StarCraft II Winter Arena Conclusion

The final day at the MLG Winter Arena was pretty amazing. They were down to the final six players at the start of the day and there were some pretty fantastic games in the last few matches. The winner's bracket finals came down to Huk against MarineKing so I was pretty happy. Huk had played very well the last two days but seemed to have lost something today as he quickly got steamrollered by MarineKing. This knocked Huk down to the loser's bracket finals where he played against DongRaeGu who the commentators were saying is probably the best player in the world right now. (He made the GSL finals right before flying to New York for this event.) He also quickly steamrollered Huk which set up the final of MKP vs DRG. MarineKing won the first game and was in a good position to win the tournament if he could win either of the next two games. He didn't which meant they'd end up playing a best of 7 with DongRaeGu already up 2-1. MarineKing then pulled off three wins in a row including a great bunker rush in game 5 followed by an incredibly timed late game push in game 6. Definitely a fantastic match and I'm particularly happy about the outcome. Now that I've spoiled the ending for you you should consider watching the VODs when they become available to the public in a week or so.

The MLG guys were saying the Winter Arena was a huge success and they're planning on having two more during the Spring season. On the down side the finals were practically unwatchable at one point. The main stream actually crashed during the third game of the finals so we (Tmiv came over to watch the last couple matches) ended up missing the critical part of the game which was a little annoying. They ended up fixing it such that we were able to watch on 480P most of the time after that and a little bit on 720P but I still wish they could have managed to set it up such that we could have watched on 1080P the whole time. On the plus side they seemed to have fixed their log in issues as I only had to log in once all day and it worked on all the streams. (Well, I had to log in a second time after I refreshed my browser during the crash but that's not too unexpected.)

I actually blew out my download limit with all the streaming of games I've done this month (16G alone between Friday and Saturday) so if I'm going to tune in again in the future I should probably look into getting a better internet setup...