EVER OSL 2008

Group Selection Ceremony

The ODT-like Round of 32 has ended and it's time for the groups to be announced. There are 4 seeds and 12 other players that qualified from the round of 32.

The system work's like this, unlike in MSL, the seeds don't choose all of the players in their groups, it's a simple understandable system like this 'seed -> seed chooses player2 -> player2 chooses player 3 -> player 3 chooses player4.' Every decision or 'pick' made is final, there is no more steal draft to be done.

With the hot issue of Jaedong’s failure in the first round, we come up here today for the next round with some new faces from 12 Korean pro teams from the StarCraft scene. From the last Bacchus OSL Season 2 2008, we’ve had 4 seeds ( Flash, Stork, Bisu[Shield] and Luxury) so that means only 12 more players can move on to this severe round; here they are:

EVER OSL Round of 16

GGPlay (CJ Entus)

BackHo (Lecaf OZ)

Nada (Wemade FOX)

Rumble (SKT T1)

Much (CJ Entus)

July (STX Soul)

Mind (Wemade FOX)

Jangbi (Samsung KHAN)

Sea[Shield] (MBCGame Hero)

Rock (Wemade FOX)

BeSt (SKT T1)

Yellow[ArnC] (OGN Sparkyz)

With the two key components of a succesful tournament - eager youngsters and old favorites - the present EVER OSL (since we basically talked about the ODT so far) is definitely going to be full of exciting games. Let's take a look at the OSL groups before we continue:

Group A By.Flash Rock Sea[Shield] GGPlay	Group B BeSt[HyO] Nada Stork Jangbi
Group C JulyZerg Yellow[ArnC] Luxury Rumble	Group D Bisu[Shield] InteR.Mind BackHo Much

These are probably - if not - the most interesting StarLeague groups so far: the least amount of Terran players and the most Protoss representatives, a Zerg-only group, two identical racial groups (B and D).

Group A has Flash as the heavy favorite, but ever since GGplay's rebirth into the CJ Entus Swarm, his skill has started to show again; Rock is a one-match-up wonder (PvT) and he has 2 Terran players, while Sea doesn't really have any weak match-ups and his opponents represent all the 3 races.

Group B has 3 great Protoss player and a Protoss exterminator - what more can we say? All the TvP matches will basically be the group highlights: NaDa vs Best, NaDa vs JangBi, NaDa vs Stork... they all look insanely delicious. As for the Protoss mirror matches, we can only say they will certainly be above average, since all these players are simply on fire.

Group C is something just priceless. The recent Korean maps made it extremely difficult for us to see Zerg players getting to or winning the finals of some tournaments. However, we now have not less than 4 (!!!) Zerg players. Incredible as it may sound, it's true, and it also features 3 of the best ZvZ players right now: July, the God of War, and the twins Yellow[ArnC] and Luxury. Rumble is still too young to be called a good Zerg, but since this match-up is just so intense, anything can happen. Would be interesting to see if July's move to STX improved his style, especially if we consider the fact that SouL is a great Zerg hatchery.

Group D is actually a Group B copy in terms of match-ups, but not nearly as exciting. Sure, we have Bisu's chance to revenge his MSL title since he chose Mind as his opponent, but that's basically it. BackHo is nothing special, except for his recent win against JaeDonG, and grandpa Much is simpy average, at least compared to Bisu or Mind. That doesn't necessarily mean we will have boring, one-sided games, but the names almost point to that.