Six Pool Rush
The Zerg have the fastest rush found in the game and on the smaller maps, this can be quite devastating to an opponent. Simply set the first four Drones to gathering Minerals, produce the 5th and 6th Drones as soon as you have enough minerals and command each to gathering minerals as soon as they are produced.
While your Drones mine, send your Overlord to quickly find the enemy base and keep it there to observe what your enemy may be doing. Keep an eye on the Mineral amount indicator in the top right of the screen and once the mineral count rises above 130 Minerals or so, grab the last Drone to drop off its Mineral load and bring it out of the mining area and prepare to set down the Spawning Pool as soon as the Mineral counter tops 150. While the Spawning Pool builds, build one more Drone and send it to mine and continue to allow the other Drones to mine. As soon as the mineral counter tops 100, build another Overlord. By the time the Pool finishes, you should have over 150 minerals, enough to convert the 3 Larvae at your Hatchery into 3 pairs of Zerglings. Use these to quickly rush to the enemy base and target enemy workers one at a time (queue up the targets if possible by selecting all your Zerglings, right clicking on an enemy worker, then hold down Shift and continue to right click on more workers). This should effectively disrupt their mining operation and if your opponent fails to effectively counter with their workers, your Zerglings should be able to finish off the entire enemy base.
This strategy is quite limited in its usefulness though. The keys are finding the enemy quickly and hoping that you can hit them shortly after the Zerglings are produced. On larger maps like Killing Fields or Sherwood Forest, the time it takes to find the enemy and actually hit them with the rush would give your opponent more than enough time to build up defenses or even just enough workers to overwhelm your rush force, so if you do decide to use this tactic, limit it to 128x128 or smaller maps if you want to pull it off successfully.
NOTE that on very small maps like Blood Bath, you can even pull a Four Pool Rush by only mining with your inital 4 Drones and waiting til you have enough for the Spawning Pool and proceeding with the rush in the same way as the Six Pool Rush. This tactic provides an extremely quick rush but if it fails after the first two waves, consider yourself dead since you will not be able to produce quickly enough to press the advantage.
While both rushes have the potential to be devastating, an experienced player can defend against even these quick attacks in which case, they will most likely outmine and outproduce you in a short period of time. Weigh these options before electing to use these particular tactics. |
