TaeJa career story - part 2 (HotS)

Wings of Liberty had seen TaeJa in peak career form as it came to a close. The star Terran of Team Liquid had followed up his foreign tournament championships with two GSL Code S semi-finals runs in the span of the last three held before the switch to Heart of the Swarm. With the arrival of the new expansion, TaeJa flew out to Dallas for the MLG Winter Championship in the middle of March. After defeating SaSe, a foreign Protoss who had been a bane of his in WoL, 3:1 in the Ro32, TaeJa was ruthlessly eliminated in a 3:0 sweep by fellow Korean Terran Bomber.

A couple of days after Dreamhack Summer, TaeJa played his WCS American Challenger group, beating hellokitty and Neeb without difficulty, earning a Premier League spot for Season 2. Less than a week later and it was time for TaeJa to board a plane for Germany, to play at HomeStory Cup VII. Rampaging through the two group stages, TaeJa reached the Ro8 with only a single map loss against him. Thrashing former GSL champion Seed in the Ro8 earned him a semi-final series against team-mate TLO. Having just beaten TLO 2:0 in Sweden, many would have predicted the monster Terran would roll over the Zerg on his team-mate's home soil. Instead, TLO would weather the assault of TaeJa going up 2:0 to claw back to 2:2 and a deciding game. TaeJa won the deciding map and moved on to his first final of HotS.

Former GSL champion Life would have had many Terran players worried, but more concerning for TaeJa was that Life had beaten him in all of their only offline meetings. In online competition, as Code A and B level players, TaeJa had always held over the young StarTale Zerg, but once their rivalry had transitioned into the offline phase the Korean Zerg had beaten him in three straight series, going 7:0 in maps against Liquid's champion Terran. Another scary opponent proved to be little more than a shadow of a tree on a wall, as TaeJa continued his undefeated playoff run with a 2:0 series win to reach the final.

As only TaeJa could, he complained after the win about only winning tournaments worth at most $10,000 (though technically his ASUS ROG win that year had been worth $13,000). Phrasing aside, it was clear that TaeJa felt some level of frustration that his best form had seemingly always been on display in the medium-sized tournaments, never at the biggest events or in GSL Code S. No amount of foreign tournament wins could stack up to the prestige of winning events like GSL, WCS Global Finals and such. After years of top level play and sustained wrist damage, TaeJa was clearly reflecting on opportunities gone to waste in his career.