Won Code S. Won Blizzcon. It’s been a long time coming. He almost beat Byun in the Blizzcon finals back when 3 rax reaper was a thing and he got a second chance here.
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Well, Dark won. I’ll admit that I’m wrong. He is the best player in the world now.
dont forget super tournament 2, where he slaughtered maru, stats, soo, and TY
f’n BEAST
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If said teenager didn’t fatigue so fast, he would have mopped the floor with Dark. He was just exhausted. Just compare game 5 Reynor vs. Serral to game 4 Reynor vs. Dark. Dark was playing much worse than Serral, but Reynor didn’t even look in the same league as what he was playing an hour earlier.
If Reynor had faced Dark in the semis, Dark would have died horribly and Serral would have won. Simple as that.
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I think you’re underestimating Dark, and the same claim you made about Reynor being fatigued can also apply to Dark being tired, hence him playing much worse than Serral in game 4.
He was fatigued because he was being outplayed at every waking second and struggled to keep up.
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Fair. But Reynor has shown signs of fatigue in later tournament rounds in the past, and the fact that he is 17 is a huge disadvantage in this regard. You just run out of steam a lot faster before the age of 20.
Oh well, next year. Reynor’s win is coming sooner or later. It’s not if, it’s when.
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Uh, no? He beat Serral for a reason. But the last game was also a good example. I have seen diamond players with better ling/bane war micro than that. He couldn’t keep going and he collapsed before the finish line. But I think Reynor without the lack of stamina is a better player than Dark any day of the week.
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No way.
Dark’s mechanics and game knowledge are both literally off the charts. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Dark wasnt playing worse than serral at all imo. I dont know much about ZvZ but serral’s game 5 vs reynor was borderline bad. Everyone knows that a critical mass of ranged zerg units, not to mention a ball of lurkers, mows down ultras.
Dark’s path to the finals was nowhere near easy.
Literally Maru and Classic, pretty much the pinnacle of both races at the moment. Dark’s insane knowledge of the game allowed him to read Maru like a book and with his mechanics was able to dumpster him (btw he also trashed him in ST2 lol), then fend off a Classic who was literally throwing the sink at him in the swan song of his career. Ive never seen anything like it.
Dark then completely dismantled the vaunted “superior european zvz” prodigy in reynor. Dark was literally toying with reynor. Literally went drone rush and still crushed him in the series.
Then you look at Dark winning the the first GSL code S for his race in LotV, and the path he took to get t here. Then butchering the best koreans on the planet in ST2
There is no doubt that Dark is the best player in the world. This peak he ahd in 2019 is ridiculous
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reynor gets stomped by korean protoss and terran players. cannot crack code s ro.32
Dark eviscerates the best of the best korean protoss and terran players
let’s be real. Reynor overperforms against serral and that’s about it.
that said reynor is only 17 and he is a prodigy. he’s nowhere near as good as dark at the moment though
Well, he definately had better and faster hitting multiprong than Dark, and did a better job of absorbing the map than Dark, and did more with his mutas than Dark.
The real difference was that while vs. Serral, Reynor just always had a few roaches in position for everything and had amazing defence with a switch into roach/lurker/hydra/infestor/viper which he controlled brilliantly.
Meanwhile vs. Dark, he failed to stop nydus from popping (only takes 3 roaches) let lings and banes slip in through the cracks all over the place, heck even before the mutas showed up he just lost 4 roaches for free because he wasn’t even looking at them, and replaced the lurkers and infestors with simple corruptors.
His first performance was fast, clean, sharp, and complex. His battle against Dark looked sluggish, sloppy, and generally like he was just trying to scrape by.
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He plays zerg; you’re argument is a nonstarter.
I will never doubt serral’s insane mechanics. I don’t think that’s the crux of the outcomes here though.
I think the real difference is that Dark’s knowledge of the game is just on a completely different level.
He knew the proper response, the chink in the armor, to EVERYTHING and was relentless in exploiting it, unlike serral. He couldnt afford lurker infestor because Dark was so much better at damaging reynor than seral was.
Serral himself once said that he admires dark’s dynamic gameplay, and now i know why.
To me it looked like serral was too clean and generic vs reynor. Dark knows how to play reynor’s wild and gritty ZvZs and embraces it. Dark is the best zerg against unconventional or aggressive play. It was shown against classic too. And Dark has been stomping Maru, the most aggressive elite terran, recently as well
Reynor actually profiles Serral and comes up with strategies that will be good vs him while the top koreans don’t. Stats for example has done virtually the same exact thing every time he has faced vs serral. That’s probably because that’s the only style that he, stats, knows how to do.
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That’s my point though: it felt less like Dark was doing better at hitting the economy and more like Reynor was failing to defend his economy. In the game against Serral, he had units in 5-6 places at once and well placed static D. In the game against Dark he had units in 2-3 places and haphazard static D.
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I hear you, I just dont think it’s the case lol.
I’m not going to pretend to be a ZvZ expert…that is the matchup i know the least about. But to me it looked like Dark was just pulling Reynor apart like he pulled everyone else apart. He seemed to always have the perfect response to reynor’s actions just like he did to maru and classic. In the disco blood bath map, there were points where most of dark’s banes were connecting with roaches but Dark still somehow found a way to connect a couple of banes and kill masses of drones while the observer (probably a GM himself) could not even keep up. If that is not perfect exploitation idk what is.
Reynor’s performance against serral could be attributed to a lot of things, including the fact that reynor is just very familiar with serral and overperforms against him.
I couldnt tell that there was any gross mechanical underperformance on reynor’s end though, compared to his games with serral. All I saw was Dark perfectly responding to everything including the play of Maru and Classic, who are both mechanical juggernauts themselves. Dark was just beasting the whole way through.
You are a joke, silver
Good player, but nowhere near Serral’s level. Maybe top 20 all time though.
O wow Serral loses sometimes in ZvZ to a maestro 17 yr old with 400-500 apm how pathetic yea…meanwhile Dark can just make roaches + some other stuff all day and beat Toss left and right…just keep pressure on…add some drones here and there…infinite roaches even just on like 50 drones, but a few more, can afford you double evo chambers and nydus’…while P has to make gates that take forever and a day, robo, twilight forge, yadda yadda, not lose any workers or any expensive units, kill 20 some drones and then you have a chance…zergs dont even need tier 2 tech really just a nydus.
Can say good scouting and everything by Dark I guess but eh, except for ZvZ I think its always predictable and boring the zerg response to stuff is…zzzzzzzz boring…
Dark abused nydus worms so hard in the tournament, he is a great player no doubt but I don’t think he is going to do well if and when zerg gets nerfed. In my mind Serral is still the better Zerg player, he was doing well way before Zerg became so OP.
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