- News by: Julian Xu

At the end of week 5, CSL season 3 has just crossed the halfway point of the regular season. It’s pretty clear by now which teams have been blessed with all the yellow and blue ranked ICC players and which teams are just happy that at least they’ve found 4 people in their school who know the name Lim Yo Hwan. However, with 3 or 4 matches remaining for each team, all the playoff spots are still up for anyone’s taking. Let’s take a look at the current standings in the East and the teams that are fighting to secure their ticket to the postseason.

In East Division 1, Tufts, a team that barely missed the playoffs last season, is currently standing at the top with a shiny 4-0 undefeated record after winning both their matches during the past two weeks. And with only 1 total game loss in those 4 matches, they will surely be a tuft team to beat (sorry, couldn’t resist). Particularly of note is their match last week, where they handed University of Ottawa their first loss of the season in a 3-1 victory. UOttawa’s star player dRaW (Cameron Nolastname) was conspicuously absent from their lineup in that match though. Who is this dRaW guy you ask, and why does he matter? I asked that to myself too, and while I didn’t find an aka, I did find a B- iCCup account with a 76% win record. He also defeated McGill ace Freaky (Sami El Dabbagh) in a straight up PvZ ace match on Tornado in week 4. Yeah. Anyway, UOttawa, MIT, and McGill are now tied for 2nd place at 4 wins and 1 loss apiece. Many contests between these 4 teams are still left to be played in the upcoming weeks, so keep an eye out for this division!

East Division 2 is in a similar boat. Three teams are 3-1 and tied for 2nd place – Cornell, Yale, and George Mason. Meanwhile, Princeton is in the lead, sporting a record of 3-0, with their week 5 match against Yale still left to be played. In week 4, Princeton hero zchen (Michael Chen) continued to prove his worth by defeating Rutger’s Nexus (Kishan Pandya) in a PvP ace match. Watch the game if you want to see what happens if you go 2 gate obs against 2 gate FE, and don’t start your expansion until 4 minutes after your opponent. Spoiler: you get outmacroed. Hard. Speaking of Rutgers, they were in Princeton’s shoes 2 weeks ago with a 3-0 record. 2 weeks and 2 losses later (with their other loss coming from Binghamton), they are now swimming in the middle of the league and in danger of not qualifying for the playoffs. Is Rutgers really only a mediocre team without their mercenaries? Or were these past 2 weeks just a fluke? Perhaps next week we’ll be enlightened with the answer when they face off against George Mason.

Over in East Division 3, we have University of Toronto and University of Waterloo tied for 1st place, both with undefeated records. However, this won’t be the case for long since they were scheduled to play each other last week but due to iCCup being down again, have only played and split the first 2 matches. Of the remaining 2 or 3 matches, we have UWaterloo’s CSL individual tournament winner Jackass (John Lee), who normally would be the favorite against anyone, playing as the underdog against UToronto’s TSL S1 champ IefNaij (Jianfei Wang). IefNaij is not invincible – he was defeated in a game last season. Can Jackass pull off the upset this time? Taking a look at the rest of the standings, we have McMaster and Ryerson both at 3-1, and Carnegie Mellon at 2-2. Those schools (Ninja Edit: Except for CMU) are playing in the CSL for the first time. What surprises do they have in store for us in the next few weeks?

Finally, there’s East Division 4. With Central Florida dropping out of the league, this division is now the smallest division in the entire league, with only 7 teams remaining. Emory picked up 2 wins during the last 2 weeks and are now standing on top of the division with a 4-0 record. However, both Duke and Georgia Tech (who defeated in-state rivals University of Georgia 3-1) are also undefeated and have 3 wins each. Georgia Tech is set to face off against Emory next week. Georgia Tech lost former progamer Assem (Brian Fransioli) from their team, but still has Chinese superstar MasterAsia (Ruodo Wang). Will that be enough?

Thanks for reading – see you next week!