The story of this week in the Eastern Conference seems to be closely contested 3-2’s and… not so closely contested 3-0’s. Only 1 match out of the 14 played this week was decided with a score of 3-1 (Princeton over George Mason). Regardless of set scores though, there were no surprises in the overall match results. Powerhouses from last season continued to fare well, especially against the newer teams.

In East Division 1, Protoss players took inspiration from newly crowned TSL champion NonY and did not lose any of its games against Terran or Zerg opponents. Most notably, spencer (Spencer Liang) helped Harvard to its second ace match victory in 3 weeks, this time over Mt. Allison, and improved himself to an impressive 5-0 season start. Harvard is currently sitting in the middle of the league standings with an overall record of 2-1. Newcomer Ottawa continued its strong showing with a 3-2 win over MIT, a team that made it to the playoffs last season. Next week should be a true test for them as they will be facing McGill, who is currently tied with them for 1st in the division. In the other 2 games, both McGill and Tufts easily handled their respective opponents, Carleton and Dalhousie, without dropping a set.

Matches went by quickly in East Division 2, as Cornell went 3-0 against RPI, Yale defeated Stony Brook 3-0, and Princeton took a 3-1 victory over George Mason. By defeating University of Maryland in straight sets, Rutgers demonstrated that they are still a strong team even without fanatacist (Eddie Sun), who was discovered to be illegally smurfing for the team. Had Rutgers not been penalized with 2 automatic set losses for the games fanatacist played in, they would be the only team in the league with a 9-0 set record. Next week we have Rutgers and Yale battling it out for the potential #1 spot in the division. With the changes this season to expand the playoffs to include a field of 24 teams rather than only 16 as with last season, the #1 position becomes even more crucial as it once was since it means an automatic bid into the round of 16.

Over in East Division 3, University of Toronto and reigning Season 2 champions Waterloo continue their dominance with 3-0 victories against Western Ontario and York, respectively. Surprisingly (or not), University of Toronto ace and Razer TSL champion IefNaij (Jianfei Wang) has yet to play a game. Whether he’s just busy with school or if the team feels confident enough without him we’ll have to wait and see. The other two matches here were much closer: Oberlin’s Sunyveil (Dayv Doberne) defeated Case Western’s yoden (Benjamin Horstman) with a well-executed 6 fact TvP timing attack in the ace match, and Ryerson also won a close 3-2 match against McMaster’s all-zerg lineup. Next week University of Western Ontario faces off against Waterloo. Last season UWO defeated Waterloo 3-2 in the regular season, only to watch Waterloo take the playoff spot and then win the whole thing – can they pull off another victory this season?

Finally, we have East Division 4, which apparently ran into some difficulties since this their Sunday match time coincided with the ending of iCCup season 11. Nevertheless, games were either rescheduled or still able to be played, whether it was on the sc2tv.ru server (Brain clan), over hamachi, or simply using B.net with Chaos. Please thank your team coordinator and division admins for keeping things running smoothly! On to the games – Duke may have had trouble with rival UNC’s basketball team in recent years (although perhaps not this year), but they certainly did not have any trouble with their Starcraft team, easily coming away with a 3-0 victory. Florida is currently up 2-0 against Central Florida with the remaining games not yet played, and Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech have rescheduled their match for a later date.

Thanks for reading – see you next week!