8-pool beats 6-pool.  Their lings arrive while your lings are eggs.  Run your workers in circles until your lings are out.

If you wait for 10-pool, though, you're probably screwed.

In my experience in 3v3, this is extremely unreliable and you can often get the same effect at much lower risk by using the 8-pool variant.  I just don't 6-pool anymore, the extra time you get over 8-pool isn't worth it when the 8-pool variant can trivially get the second overlord and queen out without sacrificing his zergling production.

I dare suggest the following - if you don't care about rankings (the sc2 game), then you should be able to find some buds here on the forums that enjoy playing the full game for fun.  Heck, in the OMG clan alone we have like 8 folks that have sc2 and would happily play like that.  And that's just a super small segment of the folks you come in contact with.

A few days ago I had urge to play some 1v1 Starcraft2. So I asked a friend of mine who still ladders to play custom 1v1 with me. I play Zerg, he plays Protoss.

What he did first was build 2 pylons and 1 cannon right at the bottom of my ramp. I actually managed to counter that as I seen from pro players how to do it. But after that game I lost all will to play SC2 further

Similar thing happens in online poker and it pisses me the frack off!  There is a deep and engaging game available.  But the damn donks reduce it to its simpliest form.  Might as well play GoFish for the enjoyment and challenge involved.  Or go play with themselves rolling dice in a corner.  The only counter I know of is to seek out communities of like minded players.  I found them for Civ and for Poker.  I imagine one can also find them for Starcraft.

It sounds like you want Kohan instead of Starcraft.  Perhaps you should make it when you're done with Elemental.    An RTS GalCiv done in that style sounds delicious- seriously.

I really think you could make a very good RTS-game in that style, given what Stardock is good at game development-wise.

What you're describing sounds very similar to other competitive genres at low-level (aka scrub) play.  Doesn't matter if it's Starcraft, Counterstrike, or Tekken.  You run into those sorts.  You can't really make them play differently- outside of curbstomping them untli they get it or quit, which probably isn't possible in SC.

In some ways it IS a game problem. If you make a competitive game, you have to expect players will take the shortest path to victory. Winning matters. That's just how it is. So if the game allows these kinds of strategies to be effective in the hands of players who aren't skilled enough to properly scout and counter them, that's what you'll see.

I don't really play competitive games much anymore because of that. I used to, but in my old age I prefer to build stuff at a slower pace. Coop games and playing against the AI are better that way.

One of the aspects of games like Starcraft is that, as you begin to lose, you are also less able to fight back. This is why you have all-in strategies. You can plan your build order in a way to give you one chance at victory, but if it fails, you are absolutely crippled, without even being attacked once, and completely unable to fight back.

You often see a player resign even when he still has bases, an army, and is gathering resources. It's just that he's so far behind his rival that it's better to just give up than to waste the other player's time, since he has no chance of winning. Starcraft and other RTS games are in that end of the spectrum.

In the middle you'd have a game like Street Fighter, where your ability to fight back is always the same, regardless if your health meter is low or high. You won't see players quitting before the match is over, because they always have a chance to win.

The opposite extreme would be a game like Puzzle Strike, where the more you begin to lose, the more able you are to fight back.

Except that when StarCraft is played professionally, in the tournaments, it is played like that, with a match taking place over a number of sets, so that defeat in the first one isn't conclusive, and you get the chance to start again without any hindrance to your ability to fight back.

Perhaps there should be a special league for players willing to play 3-set matches?

Other than that, even if you have to play a few short poor matches to get one decent one, don't the close games always outweigh the poor ones?  A longer game isn't automatically a better one?   

Ok before I say this, let me state I have played neither starcraft 1 or 2, but I have been meaning to for the longest. With that said, how does this even sound like something viable for an RTS game? If I am losing and can't imply no brilliant Tactical maneuver which opens up a window of opportunity. Then why even bother?

@DesConnor: Definitely, in most games or sports, tournaments will be best of three or five, it's the only way to be fair.

I didn't mean to say that there's a problem with how the game works, just mentioning that, inside any given match, it's possible to cripple a player in a way that he cannot fight back, which is exactly what the all-in strategy aims for. You give yourself a chance to destroy your opponent and win, however, by doing that, you also guarantee that if your attack fails, you are the one that's been crippled and can't fight back. The guy quitting after his attack fails is not quitting out of anger - well, maybe he's also angry, but that's not the reason - he simply realizes that his strategy failed this time and now his chances of winning are so slim that he might as well go on to the next.

I like how League of Legends somewhat deals with this, by tagging 'leavers' in relation to their wins. If you leave a game for any reason before it ends, you didn't lose the game, but you get a 'mark' that is far worse than a lost game.'

Recently, they even banned those that had a Win/Leave ratio over 0.45. So everyone who had less than 55% wins in relation to their leaves simply got banned. That's just awesome.

Except that Starcraft has no LAN support.

I still don't see how this makes for a fun game. It is basically you win or lose one shot kill type of thing. No real battle to see who is a better tactician/strategist, no real push to make it feel like the game can go either way throughout the game. This just maybe how I feel about it personally see I'm not a big fan of putting everything into "one final swing" type of play.

Well when you boil it all down, most one on one strategy games are decided after the first major battle whether it's a RTS or a TBS. These games usually involve cascading victories or failures so once you fall behind you usually don't have a chance to catch back up. It's just a question of whether this big battle occurs after 5 minutes like in SC2 or in an hour like when I used to play Heroes 3 online. Either way you usually know who's going to win when it's done and it's not uncommon to see the other person quit.

This is why I like Red Alert 3 better.

It has its own problems though...

All competitive games tend to devolve into this mentality to some level.

My suggestion on a design level is to look at this:

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

The guy who designed this personality-wise is very similar to you(Brad) in many ways, though I don't think the two of you would ever work well together (the first argument over a Mac would result in murder- you guys would either make an awesome game, or awesome court TV)

He was the designer of the SFII and Puzzle Fighters remake, which is controversial among SF fans, though I'm of the opinion he vastly improved SFII on a shoestring budget. 

He describes what you're talking about in the post above as the "slippery slope effect" and talks about the design problems involved.  I think in terms of making competitive games, he's probably the best theoretical guy in the business.