Greatest player of all times

In my opinion the greatest starcraft players list can be narrowed down to 5 players. Grrrr, Boxer, Nada, Oov and Savior. Other players like Yellow, Ra and July are great in their own right, but fall short when you compare them to these 5 gods of starcraft.

Grrrr was not only the greatest foreign player ever, but dominated the early Korean programming scene. He came to Korea as the famous ladder gosu everybody knew and befuddled the best that Korea had to offer with his random play (he only selected protoss when he was in trouble which goes to show how far ahead he considered himself to be). Not only did he get astronomical tournament winnings, which by the way were the only source of income for programmers back then, his annual tournament winnings back then are still comparable to the tournament winnings of top gamers today.

Boxer is boxer. I\'ll skip him. Nada as all of you know has accomplished more than any other programmer. Oov ended Nada\'s era and took his level of domination one step further. And as of now Savior is the man to beat.

How do we compare these players? Well, there are a lot of ways. One way is to take a segment of career when these players were at their peak (their best 100 consecutive games), and compare them statistically. Of course there are a lot of factors, but I believe that as far as comparing goes, this way isn\'t too bad. I got the sources from pgr21 and other Korean starcraft community sites, I\'m pretty sure these numbers are accurate.

1. Grrrr (Feb 16th 2000 ~ April 27th 2001)

v T: 7 wins 0 loses (100%)
v Z: 22 wins 16 losses (57.9%)
v P: 3 wins 5 losses (37.5%)
Total: 32 wins 21 losses (60.4%)

Grrrr played in an era when there were less televised matches then today and he was notorious for practicing less than he should and his era quickly came to an end. I think the guy who organized the statistics had to stretch out Grrrr\'s peak era because he didn\'t play enough games, thus the numbers don\'t look too impressive. But if you look at the televised matches from 1999 to 2000, Grrrr had the most number of wins as well as the best winning percentage.

2. Boxer (Feb 16th 2001 ~ Aug 30th 2002)

v T: 15 wins 8 losses (65.2%)
v Z: 35 wins 13 losses (72.9%)
v P: 19 wins 10 losses (65.5%)
Total: 69 wins 31 losses (69%)

Boxer was famous even before his era of domination for his creative play. I guess his best display of domination can be seen in WCG 2001, where he won the whole tournmaent without losing a single game, and that's including the preliminaries. He said it himself, he practiced not so that he would win, but so that he would win in style. There may be better players than Boxer, but I don\'t think we\'ll ever see a bigger icon than him.

3. Nada (April 25th 2002 ~ March 13th 2003)

v T: 15 wins 9 losses (62.5%)
v Z: 33 wins 15 losses (68.8%)
v P: 22 wins 8 losses (78.6%)
Total: 70 wins 30 losses (70%)

The boy genius. This guy was made for starcraft. No weak match ups, a ridiculously high apm and the ability to just look at Boxer\'s replays and copy them without breaking a sweat (Nada was titled genius after he managed to absorb build orders which Boxer took days of hard thinking to make). He was the gosu amateur who beat programmers, and then he became the greatest of them all, perhaps even better than Boxer himself. He seems to be slightly restricted in his play, despite his \'freestyle\' way of playing, which is the only reason I can come up with when answering the question \'why did Oov get the better of him?\'.

4. Oov (July 11th 2003 ~ Aug 29th 2004)

v T: 32 wins 16 losses (66.7%)
v Z: 20 wins 3 losses (87%)
v P: 22 wins 7 losses (75.9%)
Total: 74 wins 26 losses (74%)

I have the hardest time explaining Oov\'s success (the best I can come up with is that he understood macromanagement better than anyone else at the time). His numbers are actually buffed up higher than it seems because he had instantaneous success compared to other gamers. He beat players left and right when he was an anonimity, and his winning percentage dropped to appropriate levels with each passing year.

5. Savior

Ok. It\'s clear that the four previous players now have their best days behind them. There are two periods for Savior, and even these two slots might not show him in the best light since he could do even better to increase his percentage.

a) (Feb 12th 2005 ~ sometime in 2006)

The guy who organised most of these statistics, altair, didn\'t really specify time line. I would guess the approximate date to be sometime after Savior beat Ra in the Pringles Season 2 finals.

v T: 21 wins 7 losses (75%)
v Z: 20 wins 13 losses (60.6%)
v P: 28 wins 11 losses (71.8%)
Total: 69 wins 31 losses (69%)

This is the early stage of Savior\'s career at the beginning of which he had yet to be recognized as a top class gamer.

b) (March 4th 2006 ~ Feb 16th 2007)

v T: 31 wins 15 losses (67.3%)
v Z: 20 wins 6 losses (76.9%)
v P: 25 wins 3 losses (89.3%)
Total: 76 wins 24 losses (76%)

As you all know 2006 has been Savior\'s best year by far. Depending on his results in the future, reaching 90% winning percentage versus protoss and 80% winning percentage versus zerg could be the mind boggling feat he achieves. He still does great against terran, but exposure to top class opposition over a period of time and the ever present terran favouring maps took its toll.

So there you have it. If we exclude Grrrr, because his era of dominance is hard to compare with others, you can see that there\'s hardly any difference (69, 70, 74, 76 wins out of 100 respectively) between the four programmers. The scary thing is though, Savior\'s winning percentage is increasing as time passes by, and it's already highest out of the five already.