IEM S5 World Championship Finals Preview - Bcrbo Preview

World Finals time! We dream, we anticipate, we conjure up, we guess and we calculate. We keep ourselves busy with that which is about to happen. The ESL's majestic and intensive Intel Extreme Masters World Finals are going to keep Quake Live fans worldwide enticed and curious for the coming week.

It all starts with the bets, avid followers thinking they know who will win and have no problem sharing their opinion with others, often endorsing their theories with scientific ideas and principles, pulling out statistics. Yet, most of the times, it is just a gut feeling or a simple fan adoration that makes you choose the one over the other. Sure, sometimes there is statistical proof or there are strong odds in favour of the one or the other. However, the biggest truth of each tournament is that the Group Stages are usually seen as the most boring part, yet they frequently end up causing weird and interesting brackets because of early upsets or unexpected wins/losses.

Cooller watching at his opposition in Kiev, Ukraine

American Influence?

It has been a while since we have seen three Americans make the journey to Europe and Germany and all three players are legendary in their own right. A combination of old and new that sees SK-Gaming's man of Quake Live return from a longer break over the winter to once again leave his mark on the scene and return to his dominant winning ways of before. Shane "rapha" Hendrixson has had a rough second half of 2010 and saw his contemporaries move up the ladder and break his eerie spell over the game somewhat, losing titles at QuakeCon, Global Challenge Cologne and DreamHack Winter 2010.

The biggest spotlight will probably be on Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, who is placed in the arguably easier group A (although not by that much) and has a lot to prove to not only himself but all critics who were shocked by his sudden outburst in Jönköping, Sweden a couple of months ago. He proved everyone wrong by coming out strong and reaching the Grand Final of the Kaspersky event, taking out the likes of noctis, rapha, Cooller and k1llsen along the way. Will the tall American be able to replicate these results and come out fighting? Although all groups are difficult, he should be able to at least finish in the TOP 3 of his, but to do so, he will have to look at his match against k1llsen the most, as it is likely both players will be battling it out the last spot for the Playoffs.

Another rapha-czm match in the making. Different outcome, this time?

The other and final American to appear in Hannover is none other than Paul "czm" Nelson, a truly legendary name and a hero amongst Quake 3 fanatics for his solid and impressive aim-heavy play that saw him win QuakeCon 2004 and take silver at two consecutive ESWC events. Especially Anton "Cooller" Singov will be looking forward to a rematch between them and even though the odds are heavily in favour of the Russian and the match will probably not be as close and exciting as that ESWC 2005 Grand Final in Paris, it will be one of the small highlights of Group B in a match-up of old school mania. The enigmatic mathematician has been practising somewhat as of late and he was seen doing really well without any practise, therefore it will be interesting to note how an in shape Paul Nelson will fare against the strong names in his group. Surely he will have an extremely hard time, not only having to face rapha, Cooller and Cypher but also not being able to count Spart1e nor dandaking completely out either. His LAN experience and cool under pressure as well as his impressive thinking will need to weigh heavier than his sometimes obvious complacency in high-stakes games and will need to have rekindled the love for going all-in in the moments that matter most and might seem unreachable.

Everyone vs Everyone

Even though Cooller and Cypher were known or seen as being friends during Quake IV times, it seems their amicability has turned somewhat sour as of late and the very similarly-styled players seem to have lost their way. All pre-tournament interviews tend to heat up the differences between these players and the young Belarusian's confidence in going up against his mentor has aided in him always coming on top. Anton "Cooller" Singov himself has pointed out to the fact that styles simply clash at the very highest level and it all boils down to who faces who. There have been patterns in 2010 and it seems that out of the TOP 4, there is a way of telling who will beat who, just by gauging the styles and the statistical history that preceded them. Alexei "Cypher" Yanushevsky will beat Cooller each and every time they meet, will lose to Maciej "Avekkk" Krzykowski and will swap wins and losses against Shane "rapha" Hendrixson. Anton "Cooller" Singov will win most times against Avekkk, will always lose against Cypher and a match against rapha can go either way. rapha on the other hand will always beat Avekkk, will beat Cypher more than not and go 50/50 against Cooller. Avekkk, finally, has the upper hand against his Serious-Gaming star companion Cypher, always loses to rapha and has a strong disadvantage against Cooller. So, based on the mutual results between them in 2010 and 2011, each player has one match-up that suits him very well, one match-up that can go either way and one that will see him lose most of the times. Therefore, if you want your favourite player to win, you can sort of guesstimate what his chances are as soon as the Playoff Bracket is made public by seeing who his opponents are.

Let us do a small game called "presumption": If you want Cooller to win, he will end up second in his group (as statistics say he will always lose against Cypher) and will have to hope that Avekkk won his group and k1llsen finished third in his group. At the same time, rapha will need to win his Semi-Final match against Cypher if he wants the best odds to win the Grand Final as well. Similarly, if you want Avekkk to win the whole tournament, he needs to beat Kévin "strenx" Baéza and hope that rapha beat Cypher, which is a 50/50 match-up for either, in Group B for him to first take out Cypher in his Semi-Final and then face strenx himself, who hopefully for Avekkk will have beaten either Cooller or rapha in the other Semi-Final, to have the best possible outcome.

Cypher calm as ever, playing on-stage...

But all these theoretical and hypothetical delusions will only confuse you, as there are so many variables and factors that play a small role in each final result. If one of the big players loses a match unexpectedly in the Group Stage, all the cards will be reshuffled and we might even see a repeat of the Kaspersky DreamHack Winter 2010 event where three of the four favourites lost out in the first Playoff round to end up with nothing. So guessing and proving will lead to hardly any avail, you can just hope really hard that whoever you vote for will end up doing well. Realistically speaking, Quake Live's top level has never been so close as this and there seems to be no one player to dominate all others like 2009 where rapha was king and master.

strenx Time?

One of the biggest hopefuls for this event will be none other than strenx, the charismatic and somewhat nonchalant Frenchman who has consistently and unremittingly kept on growing throughout 2010. The year before, he was mainly busy trying to shake the online label from his play, as he tended to struggle in big events and could not, more often than not, break into the Bracket stage. However, in 2010 he brained up his game and took some of the general criticism on his play to heart and started working on his game plan. The first thing that became apparent was the fact that he started using the lightning gun less or at least more appropriately, perfecting his rocket play and just generally speaking swap up his gun play to the more apt situations: using the best possible gun in each situation and becoming more efficient in his killing. This also took care of the easy anti-stratting of blocking strenx access to the lightning gun. In the last months of 2010 and beginning of 2011, he has been more close to the top players than ever before and even beat some of the old school names in the game.

The Cooller-strenx controversy in Kiev. Let's hope for no repeats this time...

In 2010, strenx definitely deserved the title of most improved player in the circuit, had there been awards, and in 2011 he is poised to take a first title. Whether he will be ready for that responsibility and that pressure in Hannover already, is yet to be determined. However, his Group A draw will possibly suit him better than any other, he has beaten Avekkk, DaHanG, k1llsen and fazz in big tournaments before and his more developed game plan should not give him too many problems against Vo0 either. He has even beaten Cooller and rapha at the DreamHack Winter 2010 Group Stage and Playoffs respectively and the thriller of a Best-of-Five against Cooller at the IEM Season 5 European Championship Finals could basically have gone either way. His biggest weakness is still Cypher, who he is yet to beat in a big official tournament whilst gunning for the Grand Final.

But the biggest plus speaking in favour of the Frenchman is the fact that he is still growing, he is still improving and unifying his undeniably strong aim with a more strategized approach to the game. If he can keep his calm and at the minimum, reach the same levels as his last three tournaments, he will be a very tough opponent to play and beat for all of the traditional Four.

Quake, Quake, Quake

Although it is quite unfortunate, in my view, that the event is spread out so thin, that we are given a lot of Quake for the first two days and then just three days of two matches each. It might lose its appeal to the audience and that special feeling of results and upsets rapidly following each other. On the other hand, I think they had no choice but to do it this way.

We are given quite a few matches of Quake Live and we should be heading into some very exciting days the coming week and you can catch everything either via the normal live streams or the High Definition one that both Level Up TV and ESL TV are offering. Happy Quaking ahead and may the best player win.

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All images courtesy of Fragster.de and ESReality.com