[BSL12] Ro4 Preview

Ok! First, let me state that I'm not really including Chinese players either. While there's little question that the best non-korean player at some point between 2000 and 2010 was Chinese, they had their own scene and weren't really involved in the non-korean community - lag also made it pretty unplayable.

Firstly, the players that were closest to making my list were Draco and Blackman. That might add to the impression of the anti-polish bias of my article, I guess. :D

With Blackman there's no question in my mind that he was the best non-korean player at his peak. But the peak was not very long, it's basically in 2002. He got third place in WCG that season (best non-korean, ahead of Elky), but then he went inactive and never regained his previous level. I remember he got bbsed out of WCG poland by a terran player with 80 apm, I think the year after, might have been 2004 though. He was mostly characterized by absolutely amazing macro (larvea turned to eggs within 5 seconds of spawning every time) and relentless lurker drops.

Draco was probably the best player between Mondragon and Idra's reigns, in late 2006-2007. He won PGL, beating the top chinese (as well as one korean and lots of other foreign) players in the process. But, again, if you look at most tournaments he participated in, I think he probably lost more against players like Mondragon, Testie and Sen than he beat them.

Anyway, I'll go about it more chronologically, and expand some on the players I already mentioned.

First I mentioned Maynard. Maynard was probably the most dominant any player has ever been, because he had figured out an essential aspect of the game before any other players did. He mostly played on Kali (which was home of most of the best players in 1998), was nicknamed 'God', is still frequently referred to because 'transferring workers to another base' was named after him. I never played him myself during this stage, but I heard stories that he would actually beat other legitimately good players in a straight up 1v2 - players that by today's standard would probably be equivalent of low S, high A rank. (As great as Flash is, there is no way he would beat two of me at the same time). Now, part of why he was so good is that everybody else were so bad - but imagine if you are building 35 workers per game while your opponents stop at 20.

Then I mentioned Grrrr...
Also known as Giyom, he was the first superstar of the game. In 1999, he won most of the biggest tournaments in the scene (PGL 4, brood war world championships and more), then moved to Korea and won the first OSL. He was the best player in the world - Korea included, for more than a year.

Between Maynard and Giyom, there were other great players that deserve a mention, who won big tournaments. First, Gadianton won PGL season 3 - PGL being one of the first esports tourneys, 'professional gamers' league'. He won it playing random, and I recall reading that he picked random because he wanted to show that the game wasn't imbalanced.

Zileas won the Brood War Beta tournament - which was a really big thing, but quite frankly, he was fairly one-dimensional and benefited from some legit imbalance. He's basically the father of reaver micro - but this was partially caused by playing during a period where reavers had no cooldown after being dropped from shuttles. Again - he did win the biggest tournament around, one where all the other top players were competing, but that was basically it for what he accomplished.

D22-SoSo is another player that I remember from the first years - he won the 1999 Brood War Ladder tournament, beating Giyom. He was also quite the character - he was entirely obsessed with 'Eugene Kim', from kpop-band S.E.S, and actually managed to utilize his brood war fame to score a meeting with her at a concert.

The pre-2000 era was really exciting, but coverage was sparse. There were no replays and generally no VODs, nobody had figured out how to make observer maps. The biggest tournaments saw battle reports written, sometimes by one of the players. I remember one tournament game that was played on a 2-player map - then the only way to get a battlereport from that game was that they played on team melee and had observers on both teams' that wrote a report after. Many other players were fantastic players.

In 2001, the Norwegian player Slayer was the best player in the world. He's the last non-korean player to win a tournament against top korean competition - KBK. But there were others that were really great, too. For one, his friend and mentor sVEN deserves a mention. While sVEN never won any equally high profile tournaments, he was arguably just as good. I remember hearing that when GARIMTO was practicing for his 2001 OSL final against Slayers`Boxer, sVEN was one of his main practice partners - and that sVEN was beating him something like 70% of the time. sVEN was a really, really smart player - while Slayer was mechanically gifted in a way the brood war scene had never seen before. (There's a Norwegian documentary about his KBK win where you can see Maynard - who was living in Korea at the time - state 'he's the fastest player I've ever seen'.) I'll even share a personal story - I watched Slayer play live in 2000, at 'The Gathering' LAN in Norway. It was actually really disheartening, and for a period after, I completely gave up hope of competing in brood war because he was so unbelievably much faster than me that I thought I'd never have a chance at getting to his level. This was partially before replays, and definitely before we knew how to measure APM, but I remember once we first got BWChart to measure APM, Slayer was the first guy I checked out, and while his ~250 apm wouldn't scare anyone today, knowing that he had sub 10% hotkey use, that most others at that time were below 150, and that there was no spamming to inflate APM (because those replays were from a period where APM wasn't even measured), it was something real special.

These were both part of the GG## clan, together with Elky, NTT and a few others, and arguably, these four players were actually #1-4 outside Korea.

Slayer and sVEN then both went to serve in the army and never returned to their former glory. They both attempted a comeback in 2004, but Slayer lost the WCG Norway winner bracket final against yours truly - proving my 2000 sentiment wrong.

From 2002 until 2003, Elky is the top non-korean player. He would actually lose against non-korean players quite frequently, and I do think Blackman is a superior player for part of this 'reign' - but he moved to Korea and reached the fourth place in both an OSL and WCG. Top 4 in an OSL is basically like top 4 in an ASL - this ranks significantly higher than anything anyone else was doing.

There are others worth mentioning during this period, though. For one, the father of team liquid - Nazgul, was genuinely a fantastic player. He also moved to Korea, but without achieving real success. Most famously he played a I think bo7 vs Slayers`Boxer and lost 3-4. Boxer's position then was kinda like Flash's position now - so this was genuinely fantastic. He also beat Xellos in a game on Plains to Hill, using a lot of speed shuttles in the process. Poor mechanically, Nazgul had some genuinely _fantastic_ build orders. He also beat korean progamer Jinnam with a ridiculously cool cannon rush on lost temple. (Something like a 7 gateway 10 forge opening against a zerg player on the 9' position, where he used the early zealots to block the choke while building cannons under the ramp, followed by cannon-pushing the gas, meaning Jinnam had to try to break those zealots+cannons without gas. Obviously impossible. )

Sweden had a guy named 'Saft' who was an online beast who almost never lost - but he didn't achieve much in terms of tournaments.

Fisheye deserves a mention, too. He got third place in WCG 2003. Another really smart player with poor mechanics, Fisheye excelled in tournaments and got some really great results. Still - I don't think he was ever #1 outside Korea, but he was top 3-5 for several years. Also beat Pusan 2-1 in the Europe vs Asia tourney in 2005!

From 2003, we're also seeing the emergence of another player that really deserves a mention - Ret. Ret has been known as the guy who can go afk for as long as he wants to, but that always becomes a top player again shortly after returning. Still - unfortunately for him - I think Mondragon was always better than him from 2004 until 2006-7, and then Idra was better than him after that. Testie deserves a mention too - he was Mondragon's closest competition from 2004-2006 (and Testie was also very good between 1999 and 2003) - but he's also kinda controversial, because he was a map hacker for a long period of time. Still - he was legit from 2004 onward, and he was definitely top 2-3 during this period.

Also giving a honorable mention to Asmodey and Androide, two fantastic russian players. Androide used to give me aneurisms because he would just randomly place his command centers (like, he'd literally just build the cc 2 hexes off what was optimal and not bother correcting it in every single game he played, accepting that his income suffered from it) - but the guy was a fantastic player. Asmodey scored some of the best results of anyone in the 2002-2003 period.

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