Today, the WCS season finals begin for Europe and America. I compiled a few stats that I posted to Team Liquid and are reproduced below.

MC (P) v StarDust (P)
1. StarDust beat MC 2-0 at IEM Cologne. The games lasted 6:56 and 8:38 with MC attacking early in both games (ref)

2. MC is 3-9 (25%) in PvPs lasting 20-25 minutes, but 6-1 (86%) in PvP >25 minutes (ref)

3. MC is diligent in using his Phoenixes. Although he makes slightly fewer (.54 v .65) Phoenixes per game than his opponents, he uses Graviton Beam more often (2.81 v. 1.61) (ref 1) (ref 2)

VortiX (Z) v. jjakji (T)
1. VortiX opened Hatch First in 18/20 (90%) of ZvTs. It’s usually a 15 Hatch followed by a 16 Extractor or Pool. (ref)

2. VortiX is 4-0 in games 8-12 minutes long, all of which were Roach Baneling all-ins. However, he’s only 4-4 in games going Roach Baneling overall (ref)

Alicia (P) v. Bomber (T)
1. Alicia is 19-6 (76%) in games longer than 16 minutes, while only 69% overall. (ref)

2. Don’t play Bomber straight up in TvP. He’s 2-7 in games <16 minutes and 11-4 in games >16 minutes. Blink Stalkers and Dark Templar are good bets (ref 1) (ref 2)

TaeJa (T) v. HyuN (Z)
1. At ASUS ROG Summer 2013, TaeJa beat HyuN 3-2 (ref)

2. HyuN can be deadly in the early game. He’s 9-0 before 12 minutes and 13-2 before 16 minutes (ref)

Methodology
I used the data from Spawning Tool to generate all of these statistics. Notably, replays for WCS 2013 season 3 and the current WCS season have not been released, so those are not included in the current sample. Some players have more data from other recent tournaments, whereas others may be based on older data with different play styles.

If you get chance, please poke around with the data on Spawning Tool and share any other interesting trends you find!

A week and a half ago, I slapped together some graphs about the importance of supply differences and posted it to reddit. There were a ton of very thoughtful comments from the community, some of which I riffed on to create more graphs and investigate more of the data. This post is a summary of the rest of what I found, with all data available in this spreadsheet.

The first graph shows the global win rates and win rates in mirror matchups given certain supplies. The most direct way to use the data is to observe a game and point back to the graph at any time to figure out how much of an edge someone has. Continue reading →

Over the past week and a half, I have been going through games from the BlizzCon round of 16 players and tweeting out interesting things that I have found by going through the Spawning Tool research page. I just posted a summary of that to TL. That’s reproduced below for your convenience.

BlizzCon is approaching, and there are some pretty amazing match-ups in the round of 16. In anticipation of that, I went through each player’s history in the match-up to see there were any interesting statistics that came out of it. Here’s what I came up with (methodology at the bottom):

SoulKey (Z) v. NaNiwa (P)

• SoulKey does a little of everything in this matchup. Just check out the tags (ref)

Bomber (T) v. MMA (T)

• Expect Banshees. They both open Banshees in ~45% of TvT games (ref 1), (ref 2)
• MMA plays a very Marine-heavy bio in TvT. He made ~80% more Marines on his opponents and went bio in 10/13 games (ref)

HerO (P) v sOs (P)

• They before in the WCS season 1 finals. They games were really cheesy (ref)
• HerO likes early Stalkers in PvP, making ~50% more in the first 10 minutes than his opponent (ref)

Polt (T) v. aLive (T)

• They played in season 1. aLive won 2-1 (ref)
• By the unit counts, Polt’s TvT looks remarkably normal. One thing is that he doesn’t really play mech much (ref)
• aLive doesn’t 1 rax expand much in TvT. He does, however, really like to open 1/1/1 into some nifty tech (ref)

Dear (P) v. TaeJa (T)

• In TvP, TaeJa is 32-2 in games less 25 minutes and 2-5 in games longer than 25 minutes. I guess the strategy is to wear out his wrists (ref)
• TaeJa also scans on average 2 more times per game (MULEs 2 less times) than other WCS TvZ players. I think this is attributed to his eagle eye in sniping Observers (ref 1), (ref 2)

Jaedong (Z) v. Mvp (T)

• In ZvT, Jaedong is 11-4 in games less than 20 minutes and 4-17 in games longer than 20 minutes. I think there’s some bias in the quality of the opponents, but that’s still pretty striking (ref)
• In comparison, Mvp is 8-5 in TvZ longer than 20 minutes, and 62% of his games went that long. (ref)

Maru (T) v. MC (P)

• Maru could use anything. In 11 games, he went proxy 2 rax twice, 1/1/1 twice, 14 CC 3 times, and 1 rax expand in 4 games. This guy knows how to mix it up (ref)
• MC has a strange win rate in TvP: he’s 5-0 in games less than 12 minutes, 1-3 in games 12-16 minutes, and 5-3 in games longer than 16 minutes. Looking at the games, he wins fast with cheese in a lot of games, loses mid-length games after failed cheese (usually Oracles), and then does okay in long games (ref)

INnoVation (T) v. duckdeok (P)

• The only INnoVation TvP games I have are the season 1 finals against sOs. Here’s the link for fun (ref)
• duckdeok plays REALLY short TvPs. None of 8 games went longer than 20 minutes (ref)

Methodology

I used Spawning Tool for all of these stats. For each, player, I pulled up all of their games in the relevant matchup and, if feasible, looked at the builds (and some replays in ambiguous cases) to determine what builds they used. If you’re interested, I recommend you also play around with the system to see if you can find anything interesting in the data as well.

The replays are largely from major tournament over the past 6 months or so. The data may skewed for 2 major reasons. First, WCS season 3 replays have not been released and are not in the data. Second, WCS season 1 replays are pre-Hellbat nerd. Of course, the usual disclaimer is that players do change styles.

These stats originally appeared on twitter @spawningtool.

And the pitch: the site is only as good as the data, so if you have replays, please upload them! Also, if you’re interested in labeling replays or have ideas for features, PM me or tweet at me. And to stay updated, follow me on twitter @spawningtool. I’ll try to put more stats out as we find out what the match ups for the later rounds are