Congratulations to team Dignitas’ Naniwa for winning MLG Dallas! Naniwa came from Sweden to participate in the 2011 MLG Pro Circuit in Dallas, Texas, and managed to go undefeated until the grand finals against ROOT Gaming’s Kiwikaki. With an unbelievable run of 25 games won to 2 games lost, Naniwa managed to come out on top as the victor for this event. Naniwa battled his way through the entire open bracket, and then had to face some huge names such as his own teammate SeleCT.
The finals was a PvP between two top tier players. Because of the way the MLG brackets and finals are set up, Naniwa started the grand finals with a 2-0 lead over Kiwikaki. The series would be played as a best of 7. If you missed the action, here is a brief summary of the matches from the grand finals
Game 1: MLG Shattered Temple
To start off game 1, both Kiwikaki (spawned at the 3 o’clock position) and Naniwa (spawned at the 9 o’clock position) built a standard 4 gate opening. Naniwa then decided to build an early Twilight Council and began to research blink. Pushing aggressively, Naniwa lost a lot of his blink stalkers attempting to blink right into Kiwikaki’s base. This put him on a strict defence based game as Kiwikaki responded with a hard counter-attack. Extremely effective blinking kept Naniwa alive and in the game as he managed to hold off everything Kiwikaki could send at him. With a huge mass of stalkers in the middle of the map, Naniwa decided to push and blink into Kiwikaki’s idle army. He managed to get a perfect surround with his stalkers, and ultimately won himself the first game of the series. The score was 3-0 in favour of Naniwa.
Game 2: MLG Metalopolis
Kiwikaki spawned at the 9 o’clock position on the second map where as Naniwa spawned at the 6 o’clock position. As the last game, both players again opened with a standard 4 gate build. Trying to be sneaky, Naniwa warped in a proxy pylon into Kiwikaki’s base, but due to an excellent scouting job, Kiwikaki took out the pylon before any units could be warped in. As the game progressed, it was Kiwikaki who decided to research blink for his stalkers. Using the same strategy Naniwa had just used on him, Kiwikaki managed to blink a ton of stalkers into Naniwa’s base destroying all of Naniwa’s defence. Naniwa had suffered the first map loss of the event. The score was 3-1..
Game 3: MLG Shakura’s Plateau
At the beginning of game 3, Kiwikaki started off with his signature gas steal, and then built into a 4 gate. What Naniwa failed to notice was that the probe that had stolen his gas had also placed a proxy pylon dangerously close to his nexus. By warping in 4 zealots, Kiwikaki forced Naniwa’s probes off of the mineral line, disabling Naniwa from creating any units to defend his base. By warping in a couple of reinforcing stalkers, Naniwa is forced to surrender. The score was then 3-2.
Game 4: MLG ICCUP Testbug
This map was played completely different than the other maps. Both players used a different build than their standard 4 gates. Naniwa uses Kiwikaki’s strategy against him and steals one of his gases and then builds three gateways, and an early Robotics Facility. While Naniwa begins building Immortals, Kiwikaki decides to early expand and build a forge for the access to photon cannons. With 5 warp gates and the extra income, Kiwikaki had a sizeable amount of stalkers and decided to push forward with them. After building two Immortals, Naniwa then built two colossi. Conflict arose in the middle of the map where Naniwa managed to place a couple of amazing force fields that allowed him to take out all of the stalkers, even though he was outnumbered. Since all of the stalkers were destroyed, Naniwa could just waltz on in to the natural expansion of Kiwikaki where he surrendered and Naniwa took the victory 4-2.
A huge congratulations goes out to both Naniwa and Kiwikaki for achieving first and second place in MLG Dallas 2011!
This past Friday marked tenth edition of 
The next major tournament that happened this weekend was the FXOpen Invitational Series #2. CompLexity was proud to send both coL.CunCher and coL.stalife into the fray. Unfortunately stalife fell in the round of 32 to FXOSheth, but after taking out ESCGoOdy. CunCher on the other hand managed to fight his way to the round of 8, sniping some huge names including: oGsInCa and FXOMOonan. CrunCher finally fell to dignitas.SeleCT, who in turn got knocked out by oGsSuperNoVa; the player who ended up winning the entire tournament.
Lastly, this weekend also saw two days of the TSL3, which were full of some of the most epic upsets to be seen in SC2 yet. On day three of the round of 32, French player Adelscott managed to take out “the Game Genie Terran,” former GSL champion IMMvp, widely considered to be the best Terran in the GSL despite his Code A status, with a score of 2-0. Match two saw FXOqxc triumph over MVPGenius, Blizzcon Champion and GSL Code S player. Match three saw ESCGoOdy take out former GSL champion IMNesTea, widely considered to be one of the best Zerg players on the planet, with a score of 2-1. The last game of day three saw Dignitas.NaNiwa take out Team Liquid’s Ret with a score of 2-1. Obviously, most players expected these well established Korean players like MVP and NesTea to dominate the TSL3. Could these results be a sign of what’s to come in eSports?
coL.CrunCher
coL.stalife