ACL Fifa OR1 Wrap Up

ACL Fifa 12 Online Round 1 Wrap Up

The 9th of January saw ACLPro kick off its first Online Round for FIFA 12. Being the first Online Round of the season, the points from the previous season were used in the seeding process to determine the pro players for this competition. This meant that the 8 highest scoring players from last season
were deemed “pro” players and everybody else was an open player.

Pool Play
Monday night saw all of the open players compete against other players in their respective pools to determine who made the open double elimination. Once the pool play games had been played, the double elimination for the open players was played over Tuesday and Wednesday night. While the open players were involved in their pool play and double elimination, the pro players were allocated those three days (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday) to play their pool play games. The pro pool contained these 8 players:

HumptyDumpty
iCripsy
Irishtanker
MF Jtino
Muzza255
iM skip intel
xx iTz Todd
Lakey64

The open bracket saw some familiar players sign up such as Lion Tamer92, Shadi The Daddy, along with some new players such as Air JJx and I am a Zyzz. After the open pool play, the double elimination seeds looked like this:

1 LioN TaMeR 92
2 SHaDi the DaDDY
3 THE INF3RNO
4 s0seen
5 sretzooR
6 MF Blaze
7 AirJJ x
8 I am a Zyzz
9 Walshizm
10 fray Geemon
11 SiIverblade
12 daft gc
13 KronicStunnah
14 nR Omen
15 Another Benco
16 Forlaan

After a gruelling two days for all of these players, 8 of them played their way onto the pro double elimination. AirJJ x surprised players by taking the top seed for the open players. Another surprise in the open double elimination was to see the Community Shield winner, ‘Shadi The Daddy’ fall out of the competition without making the top 8.

Pro Double Elimination
The pro pool play followed a similar fashion – The usual suspects such as Muzza and Skip took out the top seeds. Despite having top seeds, both players were contested on some occasions dropping games to Todd and Cripsy. Once both open and pro pools had their seedings, all 16 players were placed into the pro double elimination with these seeds:

1 fray Muzza
2 iM Skip1 intel
3 HumptyDumpy
4 iCripsy
5 MF Jtino
6 xx iTz Todd
7 Lakey64
8 IrishTanker
9 AirJJ x
10 Lion Tamer 92
11 another benco
12 THE INF3RNO
13 SiIverblade
14 daft gc
15 s0seen
16 sretsooR

The winner’s bracket round 1 saw multiple good games and surprisingly only saw 1 pro player lose their first series in the double elimination. Winner’s bracket round 2 saw Muzza take on Air JJx, which was always going to be a tough series. Air JJx managed to take a game off Muzza but couldn’t quite deliver the final blow, allowing Muzza to dominate in the 3rd game showing why he’s one of the best in Australia. Another tight series in the WBR2 was Cripsy against Brett. Cripsy’s Brazilian attack showed to be too powerful for Brett’s defensive efforts with Manchester City, winning the series with two games, with the scores of 3-1 and 2-1.

HumptyDumpty vs Todd was also another tight series in the WBR2. Humpty started his ACLPro season strong by punishing daft gc, but his glory and success was short lived after struggling to threaten Todd’s defence. Humpty eventually went down to Todd in straight games losing 2-1 and 2-1. The final series in the WBR2 was Skip against Lakey64. Skip managed to hold Lakey goalless in both games winning 1-0 and 1-0 in a gruelling series.

Winner’s bracket round 3 saw Cripsy take on Muzza and Todd take on Skip. Cripsy played well to gain a win against Muzza but not well enough to win the series. Muzza continued his fine form winning the series after 3 games, winning 2-1, 3-1 and losing 2-0. In the WBR3 game on the opposite side of the bracket, Todd was a little bit more unlucky than Cripsy going down to Skip 3-1 and 4-0. This set up a usual Winner’s bracket final between Skip and Muzza.
LBR1 and LBR2 showed a few of the open players drop out of the competition along with Irishtanker who was unlucky to not progress further in the competition. In the LBR3, Lion Tamer played against Brett and Humpty played against Lakey. HumptyDumpty played quite well against Lakey managing to win both games against him earning himself a place in the LBR4. After his 3-1 and 1-0 wins, Humpty had this to say:

“Very comfortable wins for humpty. There were absolutely no chances for Lakey. Some may wonder why he is even considered a pro player.”
After hearing Humpty’s words of confidence, I caught up with Lakey to ask him what he thought about these claims.

“I can’t take what he has said seriously; I honestly thought it was a massive joke. I defeated him comfortably in the last tournament and he sucked up to me claiming I was the best player and now he is questioning my pro player status… Interesting."

In the other game in the LBR3, Liontamer started his series convincingly winning 5-0 in his first game. After losing his first game quite embarrassingly, Brett decided to step it up a notch and show Tamer that he deserved the spot in the next round more than he did. Brett won the second game 4-2 and then the third game 2-0 to make his way into the LBR4 against Todd.

Both of the series in LBR4 saw all four players have to play in 3 games to decide a winner to progress through to the LBR5. Todd successfully played his way through to the next round without dropping a game, winning 2-1 and 5-1 whilst sharing a tied game at 2-2. In the other game, Humpty lost the first game 1-0, won the second game 3-1 and then tied the 3rd game 1-1 with a 90th minute equaliser from Walcott. This meant that Humpty progressed to the LBR5 against Todd on an aggregate of 5-4.

The LBR5 was a three game series between HumptyDumpty and xx iTz Todd. The first game of the three was a narrow 1-1 draw. The first scoreline suggested that the following games were also going to be close; both of the following games indeed were. Humpty used Walcott’s pace to his advantage to score a late winner at the 87th minute to give him a 2-1 win heading into the 3rd game. The final game of the series was another nail biter resulting in a 4-4 draw with two 90th minute goals. This meant that Humpty progressed through to the LBF with an aggregate score of 7-6.

The WBF consisted of Muzza and Skip battling it out to earn a place in the Grand Final for ACLPro’s first Online Round for FIFA 12 in 2012. Skip showed Muzza that he was extremely keen to win his first ACL event by punishing Muzza 3-1 and 5-2. This meant that Skip progressed to the Grand Final to verse the winner of HumptyDumpty and Muzza255.

There were rumours floating around before the LBF started that Muzza actually threw his previous games just to keep his legacy alive. Nearly every ACL event that Muzza has won, he’s done so by coming through the loser’s bracket. This explains some of the speculation behind the claims that he had thrown his games. Muzza later confirmed that he did not throw his games against skip and stated that he just simply lost.

Humpty challenged Muzza on all fronts during their LBF but unluckily could not come out on top. It was a three game series with Muzza progressing to the final on an aggregate score of 8-6. Muzza won 4-1, tied 2-2 and lost 3-2. We believe that after Humpty’s match though, he took a little bit of a fall after his defeat…

Only two players remained at this time. The legendary Muzza255 and the everstrong iM Skip1 intel. Both players aiming to take out the title as ACL's first online round winner for 2012. Muzza took an early lead in the series grasping a tight 1-0 win over Skip in their first game. The second game immediately followed with a reversal of the scoreline - Skip winning a very narrow second game 1-0. This left only one game in the series between the two talented players. If you could pick any winner between these two, who would it be? Well you're wrong. The third game of the series ended in a 1-1 draw which meant that this intense match up needed to go into a fourth game, a golden goal game of fifa. The first player to score in this fourth match would automatically win the final game declaring them the winner.

45 minutes of intense gameplay passed without a single goal being scored. Roughly 10 minutes after the half time interval, Muzza broke the deadlock scoring the winner in the 55th minute. After 3 and a half games of fifa and 325 minutes of gameplay, Muzza earned the title of being ACL's first online round winner.

Congratulations to Muzza for taking out the competition! Stay tuned to see an interview between Muzza and myself!

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