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Tech

Rare Draw in 'StarCraft II' Championships Match Stuns Viewers

The luck of the draw? Only for one player, it seems.
Image: Bin Zhang.

This weekend marks the WCS StarCraft II Spring Championship at DreamHack in Tours, France, and a shocking draw in a major match earlier today illustrates some of the drama that can arise in eSports tournaments for real-time strategy games. Playing the Blizzard strategy game StarCraft II, Choi "Polt" Seong Hun of South Korea ended up in a surprise draw with Alexey "Strange" Solyakov of Russia, forcing them into a rematch.

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Polt, a four-time WCS (World Championship Series) world champion, won that eventual match. But in the video below, the shock from the DreamhackTV commentators in the match before is obvious as the tied score comes seemingly out of nowhere. The culprit here, appears to have been StarCraft II's rarely seen stalemate conditions, which activate on a timer when a player can no longer perform a basic function like destroy an enemy building or generate income. In the case of this match, as noted by Reddit user Aunvilgod, neither player was mining and no building had been destroyed within a certain timeframe. It's a shame, as Strange seemed but seconds away from an authentic victory.

But while the rest of the viewers were shocked by the sudden outcome, it was apparently expected by the players themselves. On their own screens, they could see the rarely seen stalemate countdown timer whereas people watching the footage with its customized user interface could not. And with that knowledge, some commentators assert that Strange wasn't as assertive as he should have been in those final seconds.

The match was especially significant on account of the players involved. Strange is a relatively unknown player, while Polt is one of the closest things the StarCraft II has to a professional celebrity. Their approaches to the strategy were markedly different. Strange was playing the Protoss race, a group of alien beings in the game's lore who think of themselves as the "firstborn" of the universe. Polt, on the other hand, tends to play the relatively mundane "Terrans," who basically amount to the human race 500 years into the future. Some players, on the Starcraft II forums see Strange's dogged resilience against the famous Polt as a sign of a balance problem.

"So in order to beat a nobody like Strange (Protoss) as Terran, you need to play as good like the current world champion and #1 ranked foreign player," one commenter said.

But strangely enough, Strange did make it to the Spring Championship. Perhaps the man simply knows what he's doing.