This post requires knowledge of the game Starcraft: Brood War. For those unfamiliar, skip to the bottom for an AI-assisted translation.
Even if you’ve studied the deepest recesses of a bad strategic pathway, it’s still a bad strategic pathway.
In season 10 of the Starcraft Broodwar ASL tournament, Protoss player Bisu cannon-rushed his Zerg opponent, Shine. The Zerg had fast-expanded despite the mineral structure in the natural expansion making cannon rushes incredibly difficult to block and Bisu being literally the person who invented the forge fast-expand (so he’s almost definitely going to have a forge!).
After the cannon rush kills Shine’s expansion, Shine switches into lurker drops, where he sneaks two lurkers into the mineral lines of Bisu’s main base’s before Bisu has detection.
Bisu micros for a hectic ~4 minutes, but holds this counter and wins.
The kicker: maybe Shine intended this all to happen. He’s the sort of player who finds a weird timing and takes his opponent down this unusual pathway. The sort of player who would “bait” Bisu into attempting a cannon rush so he could catch Bisu off-guard with the lurker drop.
But even in that case, Shine would have had to throw away 300 minerals, his first set of zerglings, and a small handful of drones. Not worth it!
Don’t get yourself into a bad position because there’s a chance you can win it. Get yourself into weird positions because they’re actually superior.
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AI-assisted translation:
Two players face off. One of them, Bisu, is the most famous practitioner of a particular safe, standard opening — an opening that involves building a defensive structure early. Everyone knows this about him. It’s his signature move.
His opponent, Shine, chooses to expand his economy early anyway, on a map where that expansion is unusually hard to defend against exactly the kind of aggression Bisu’s signature structure enables. It’s like dropping your guard in a duel against the man who invented the thrust that goes exactly there.
Bisu does the obvious thing. He attacks the expansion and kills it. Shine loses the investment, the units he’d built to protect it, and part of his workforce.
So Shine pivots. He sneaks two units into the heart of Bisu’s home base — units that Bisu, at that moment, literally cannot see, because he hasn’t built the thing that lets him see them. For about four minutes, Bisu is fighting blind against something that can kill his entire economy. He survives it by hand, one frantic decision at a time. Then he wins.
Here’s the interesting part: Shine may have wanted all of this. He’s known for finding strange timings, for dragging opponents onto unfamiliar ground. It’s completely plausible that the undefended expansion was bait — that the whole point was to make Bisu commit to the attack so that the counterattack would land on an unprepared base.
And even if that’s true: the bait cost him a large chunk of his economy, his first defensive units, and several workers. He engineered a situation where he had to play nearly perfectly, against one of the best players alive, just to get back to even.
A trap that costs more than it catches is not a trap. It’s a loss with a story attached.
Don’t take a bad position because you can imagine winning from it. Take a weird position because it’s actually better.
Julian Wise 