We’ve got good news, and bad news. The good news is Australia and New Zealand have each sent one competitor to Poland to compete in this international competition, which is rather a big deal. The bad news?
The bad news is you’ll have to wake up at around 5am to watch them play. I knew all those early hours watching FC Barcelona would pay off.
Ethan “iaguz” Zugai of Australia and Mackenzie “Petraeus” Smith of New Zealand have already advanced beyond the round of 32, both placing second in their groups, and are now one stage away from the quarter-finals. It’s been a while since I tuned into professional Starcraft, but this might be the best performance our region has put up since Moonglade was strutting his Zergy business through Code A.
Well done, you little ANZACs.
It doesn’t take a vigilant spectator’s eye to recognise one of the names grouped with iaguz in the round of 16, however. Jaedong is in that group, and those will be some very interesting matches to watch. Petraeus’ group, on the other hand, promises lots of hot roach-on-roach action with three quarters of the group being of the Zerg persuasion.
Petraeus was the only player to take a game off prolific Korean player Polt, whom some will recognise from the GSL, which is encouraging. iaguz’s matches looked a little closer, as he narrowly scraped through after a tough series with Has.
You can watch Petraeus’ matches on Wednesday the 9th at about 5am, and iaguz’s matches on Thursday the 10th at the same time. Head to the Starcraft Twitch channel to stream them.
On the 14th of September, Blizzard will be streaming the conclusion of the tournament, as well as a reveal of Legacy of the Void. That’ll be at 3am, because that’s the price we pay for our sandy beaches quality local beers.
Comments
3 responses to “Two ANZ Players Are In The Starcraft 2 World Championship Series’ Final 16”
Was actually thinking the bad news was they had to play each other.
The timezone isn’t really the bad news, because the good thing about twitch is that they keep vods of previous broadcasts that you can watch for free. I almost never watch this stuff live but I always watch the vods.
The bad news, as alluded somewhat in the article, is that both of these guys are in really tough groups – iaguz more so than Petraeus as not only does he have Jaedong in there but also ForGG who is a Korean TvT monster and Lilbow who is a French protoss that actually made it all the way to the grand final in season 2.
Still, good luck to both of them!
Competitive Gaming, building ANZAC pride since… Quite recently.
Best of luck to the both of them.