[avatar user=”admin” size=”thumbnail” align=”left”]
This weekend MLG’s Winter Championship is taking place in Dallas, Texas, with $75,000 on the line. MLG have favoured a new format for this tournament, changing back to the more standard single elimination bracket. Like in most cup football competitions, the players can’t afford to make any mistakes as a single loss will see them eliminated from the tournament. We do however know the routes that each player will take to the final as the full bracket is released before the tournament has started. As Heart of The Swarm was only released on Monday, we decided to take the first day of the event to take account of any metagame changes and to prepare ourselves for an intense weekend of betting as the tournament progresses.
The stand out bet in the first half of Day 2 is for Ret to advance into the Semi-Finals. Pinnacle’s price of 9.09 is far too generous, and whilst Flash is a legendary player, this is putting Ret’s chances of defeating Flash at the same level as Minigun’s of beating Life. Whilst Flash is a firm favourite, Ret is more than the 12.5% chance that Pinnacle’s prices imply. A more likely and solid bet is Ret to win either 1 or 2 maps. If you think that Ret can run Flash close, a price of 4.02 is available for the +1.5 handicap, whereas 1.787 is very likely for Ret to take one map. We’d suggest backing each of the three outcomes, with a higher weighting of your stake towards the +2.5 – we’d be very surprised if he can’t take a map after Flash dropped a game to Bly, a much weaker player, in round 1.
After IEM, we mentionned that Seed’s HoTS debut would be awaited with baited breath after his LG-IM teammates’ fantastic performance last weekend. However, SK Telecom’s Rain made light work of Seed and we’ll put that down to an exceptionally strong performance by Rain, as could be expected based on his performance since transitioning to StarCraft II, rather than Seed performing worse than expected. Rain’s price of 1.645 to beat Jjakji seems fair, but we’d rather take the -1.5 at 2.5 as we’d expect him to assert himself if is to come out on top against a player who was able to take a clean sweep of MarineKing in round 1.
Leenock is a player who saves his best performances for MLG and the 2.28 available against Innovation seems more than fair. He demonstrated an exceptional knowledge of ZvP against BabyKnight, and we’d expect that he’s studied how to play against Terran in a similar fashion and to show that here.
Meanwhile, we fully expect Parting to advance against Sen to complete the lower half of the bracket, but with no -2.5 handicap available, we’ll leave alone the 1.174 on offer.
Betfair:
Bet on Henrik Stenson to become the BMW PGA Championship Winner.
Paddypower:
Back Australia to take the Ashes home with them.
Betway:
Back Rafael Nadal to become the Mens French Open Winner.
Coral:
Back One For Arthur to win the Grand National.
Bet365:
Back Mexico to win the Confederations Cup.
