A truly phenomenal set of games from this weekends MLG at Anaheim, there was drama, fantastic games and as always an immense audience to really add some atmosphere even for us people watching on the livestream.
Most notable players of tournament:
Polt
- A fantastic finish for a player who hasn’t appeared had a noteable finish for quite some time. What’s even more impressive is that during the entire final bracket he only dropped three games, one to Naniwa and the final 2 to Hyun in the finals.
Naniwa
- This tournament Naniwa has performed fantastically, during the early stages of the bracket he truly felt unbeatable which was rather interesting because they said that he didn’t expect to win any of these matches.
Hyun
- There is one reason that Hyun gets a player of note, and that’s because of the 4-1 victory he pulled off over Her0. Any 4-1 victory is impressive, but to take so many games from such a good player is phenomenal. Overall a very sound performance throughout the entire tournament.
The Rise and Fall of Naniwa
This MLG was truly a fantastic event to behold, with so many tense and exciting games. The entire final bracket was entertaining to it’s core. Unfortunately there was no upset by Naniwa, despite that he made quite the impression being the only foreigner to make it into the final bracket. He started the very strong the anticipation for him to create an upset and taking the tournament was growing. After falling to the losers bracket by Polt he had an incredible start taking out two strong opponents Jaedong and Dear with ease scoring himself a 2-0 victory twice. Now he was out of the losers bracket and had to fight for his survival in the tournament by facing none other than the man who sent him down in the first place; Polt. Polt was already up 2-0 and he had the mammoth task of winning 4 games versus his opponents 2. All of the games were hard fought and interesting but Polt ended up taking the series with a strong 4-1 and moving onto the finals versus Hyun.
The Finals
With the up and coming Hyun versus the old school powerhouse Polt the stakes were high; Polt to prove that he could still be dominate and Hyun to take his first major title. The games were incredible, the first game becoming a long macro game which was to the wire. With Hyun poised to win the first game with his massive army of Ultralisks, Queens and Infestors hitting a timing before Polt could switch to air units he marched into the natural and main of the opponents, however with a cruel twist of fate Polt sent a few incredible seeker missiles to Hyun Infestor force wiping them out. Hyun now with no way to combat the growing army of Battlecruisers was having his forces slowly and effectively cleaned up. Polt now with his brutal army which could annihilate both land and air hit Hyun with a volley of yamato cannons wiping out his army followed by a swift surrender.
The following games saw standard timing attacks with each player taking a game.
In the fourth game Polt had a strong early to mid game filled with some nice drops and a snipe on Hyuns third. But this game was not to be, Polt thinking he had the stronger army assertively left his base, and truly, he may have had the stronger army if he had not thrown away all advantages getting caught out heavily by Hyun in one of the biggest misplays of the tournament allowing his siege tank to be caught without entering siege mode. This allowed Hyuns Roach and slow Baneling army to destroy all of the siege tanks meaning that it was a pure bio force versus Hyuns army. Even versus slow Banelings Hyun was able to easily overpower Polt resulting in the match being tied up 2-2.
The final match beckoned, with the audience and casters anticipating an epic final match to decide the tournament victor. But it was a short lived albeit interesting game, Polt effectively won the game when he found a hole in Hyuns wall and killed a massive amount of workers with Hellions and Reapers, after which he managed to slowly throttle Hyun until he performed a final push crushing his opponent.
All in all a memorable and highly enjoyable MLG Anaheim.
Remember you can view all of the VODs on MLG’s YouTube channel.
Top 4 Matches of the final bracket:
- Â Naniwa vs Polt
- Naniwa vs Jaedong
- Hyun vs Hero
- Hyun vs Polt
