Reviewing stats from Blizzcon yesterday

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually get to watch any of the WCS Grand Finals at Blizzcon yesterday. Thankfully, there are VODs (stream 1, stream 2) for me to leaf through, so I’m watching just enough of the games to evaluate my predictions. Let’s see how those turned out

SoulKey (Z) v. NaNiwa (P)

I predicted that SoulKey would play a lot of different strategies. He used a 9 Pool, Hatch first into Roach Hydra, a Pool double expand into defense, and then another 9 Pool. That’s quite varied.

Bomber (T) v. MMA (T) Continue reading

Stats for the BlizzCon round of 16 matchups

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