold advantage over Na'vi. Two Aegis steals, supports turning into carries, plenty of excitement to go around. There was one fight which forced 7 instant buybacks and just kept going, heroes dying and streaming back into the fight.



Nexon Starter League

Part of the reason I haven't seen many games worth watching is that I have been watching the Korean stream of the Nexon Starter League which opened on the weekend - it's run by GOMTV, a professional broadcaster who has a lot of experience running the Starcraft 2 scene in Korea. Some matches are uploaded here but you really had to watch it live with the English comment stream trying to translate the Korean casters in real time. Totally impressed by the random CGI DOTA2 opening they made up for it. None of the games are particularly good (the Korean teams in general just starting to pick up DOTA2 so their skill level isn't world class yet, and all the casting is in Korean so good luck understanding anything) but the production value is great, the studio is awesome, the teams have uniforms, the casters wear ties and inject so much energy into the game even though you have no idea what they're saying. Even Nada showed up to watch! And goodness, the customized advertisements that ran in between games were so funny. The team names are hilarious (Bird Gang, Tiger Power, Best Magic Skill) and in particular one player is called Jesus Stick. It's probably just the Korean culture we don't understand, good memories of the first GOMTV GSL match finals between Fruit Seller and Hope Torture, where his mom actually featured on stage after the match during the prize giving ceremony telling everyone how her son was such a good boy.