StarCraft II: 2v2s!

The first MLG spring arena event for StarCraft II is this weekend and they just announced a bonus event that weekend which might actually be more exciting than the main event if only for the novelty of it. The spring arena will only have 8 players and the main event should be filled with awesome games as the players get to put in a lot of preparation given that they know they'll be playing all 7 of the other players. What else can you do with precisely 8 players? You can break them into teams of 2 and play a little single elimination 2v2 tournament!

I think this is going to be really cool because it's unlikely these guys have done much prep work for it at all. They're currently holding a poll at the MLG site to determine the teams so even if they wanted to practice right now they couldn't! I would imagine some of these guys might play 2v2s for fun now and then but I can't imagine it's worth their time in general to put a lot of effort into it compared to their standard 1v1 games. As such I would think we could see some wacky strategies coming out of the games. Or maybe a lot of 6 pools... At least they've set it up so two players of the same race can't be on the same team so there can't be a double 6 pool. With 3 protoss, 3 terran, and 2 zerg players there's still a lot of team combinations possible. Personally I voted up for MarineKingPrime teaming with Huk and voted down every other combination containing either player in the hopes my top 2 might team up. It is the leading pair out of the gates but they have to change their states rules for choosing teams as right now the teams would be MKP&Huk, MKP&DRG, DRG&MC, and DRG&Huk. Pretty sure DRG can't play on 3 of the 4 teams at the same time so they've actually got a more complex optimization problem on hand. I wonder if they've got someone to work it out or if I should volunteer...