PolarFluke Released: A Rundown

This weekend saw “fluKe” hosting the very first online StarCraft 2 tournament with prizes. With over 100 people registered and over 300 games needed to be played this looked to be one of the most epic weekends for the local Starcraft 2 scene.

The tournament was run by fluKe and Alcardu with bLuuMz helping them administrate the tournament. The tournament was run extremely smoothly over IRC, as it was online. Anyone could play, and prizes were up for grabs. The top 4 spots won AMD CPU’s where 5th till 8th won 10GB Afrihost internet accounts. Also 3 spot prizes were handed out to people who completed their group matches and were not from the top 8 finalists.

Like all online tournaments, there were no shows but thankfully they did not cripple the event. The tournament saw many favourites going through with the public opinion that it would be either Shase (Bravado Gaming) or ANGRYAFRICAN (Ventus Gaming) winning the tournament. With ANGRYAFRICAN and Shase both motoring their way through the tournament from the groups and into the knockouts they were ready to rock.

With ANGRYAFRICAN coming out on top of his brother at the Megarom event, there was definitely something to prove in this game. With all his practice ANGRYAFRICAN managed an easy 2-0 win over Dreamer. Using his marine push with medivacs–which people are now calling the bio ball–he steam rolled Dreamer who tried to do a four-gate in the first game.

On the other end of the semi final round we saw Shase going up against Kreef Lewer. Both matches were played on Lost Temple, and it was interesting to see a base trade where Shase took out Kreef Lewer’s base and Kreef Lewer took out all of Shase’s probes. Shase keeping up the pressure, he managed to win. The second game was a fairly quick game with Shase finishing with a four-gate push.

After this ANGRYAFRICAN and Shase were ready to once again meet in the final round. With ANGRYAFRICAN bringing the raw power of the Terran to the table and Shase bringing the mysterious powers of the Protoss, it was bound to be epic.

The first match saw ANGRYAFRICAN meeting Shase on Lost Temple where he went with his Marine and Medivac push, but Shase managed to build a High Templar to counter the marine push. This left ANGRYAFRICAN surprising Shase with a hellion rush (five hellions rushing the High Templar) and cleaning up the rest with his Marines.

Thereafter the map choice went to Shase who opted to battle it out on Kulas Ravine. Unfortunately he lost to the “bio ball”.

On Metalopolis, the third map, Shase managed an early warp prism harass followed by a Colossus army — resulting in his first win.

ANGRYAFRICAN decided to take him back to basics by requesting a Lost Temple match-up. With Shase giving the four-gate push another shot, ANGRYAFRICAN pulled out some skillful micro-management with his workers resulting in a successful defense against the attack. Once the attack was over, ANGRYAFRICAN didn’t waste time by trying his luck pressurising Shase. After pushing in, Shase tried to hold off the attack with force-fields, however this could not last forever. Soon enough ANGRYAFRICAN breached and it was havoc.

Congratulations to ANGRYAFRICAN for winning the tournament.

For replays and brackets head on over to PolarFluke