If you’d like to contact for personalIf you’d coaching like to contact ($125/hour) Grubby aQuire Mastery or justfor contact personal himcoaching as a ($125/hr)fan, email [email protected] just contact him as a fan, email: [email protected] Monitor tips from the Pros or orfind find him him onon: /@FollowGrubby

Manuel “Grubby” Schenkhuizen

i, I’m Manuel, better known in the gaming world as “Grubby,” Grubby’s Tip: If you are forced to H and I know what it takes to win at StarCraft II. Read on and raise your monitor with any books, I you will, too. recommend some light reading such as When I was 18 years old, I took a sabbatical from my studies to “A Treatise of Human Nature” by David travel the world for a year. I traveled all over Asia, the United States Hume or “On the Origin of Species” by and Europe to play international competitions in PC games. Gamers Charles Darwin. (This way you can learn refer to this as electronic sports (), and it’s increasingly something about the game or your opponents when the PC popular amongst a wide demography and increasing amount of is off!) Someone recently told me on Twitter that he uses a people. Despite having been a gamer pretty much my whole life, 1300-page physics book, and I guess that could work, too. I can hardly believe that I’ve been a professional gamer for almost nine years now. My job’s seriously fun, and funnily enough, seriously serious. Black Equalization As with any professional practitioner of sports, the tools of your he most dramatic breakthrough in monitors has been the trade are second only to your own skill in terms of influencing the T development of the black equalization feature. This was outcome of any match. We gamers carefully select our keyboard, developed by BenQ in cooperation with the Korean team StarTale mouse and headset for their quality, comfort and features. However, in BenQ’s RL and XL lines, and I use the RL monitors in the major one often overlooked aspect of the overall gaming rig is our choice tournaments. Basically, what it does is enable you to adjust the black of a professional gaming monitor. You can learn about the basics, but levels without distorting the other colors too much. This means I’ve got some key areas for you which I feel are important when better visibility on the minimap and , so it can help you see it comes to selecting your monitor for some serious StarCraft II the unexplored terrain on maps more easily. I adjust my monitor as competitive play. part of the setup process every time I sit down and play somewhere new to make sure the setting is optimized to my satisfaction. Height Adjustment Playing around with the extensive settings and profiles in the ontrolling your conditions, either at home or when traveling, monitor for the RTS mode, FPS mode, and further customization C is an integral aspect of bringing your best performance into options for colors, should give you an idea of where those settings the game. You would probably not be surprised to realize how the and the black equalization technology could help you out. Will it wrong setup - a scratchy mouse pad, for example – takes the edge help you to spot burrow movement roaches more easily? Are you off someone’s concentration. A monitor that is too high, too low able to react faster to blips on the mini-map? I encourage you to or has the wrong tilt adds just one more thing to compensate for experiment. in your effort to outthink your opponent. Being 6’2” tall, this has traditionally been a problem for me; I’ve had to support my gaming monitor with encyclopedias to ensure I could raise my monitor to the correct height. Today, most major tournaments such as MLG and use adjustable monitors, and you should consider this functionality essential for any BYOC tournament or home setup. aQuire Mastery Monitor tips from the Pros Manuel “Grubby” Schenkhuizen

60 Hz or 120Hz Grubby’s Tip: Everyone agrees that he majority of StarCraft II professional players prefer 24” is the proven best for StarCraft 2. a 60Hz monitor for the simple reason that 1) it is t However, if you can’t get used to it yet, what Blizzard outputs on the PC, and 2) it is what the smart scaling allows you to use whatever major tournaments (MLG/IEM, etc.) use in their stations. resolution you prefer without hitches. I actually have both, but when it comes to competing, I practice on the 60Hz monitor in order to get the best preparation possible. Monitor Setup and Color Modes great professional gaming monitor has color Smart Scaling A modes that are optimized for RTS gaming, pushing nother subtle but very important feature to me is forward colors that are often used in these games. LED A the ability to scale the screen. Let me first explain powered monitors offer a much larger color palette, the importance of the horizontal size of a monitor. As and the one I use has a dedicated RTS color mode that you probably know, Blizzard has allowed us to use a is built around Starcraft II and other RTS color engines. widescreen of up to 24” to increase the field of vision This may offer better visibility, and the pre-selectable horizontally. So a 24” monitor with a resolution of profiles reduce the amount of time I have to spend on 1920x1080 (16:9) shows more actual terrain than a 22” each monitor setup. monitor with a resolution of 1680x1050 (16:10). This may enable you to spot a medivac drop at the edge of the Grubby’s Tip: I use “standard,” fit to screen which would have been temporarily unclickable aspect ratio, and my windows and SC2 on a 22” monitor. resolutions are 1920x1080. A lot of people So, on scaling. While the monitor I now use is 24”, I ask me about mouse speed and sensitivity used to use a 22” LCD monitor. Recently I attended an so I’ll tell you that as well: 51% in SC2, MLG where I only had three days to get used to my new 6/11 in Windows, and a CPI of 1100 on 24” LED monitor. I judged it was too short of a time my mouse. Remember that if you downscale your monitor resolution, you also need to adjust your mouse sensi to adjust myself to 24” resolution, so I used the smart downwards (and vice versa). scaling to keep my pure 1680x1050 resolution just for the time being. So I can reduce the screen size and still maintain optimal resolution, without distorted pixels or My professional gaming monitor inconsistent graphical display or mouse movement (this use the BenQ RL2450HT monitor as my primary has been a problem for me at tournaments in the past). I mainstream monitor – here’s my setup: I saw another progamer from Poland who plays on 4:3 I think I first used this monitor in February at the Lone at home (17”, 1024x768) and he had no problem scaling Star Clash eSports tournament in Austin, Texas (http:// the monitor’s native resolution to 4:3 at the tournament wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Lone_Star_Clash) and was station. amazed at the color performance and really pleased that I could adjust the height and leave my giant books in the hotel.

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