I have decided to switch to Undead because I think it’ll be a little easier than Elf to quickly improve with. Undead seems more straight forward and Elf has a bunch of different strategies.. or maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about; regardless.

During this transition, I’ll be changing a couple big things. First, I have set my Warcraft to a lower resolution. I wanted to make the in-game screen size smaller as well (I have a 19″ monitor) but my ATI control panel settings are not cooperating, so I don’t know if my mouse accuracy will improve at all =\

Second, I will be using less control groups and better utilize subgroup order modifier key. For example, instead of having

Group 1: DK + fiends
Group 2: DK
Group 3: fiends

and selecting group 3 if I want to only move my fiends, I will tab to fiends in group 1 and use subgroup order modifier key (ctrl, SGOMK is Blizzard’s term) to issue a command only to the fiends. The benefits of using less groups are obvious I think. 12 unit limit is a minor annoyance I hope to get used to. Removing units from groups should be easier now, adding them was never a big problems since I discovered shift-adding.

For those unfamiliar with subgroup order modifier key, I guess I’ll cover it briefly. First you need to enable it in Warcraft’s gameplay options. After it is enabled, you can use the ctrl key to issue commands only to the active subgroup. Examples:

Situation: You have a group of DK and fiends selected. DK is the default active subgroup.

To move DK using right click, hold ctrl and right click on the map.
To attack a target with fiends using right click, hit tab once to select the fiends subgroup, hold ctrl and right click on the target.
To move fiends using move-click, hit tab once to select the fiends subgroup, hit either the on-screen move button or the key for move, hold ctrl and left click to target location.

Hope this helps someone.

Final single elimination stage started on time. Brief scary moment with Sky losing first game on EI to TH000 human mirror. Second game was looking bad too. TED did a cool strat against ToD on EI but you already know that. Most of the pros didn’t show up to watch until the grand final, Moon didn’t even show up for that much. SaSe was looking pretty bored/tired/whatever during the break before semifinals.. but then he disappeared and I didn’t see him during the grand final later.

Checked out some of the exhibits.. interesting 3D stuff.. special monitor/glasses/infrared (or something) signal thing.

What else. Sky lost to WhO in the final, was kind of expecting it though. I think that MK stuff is pretty weak and Blademaster is kind of strong. Not enough footmen/militia? IDK.. beside the point anyway.

I meant to take more pictures, but I didn’t so too bad I guess. Got SonKiE, ToD, WhO, TH000, and Sky sort of.

Raihn and I got pictures with Moon. I guess I look less shitty in this one so I won’t box myself out :D

postscript:

ESWC was fun too bad it’s over =[ BACK TO TRAINING POKER PRO I GUESS

post postscript

SaSe had pretty nice shoes

post post postscript

I think I gave Cassandra and Grubby wrong directions the day before.. how embarassing haha. Think I told them to go the wrong way down the street tt..

i have this urge to play warcraft =[

9am, assign seats, set up PCs etc. Moon hasn’t shown up yet.. suspense builds.. will he come?

A lot of the pros, particularly the Asians play with low resolution.. guess it’s for mouse? Yane of course has to one up them and plays not only with low resolution but low graphics settings, no shadows, etc. First time seeing him in person as well; he does look a bit like KiWiKaKi :P

10am, start matches. Moon arrives. Organization was a little chaotic at the start. We referees didn’t assign matches to be in charge of.

Needless to say, seeing all the pros was pretty cool. I got a picture with Moon :D

Moon didn’t advance which is pretty depressing. After Sky lost to WhO I feared he would lose to Grubby as well.. I really think that MK expo tech air stuff is strategically weak.. but who am I to say :P

Long day with a lot of matches but it went by quickly.

IDK what else.. I’m sure Wind or PpG or someone else will do better ‘coverage’ (or whatever the proper term is). I probably should’ve taken more photos; a picture is worth ten thousand of my words.

PpG (does she even go by this anymore?) and Grubby were asking about some place to get food afterwards. Hope the taco place I gave them was still open, if they even found the place given my directions (hah)

I guess that’s all.

Referee check-in around noon, blah blah etc etc. Raihn and Phreak also WC3 referees.

The place is large, setup seems quite nice. Maybe some light problems from main stage area, but whatever that’s uninteresting.

Saw Grubby and PpG checking in.

Opening ceremony at night. See more pros. First the Korean team sans moon. Lyn, Soju, couldn’t recognize WhO but he was probably amongst them.

Saw SaSe.

Team China arrives next. Sky, TeD and th000. Sky chatted with us for quite a bit of time. Got a picture with him but I look fugly in it so I’ll try again tomorrow or Tuesday.

Sky says Moon missed his transfer or something at LA. Went out of the terminal area and has problems with security? IDK. Hope everything got worked out.

ESWC is this coming week. I’m going to be a Warcraft 3 referee. Admin training or whatever on Sunday, event is Monday-Wednesday. Bunch of pros gonna be there, maybe I’ll get to meet Sky? Moon? :D GET PICTURES? AUTOGRAPHS? =]

Poker poker~ Week before wcg I stopped playing to ‘train’ a little bit. I had like a $1 SNG break through before that, came back and it was gone. I’ll get it back though. Gonna play $1 SNGs up to like $100 and switch to cash games. It has been a month and a few days since I made my initial deposit of $50 and I am at $66 right now.. so could be worse.

PokerStars has this nice find PokerStars pro feature.. I’ve started obsing the pros now and then haha. Sometimes there are other obs also doing the same thing I guess and they sit there flaming the pro :D

Woke up at 5, flight at 7. Got to the venue around 9:10, 50 minutes early. Walk around the plaza a little.. nothing’s open. Hulk get’s there at 9:40 or something.

Checkin, Hulk is told Shortround took the 4th spot. HolyHuman and Pesu arrive shortly with Axslav following a little later. Setup takes awhile.. fixing mouse drivers, custom keys. The venue was pretty big.. very well funded.

Format is round robin, with fixed maps. Since I decided to play elf every game, except maybe human mirror on TS, I didn’t care about maps *too* much.

Played HH first round, threw away first game on Secret Valley. Had a great start, a lot of things went right. Messed it up with a bad battle. I won’t comment on too many details since there are no replays.. venue was too much of a hassle I don’t think anyone has replays. Didn’t play well on Echo Isle. Shortround beat Axslav this round.

Second round versus Short. Won Terenas Stand with tree rush + Keeper hunts to Demon Hunter bear mirror. Remaining two maps are Gnoll Wood and Twisted Meadows, both relatively good for huntresses; I thought I had it in the bag at this point. Gnoll Wood was kind of close. I got a health fountain, but my building expansion got canceled early. Otherwise it was pretty standard potm expo hunt/glaive versus his DH/BM mass archer/dryad strat. I think some poor hunt micro cost me the game. Oh did I mention we were playing on widescreens…. I guess when the Warcraft resolution isn’t correct you have, as it were, mouse acceleration problems.. I fixed mine by changing the game resolution but I think no one else did. Lol, I guess I’m just bad. After GW I wondered if I should have bear mirrored.. I had a nice lower left spawn for creeping the mercenary camp. Played like shit on TM. In the meantime, Axslav defeats HolyHuman.

Round three. At this point the best case scenario for me is beating Axslav and Short beating HH, making it a 3-way tie for second. Unlikely to happen, and surprise surprise, it doesn’t. To my despair, Axslav randoms vs my Elf, getting Orc on both TR and TM. I knew I wouldn’t beat his mass grunt tower rush if I played standard, so both games I did some hunt stuff and lost. Afterwards he was like, “yeah my orc is pretty good versus hunts cause that’s all StrifeCro used to do” <_<. Maybe I should have massed archers. HH beats SR and they have a tie.

Tie breaker is round robin best of one, some veto/coin-flipping stuff to determine map. HH beats Short on SV. Axslav randoms to Orc vs Short on SV. FS grunts tower rush. Short is out. Axslav beats HH on EI with some Panda/Naga stuff, making it Axslav 1st and Pesu 2nd.

Axslav and his buddy leave quickly, followed by HH and SR. My flight isn’t for a few hours so I stick around and play some CS with Hulk and co. and the Starcraft players.

That’s about it.

So the stats I posted last time aren’t completely accurate, here’s the dxdiag.

Some pictures.. can’t be bothered to open case for picture of inside. I’d have to unplug everything..

The widescreen on the right is an old, noob acer 19 or 20.” When I first got it I thought the color and everything was pro but that was compared to this 5 year old (give or take) monitor, haha.

The center and left monitors are new Samsung 19″s, model 943BX. Each one came with a stuck pixel, which kind of pisses me off…

Stand height and tilt are adjustable. In the photo they are at the max. height.. for some reason the one on the left can go a little higher.. Color is fantastic, it’s got 8000:1 dynamic contrast or whatever.

I couldn’t save my hard drive with the new motherboard.. installed a different version of XP that is slightly pissing me off. In the dxdiag you’ll only see 3 GB ram cause I’m running XP, but I have 4 sticks in there.

The ASUS motherboard’s “Realtek HD Audio Manager” thing pops up everytime I plug something into a jack, a mild annoyance but something you can live with.

Can’t really comment on video card as I don’t know squat about it really.

When I was watching Frasier on DVD, it would ’spike’ sometimes.. dunno if it’s my DVD drive, VLC player, the DVD, or what.

this guy on BoX.ForLove whispers me going (paraphrasing) “yo it’s matt. what’d you change password to.. i need to go on it to screenshot icons. BoX the king = my account”

etc… lmao

So from my initial $50 deposit, I’m now at $61.74.

Got back up playing Sit-n-gos after dropping to like $25 with cash games haha. Gonna go back to cash games now and hopefully do better, God willing. Gonna bring minimum amount to tables so it doesn’t hurt so bad when I get stacked… lol.

Wish me luck :D