herO doubles on GSL week

Weekly Cup Competitions
Week of June 9 – June 15

by Wax

The week of June 9-15 saw herO stay active and successful in online cups despite his busy GSL schedule—perhaps a sign that he wasn’t feeling so much pressure with his EWC ticket already in hand. The Code S Season 1 champion scored a cup double, while Astrea made a strong run in PiGosaur Cup to also come out as one of the week’s winners.

The week featured offline competition as well, with the long-running grassroots competition Cheeseadelphia holding its 13th tournament. American Terran Future held off the visiting Gerald in the finals, proving that NA’s ‘clowns’ remain quite dangerous.

*Partial brackets may be shown.

June 9: WardiTV Mondays #39

The week began with another routine win for herO in WardiTV Mondays, with the cup monster taking down Lambo (2-0), MaxPax (2-1), and MaNa (3-1) in the final three rounds (VOD).

The more interesting story of the cup was MaNa’s run to the finals, which saw him beat a deadly Terran trio of Ryung, Cure, and ByuN. The Polish Protoss looked solid against both all-in and macro styles, and for anyone wondering how he pulled it off, he helpfully gave his first-person POV review of the entire run on his YouTube channel (YouTube). Unfortunately for MaNa, his run ended on a failed cannon rush against herO, preventing him from creating the most clickbaity title + thumbnail combo possible.

*****

June 10: PiGosaur Cup #35

The PiGosaur Cup has often been the stage for underdog runs, and Astrea ended up being the star in cup #35 as he went through both MaxPax and Cure to take the weekly title. The four game finals saw Code S Season 1 runner-up Cure show Astrea the ‘respect’ of trying to proxy-Marauder rush him twice in a row, but the NA-harden Astrea survived such cheesy efforts (VOD).

*****

June 14: Korean StarCraft League #76

herO and Classic showed that they didn’t have to take the GSL RO4 quite as seriously as GuMiho and Rogue, dropping in for a quick cup session a day before the season finale. The KSL finals clash between Korea’s top Protosses went herO’s way, although it’s hard to say if they were going all out or just trying to hide their strategies (VOD). Let’s just say we saw a lot more fast expansions than we saw in the GSL and leave it at that.

*****

June 14: Cheeseadelphia #13

The week of community competition wrapped up with Cheeseadelphia #13, which continued the long-running series of grassroots LAN events in North America. Polish Protoss Gerald crashed the tournament and looked to be the favorite on paper, but the American Terran Future managed to protect home turf with a close 4-3 victory in the finals (VOD).