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Part 2: Leta
![[image loading]](https://ncache.ilbe.com/files/attach/new/20130825/377678/1686230318/1865331051/bc0fedc968cce89f049ad104699e3600.jpg)
My next entry is Leta, the mercurial terran player known for his terrific ProLeague exploits, causing mayhem with his patented wraith usage against zerg players, perhaps a player that is hard to distinguish from the plethora of other great ProLeague players of the modern era such as Sea, or Light.
This is the top ten ProLeague players of all time in terms of total number of victories (play-off rounds included).
1. Jaedong: 240 wins
2. Flash: 233 wins
3. Bisu: 192 wins
4. Stork: 191 wins
5. Sea: 172 wins
6. Light: 154 wins
7. Leta: 150 wins
8. free: 147 wins
9. Kal: 145 wins
10. FanTaSy: 144 wins
![[image loading]](http://gameabout.com/uploads/www/news/2007012010090425377.jpg)
There was a reason why Sea was known as the "Man born for the ProLeague" by the fans
However, there is one hidden card that Leta had over his contemporary terran rivals such as Sea, Light, and FanTaSy.
![[image loading]](http://img.dailygame.co.kr/news/201104/attachments/20110407_6baaf6ab8ee9c0ca22141bb4e263ad56.jpg)
Being adorable in drag would be one
This is what makes Leta special. Leta is the all time leader of ProLeague regular season ACE-match wins.
1. Leta: 23 wins 7 losses (76.67%)
1. Jaedong: 23 wins 13 losses (63.89%)
3. Flash: 22 wins 16 losses (57.89%)
4. Stork: 19 wins 21 losses (47.5%)
5. Kal: 17 wins 12 losses (58.62%)
5. free: 17 wins 16 losses (51.51%)
7. PuSan: 14 wins 5 losses (73.68%)
7. Calm: 14 wins 10 losses (58.33%)
9. Bisu: 13 wins 8 losses (61.90%)
10. FanTasY: 12 wins 6 losses (66.67%)
Not only does Leta have the highest number of regular season ACE-match wins (if you decide to include all the play-off ACE-matches in history also, Jaedong takes first place, with Leta and Flash sharing the second spot), he has a higher win rate in the regular season ACE-matches than anyone else in the top ten spot. This is made even more amazing by the fact that there is no one else on the list who was in the same team as Leta.
![[image loading]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sNa4066kEWk/hqdefault.jpg)
Jaedong and Flash, two players who also knew the heavy burden of solo-carrying their respective teams
Notice how all the players who doesn't have another player in the top ten list on their team has relatively lower win rates than players who have another monster ACE-match player as a teammate. Kal, Calm, Bisu, and FanTaSy all have win rates close to, or above 60% win rate, and I believe this is partly due the difficulty of preparing for multiple ACE-match candidates, compared to the relatively easier task of preparing for a known fixture in the ACE-matches.
Korean community named Leta as the "Miracle Boy", as he was pulling off insane numbers in the ProLeague, and carrying his team in the ACE-matches with a success rate that was higher than either Jaedong or Flash, two players who were the embodiment of one-man teams.
The tournament that best defined Leta's miraculous ability to carry his team was Shinhan 2008/2009 ProLeague, the first year-long season of the ProLeague, the first season to exclude two-versus-two matches from the schedule, and the first ProLeague to adapt the All-Kill format.
It was the end of an era in many ways. Numerous two-versus-two players would be forced to adapt or retire out-right. There was now twice any many ProLeague games played on television than the year before, and you could now make a name for yourself as a top tier player on the ProLeague without having to go through the grueling qualifying stages of the individual leagues just to get a couple of games worth of television time. Before the massive explosion of ProLeauge games, it took years of professional play to get a couple of hundred games on television, but now it was not the case. You could become a superstar if you were a great ProLeague player now, and Leta was one of the first superstars the newly expanded ProLeague scheduling gave birth to.
Leta was a terran versus terrran beast during this period, known for his light footed dropship usage that reminded people of vintage BoxeR plays. He wasn't as strong versus protoss, but maintained a sturdy 50% win rate during this tournament, having some wins versus strong protoss players such as JangBi and free. However, other terran players such as FanTaSy, or HiyA had much more impressive terran-versus-protoss records.
![[image loading]](http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/CNtBz93AbMQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Any historical piece on Leta wouldn't be complete without mentioning his untouched mastery of wraiths
Leta would unleash his feared two starport wraiths on zergs during this tournament. His legacy would end up with Leta having a career record of 19-3 using strictly one base two starport builds only (no variations counted) versus zerg players.
+ Show Spoiler +
The above game shows how Leta uses his patented two starport wraiths to tear apart the second best zerg at the time, Calm. On the more zerg friendly map of Outsider, Leta would use this unconventional style to tear apart his zerg foes. People on Leta's team were quoted as saying that his zerg practice partners would often smash their keyboards in frustration after Leta was done with them.
With his heroics, Leta ended the regular as the fourth best ProLeague player that season with a stellar record of 49-21, a record only bested by three players (Jaedong, Flash, and Bisu). It would be the highest number of wins recorded in a single ProLeague season by any player not named Bisu, Flash, or Jaedong.
Even more astonishingly, Leta ended his Shinhan 2008/2009 ProLeague with an ACE-match record of 13 wins and 3 losses. This is the largest number of ACE-match victories in a single season in the entire history of the game. Leta won more regular season ACE-matches in this single season of the ProLeague than what many players manage to win in their entire careers.
OGN Sparkyz barely managed to qualify for the play-off rounds with the record of 33-22, if Leta had lost just four more ACE matches, Leta would still have the largest number of ACE-match victories in that season with an ACE-match record of 9-7, with only Jaedong keeping the pace with 9 regular season ACE-match wins. However, OGN Sparkyz would be out of the play-off rounds. Without Leta's inhuman results in the regular season ACE-matches, his team would have been doomed to failure.
So here's to Leta, the "Miracle Boy", who hard carried his team with unparalleled ACE-match performances in the Shinhan 2008/2009 ProLeague with mesmerizing dropship and wraith plays.
![[image loading]](https://ncache.ilbe.com/files/attach/new/20130825/377678/1686230318/1865331051/3f9c5fbca319f494efcbe81d14a8c462.jpg)
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51582 Posts
I remember when he qualified for the Batoo OSL and pretty much every pundit on Teamliquid (myself included) had very high hopes for him Royal Roading that season.
Then he ended up getting cheesed in a tie-breaker game against by.herO on Tears of the Moon for his Ro16 group and that was the end of that particular hype train.
Even worse was the season after, where he lost to type-b in the Ro8...
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All of your posts are so interesting to read, thanks for doing what you do!
Is there an easy way to check proleague stats btw? Probably a korean source?
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In a way I see some parallels between [Oops]ClouD and Leta. Both from the same team. Both players of relatively unknown quantity who suddenly became the unlikely heroes of KOR/OGN Sparkyz and made a name for themselves with superlative performances against some of the best players at the time. The guys who were the pillar that held the house of cards together. Of course, I regard Leta as an upgraded, improved version of [Oops]ClouD, but there are similarities nonetheless.
After seeing the enormous scale of the new ProLeague format planned for Shinhan 2008/2009 ProLeague, I thought to myself, surely this will be the decide the true champions from the pretenders. 55 rounds with 11 rounds being in an All-Kill format, surely the enormous game pool alone will more or less eliminate the more erratic nature of the ProLeague. This will be the first ProLeague season that will be able to accurately portray the current strength of these players.
Surely enough, there was a trend that could be seen in people who had over 40 wins during the regular season of Shinhan 2008/2009 ProLeague.
Jaedong: Winner of Batoo OGN StarLeague and Bacchus 2009 OGN StarLeague.
Flash: Okay, Flash was pretty mediocre in the individual leagues during this period, but he was still considered a top player due to his previous credentials.
Bisu: Winner of Clubday MSL.
Leta: ?
Calm: Winner of Avalon MSL.
In my memory, this ProLeague season was the first season when it wasn't totally insane to consider the fact that the top five performing players in the ProLeague might be contenders for the actual top five players at that moment in time. So it wasn't as insane as one might expect for somebody to predict really great things from Leta.
The three years that would follow (mid-2008 ~ mid-2011), due to the enormous sample size to draw from both the individual league and the ProLeague games, has some of the best overlap between excellent individual league, and ProLeague players.
The overlap can be seen below:
Players with the most number of wins in the ProLeague in the three seasons that had both the year long format, and the All-Kill rounds (namely the 2008/2009, 2009/2010. 2010/2011 seasons):
1. Flash: 194-61
2. Jaedong: 178-76
3. Bisu: 164-60
4. FanTaSy: 136-83
5. Leta: 131-78
6. Light: 130-86
7. Stork: 122-79
7. ZerO: 122-102
8.Calm: 109-81
9. Kal: 108-98
10. Sea: 107-83
Players who found the most success in the individual leagues (15 finals in total, starting from the finals of Incruit OGN StarLeague, and ending with the final of ABCMart MSL) during this period:
(16 points for 1st place, 8 points for 2nd place, and we keep halving the points until we have 1 point for a round of 16 finish, I'll give 0.5 points for round of 32 of the MSL, and the second part of the round of the round of 36 of the OGN StarLeague, but any round below that will be awarded zero points)
1. Flash: 89 points
1. Jaedong: 89 points
3. FanTaSy: 47 points
4. Stork: 37.5 points
5. Calm: 36 points
6. Bisu: 31.5 points
7. ZerO: 29 points
8. EffOrt: 24 points
9. Hydra: 22.5 points
10. Kal: 22 points
Of these two lists, only Leta, Light, Sea, EffOrt, and Hydra are the odd men out, whereas the other 8 players are fixtures on both lists, albeit with some different placements.
Now the case with EffOrt can be explained due to his temporary retirement in 2010, and missing out more than half a year's worth of progaming schedule.
Hydra can be explained due to the nature of his meteoric rise during the latter parts of this period, and did have a top ten record in the last and the final year-long season of the ProLeague.
Light had his career high in 2010, where he had the highest number of wins in the 2010 Winner's League, finished with the third most number of wins in that season of the ProLeague (only behind Flash and Jaedong), and reached the round of four for his first and only time in BigFile MSL. Perhaps if he had won that game five against Jaedong, history might remember him in a different light.
Leta had his career high in 2009, when he was the fourth best player in the ProLeague, and had his best chance at Lost Saga MSL, where Leta himself removed Flash from the equation, and only had to win one extra game versus the eventual champion Luxury. He then would have faced ZerO, a player he had great results historically against. Of course, even if he reached the finals, Leta was the underdog against JangBi, but that boost of confidence might have given him the strength to perservere when his teammates were leaking replays to enemy teams and throwing matches for money.
I think it's mostly a question of whether these players managed to seize the moment. EffOrt, if not for that remade game versus Shine, probably would have been knocked out of the round of 16. Had the referees decided to give that game to Shine, EffOrt would forever be remembered as the guy with great overall win percentages, and good skills, but someone simply wasn't clutch enough for the important moments.
The only players to have reached multiple finals in the modern era was Flash and FanTaSy for the terran race, Jaedong for the zerg race, and Bisu, Stork, and JangBi for the protoss race. For the rest of the players, reaching even one finals was a huge ordeal, and if you were lucky enough to make it that far while you were on your hot streak, you needed to make it count, because chances were, you were never going to reach the finals again.
That's the way I see it. There was only three players who were creme de la creme across all three tournaments (OGN StarLeague, MSL, and the ProLeague) during the final years of professional Brood War, and that was Flash, Jaedong, and FanTaSy. The rest had to make do with patches of brilliance, and needed to make most of it. EffOrt did it with his Korean Air OGN StarLeague Season 1 triumph. Leta did it with his Shinhan 2008/2009 ProLeague miracle performance. Few were consistent enough to their mark across all three tournaments, and if they did, it was an a very forgettable fashion like Kal during his final few years. Leta was a top player in my eyes, just not good enough to force his name into the history books, and not lucky/clutch enough to seize the moment when it was handed over to him.
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Japan11286 Posts
I agree with the sentiment of this post. I agree a lot that great players are not always those who just win a lof of hardware. Sometimes they're not just lucky enough or they weren't able to display clutchness. Sure, actually winning a finals series is serious pedigree but I don't think that losing it should detract much from that player.
Man, you just reminded me of how Hydra became good out of nowhere. JD was at the lowest point of his career then in came Hydra to topple his unmatchable muta micro prowess.
EffOrt certainly seized the moment to set his name and legacy. Reverse-sweep in the finals against the unflinching terminator-god-prodigy FlaSh? Clutch as hell.
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TLADT24920 Posts
On July 07 2017 18:05 GTR wrote:
I remember when he qualified for the Batoo OSL and pretty much every pundit on Teamliquid (myself included) had very high hopes for him Royal Roading that season.
Then he ended up getting cheesed in a tie-breaker game against by.herO on Tears of the Moon for his Ro16 group and that was the end of that particular hype train.
Even worse was the season after, where he lost to type-b in the Ro8...
To be fair, wasn't type-b considered an expert in ZvT or something? (read it on TL somewhere). Regardless, even if Leta's 2 port wraith is stellar, it was never a guaranteed victory
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On July 10 2017 00:28 BigFan wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2017 18:05 GTR wrote:
I remember when he qualified for the Batoo OSL and pretty much every pundit on Teamliquid (myself included) had very high hopes for him Royal Roading that season.
Then he ended up getting cheesed in a tie-breaker game against by.herO on Tears of the Moon for his Ro16 group and that was the end of that particular hype train.
Even worse was the season after, where he lost to type-b in the Ro8... To be fair, wasn't type-b considered an expert in ZvT or something? (read it on TL somewhere). Regardless, even if Leta's 2 port wraith is stellar, it was never a guaranteed victory
I believe Leta was the most successful player of all time with the two starport build versus zergs, with a career record of 19 wins and 3 losses (someone on YGOSU was insane enough to individually check all his VODs for the build). No build is a guaranteed victory, but a 86.4% chance of victory is pretty much as close as it gets to it for a relatively unconventional build choice.
I would be surprised if any terran player has more than ten televised winning games that started with the two starport build. Leta's mastery of wraiths wasn't just stellar, it was unmatched. If my memory serves me correct, other terran players such as Lomo, or Light may have had a couple of games worth of impressive wins with wraiths, but for Leta, the build wasn't a mere curve-ball build designed to catch zergs off-guard. Leta literally had the fine timings down to the wire, and was able to churn wins off this particular build for years.
As for TypE-B, there was this interview where TypE-B basically said that he bench-marked Yellow[Name] as his role model, and tried everything in order to imitate him. Considering Yellow[Name] is one of the greatest zergs of all time if you limit the parametres to the single match-up of zerg-versus-terran, I don't think it's a surprise that TypE-B had competent zerg-versus-terran abilities.
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I was a big fan of Leta back than and he was my personal biggest dissapointment of all players I liked. He was so awsome to watch and yet he had so underwhelming individual league performances...
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On July 10 2017 03:51 hitthat wrote:
I was a big fan of Leta back than and he was my personal biggest dissapointment of all players I liked. He was so awsome to watch and yet he had so underwhelming individual league performances...
Leta was a flower that blossomed in a sinking ship that was doomed for failure. OGN Sparkyz was a joke of a team created by Ongamenet purely for the purposes of having some political leverage as one of the KeSPA teams. It was full of bad managament, lack of funding, replay leaking, and match-fixing lead by the ring leader Justin, who was the biggest scumbag in the whole match-fixing scandal.
The game below is a game that was confirmed to have been played after Leta's replays were leaked to Hwasin, although Leta somehow still won despite having his build order revealed in advance. You can tell from the way Hwasin plays that he knew exactly what was coming.
+ Show Spoiler +
In this sorry excuse of a team, Leta's hard work, unwavering integrity, and spirit transformed him from a totally mediocre player in 2007, to a hard carrying force for his team in 2008. I don't know exactly how much his teammates sabotaged Leta, but if Hwasin was willing to admit in court that sAviOr had gotten him replays revealing Leta's strategy (probably from Justin) in order to fix the result of the game in advance, it is a possibility that Justin, the sack of shit without any morals, was capable of fixing other unknown instances of Leta losing games because his strategies were leaked to his opponents.
We don't know the full, exact details of how far reaching the cancer that was Justin and his match-fixing buddies was. However, we do know that Justin, being the captain of OGN Sparkyz, would have had the most success leaking replays off his own teammates, and the game Hwasin confessed as being fixed in his favour was a proof of that. Maybe Leta's performances in the individual leagues were completely unaffected by this, maybe it wasn't, but I can't imagine any player realizing his full potential in the toxic, cancerous environment that Leta had to overcome.
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EPT
