This was the third match between Manuel 'GrubbY' Schenkhuizen and Xiaofeng 'Sky' Li at this event alone, meeting first in the group stage where Sky won, once again in the upper bracket final which the human player also won and lastly in the grand final.

Grubby made his way to the final through the lower bracket, where he faced off against Zhuo 'TeD' Zeng a second time and again we saw Grubby dropping fiends left and right during late tier one and early tier two pushes.

With two losses to Sky already hanging over him, Grubby approached the finals as the underdog competitor, a position the Dutch veteran rarely occupies. Throughout the weekend Grubby had two opportunities to put Sky down, but fell short both times. To win the finals Grubby would have had to win two consecutive best of three matches.

The two met first on Twisted Meadows where the game eventually evolved into a base trading battle. Unfortunately for Grubby he found himself in that position out of necessity and not preference, as Sky had amassed too many air units for Grubby to counter in time.

From there it was on to Melting Valley where Grubby gave his tier one, grunt heavy strategy another chance to succeed. This time Grubby omitted the tower push on Sky's expansion and instead pressed the expansion with grunts, which lasted all of four seconds then ended once Sky's towers had finished constructing. Sky kept his unit numbers up by utilizing mercenaries as well as footmen to play both offensively and defensively, which seemed to knock Grubby off his feet - that and a level four Mountain King.

While the same strategy ended with the same result during yesterday's match, it certainly looked a lot better then than it did today. All in all the finals were rather anticlimactic, however, there were still plenty of exciting matches during the previous two days of competition.

This is Sky's second big finish of 2009, first a second place finish at the PGL IV finals to start off his year and now first place at Extreme Masters, what next?

Sky will take home 5,000 USD for his efforts in Chengdu this weekend, add that to his winnings from the PGL finals and Sky has raked in almost 11,000 USD in January alone.

Grubby will get 2,500 USD for placing second, TeD will receive 1,500 USD for coming in third and finally Jae Ho 'Moon' Jang will take home 1,000 USD for finishing fourth.

--

Image from ESL