Although expectations are only to be treated as such, two of the most hyped sides to change to HotS are TLO and Grubby. Both players are highly innovative, hard-working and intelligent, making the general attitude towards them changing almost exclusively positive. Could TLO return to that beta-form that made him so famous, and could grubby make a leap to the highest step of the StarCraft scene? These questions are to be answered, at least in part, in the match between the two at the world championships on Hanover.

Both players started off on a rather new map namely newkirk city, which is a map good for early-game shenanigans. As such Grubby tried to annoy and delay TLO by a bit with a cannon rush to deny the second base of the Zerg. TLO took the risk by simply skipping his natural and expanding to both his third and fourth placings.

This played right into the hands of Grubby, who tried to abuse the relative long distance between the bases to do some damage. Going up to 4 gates and adding a mothership core the Protoss tried to mass an attack which would even out the match again. TLO looked right through this though and himself made a bundle of zerglings, catching the first rounds of warp-ins before they even got close to a base and expanding his army as Grubby increased his warp-ins.

Grubby did no economic damage at all with the zealot forces and it cost him dearly. TLO was now economically ahead and committing to a major tech change which would put Grubby up against a big number of mutalisks as well as the already amassed zerglings. Grubby meanwhile changed focus from army pressure to catching up in terms of economy, something which TLO wasn't going to allow. Using the mutalisks TLO sniped the newly built third and forced Grubby to basically all-in from that point onwards.



A few minutes later, with TLO doing basically whatever he wants on the map, Grubby saw an opportunity to engage into the muta's alone. He forced the fight but in doing so allowed TLO to do a massive zergling flank taking out all the important protoss units with a surround. Grubby is forced to tap out 0-1.

In the second map TLO used the ladder practice he got against Grubby in his advantage, faking a build with which he beat Grubby a good number of times on ladder while in reality focusing on economy. As such when Grubby saw the initial two bases by TLO he expected a Swarm Host rush, when in actual fact the Zerg had a somewhat hidden third.

Grubby found out rather late, but managed to adapt after a while, leaving the game fairly equal. That is until TLO placed a deadly baneling bomb outside of Grubby's second base, detonating it while Grubby was blindly moving his army down the ramp and killing half a dozen of sentries. Grubby's army was crippled, as without sentries he could not protect his army against the swarm of zerglings that TLO built up. Once again TLO got full freedom to do as he pleased around the map.

The zerg started to expand all over and once again added mutalisks and corruptors to make a deadly zerg army. Being down in bases and even in army size Grubby could do nothing but wait for the almost certain killing blow. TLO took his time, made sure he didn't screw up the composition and eventually dealt the killing blow to the Dutchman, knocking him out of the tournament with a 2-0 defeat.