ST_Squirtle

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Kong

Much like 2014, 2015 was the Year of Second Place for Korean Starcraft. After soO’s monopoly of the runner-up spot hit an abrupt end, Dream and ByuL took up the slack, sharing five of the six starleague silvers on offer. From GSL Season 3 in 2013 to the end of HotS, these three players finished on the losing side on nine out of ten occasions. Zealously has already charted the fortunes of the Kongs of Starcraft 2 in Kings of Silver, but I want to answer a simpler question. Why are they described as failures?

The difference between success and failure is a rigid dichotomy, and a player's career is usually judged according to the highest standards. soO was pilloried for his repeated consecutive losses, mocked long before the sheer weight of his achievements began to reach critical mass, while Dream has been dismissed for being a “bubble”—Korean terminology for a player undeserving of his results. It’s undeniable that their conquerors, from Dear to INnoVation, have taken the bulk of the accolades following their clashes, even if a counterexample exists in Classic—forever dismissed despite a pair of starleague trophies. A Kong is fated to lose in the home stretch. They’re collectively viewed as mentally weak, incapable of handling pressure. They suffer the indignity of being chokers, as players forever doomed to fall at the bitter end. While the last point is certainly true by definition, I have an issue with the former two.

To dismiss a player as mentally weak is the easiest and most damning of put-downs. Mechanical issues can be fixed. Strategic choices can be honed. Criticizing a player’s mentality is essentially condemning them to inevitable failure. It’s easy to look at a long list of defeats in major finals for otherwise unstoppable players, and to blame it all on breaking down when the going gets tough.

To do that is to focus on one game at the cost of all the others. For example it would be folly to take Squirtle’s path through IPL 4, one of the greatest LAN runs in history, and reduce the achievement to the very last series. He trucked his way through the open bracket, through the lower bracket, all the way to the finals. Squirtle’s resilience even included a mini-resurgence at the death against aLive, coming back from 0-2 down to take the first series 3-2 and push the finals to a second Bo5. Similarly, it would have been easy to throw in the towel against Mvp in the GSL Finals. Down 0-3 against the greatest SC2 player in history, who wouldn't be tempted to give up hope? Instead Squirtle fought back all the way to the decisive game 7. There’s an interesting parallel here to Soulkey vs INnoVation—the only other time that a player has battled back from 0-3 down in a GSL Finals to push the series to the ace match. Soulkey will forever be a champion because of INnoVation’s choke, while Squirtle will forever be a runner up because of Mvp’s clutch decisions. It’s hard not to imagine that those roles could have been reversed should the two terrans have been swapped.



Equally, it is far too easy to blame soO or ByuL’s mentalities for those awe-inspiring strings of losses, and doing so would be to overlook the fact that, on each occasion, they got back up for another tilt at the title. What about soO’s masterpiece of a Bo7 against Zest in the GSL 2014 Season 3 semifinals, or ByuL’s indomitable will to hang on in against INnoVation’s mech during their SSL 2015 Season 3 quarterfinal? Was Dream mentally weak when he took on Life, in the best form of his career, and fought him head on in a pair of the toughest, most intense TvZs ever played? As defeats stack up, the easy option is to give in; to recede back to being merely a participant, banking cash for being one of the chasing pack; the harder one is to refocus and come back even stronger. It’s hard to accept the popular wisdom that a Kong is mentally weak, while players who have displayed a fraction of that endurance and achievement get a free ride.

It might also be easy to throw the ‘choker’ label on a player after a string of high profile defeats, but it’s harder to recall the context surrounding them. For instance, in his four GSL finals to date, soO was matched against Dear (on one of the hottest streaks in Starcraft history), Zest (at the start of a year-long reign of dominance over the Korean scene) and INnoVation (at the height of a terran-favoured meta in TvZ), and was only truly favoured to win one—against Classic (who’s shown since that he’s arguably the most dangerous and complete protoss in Korea). ByuL’s recent hat-trick of defeats came against three of the best players in the history of the game, playing at near-peak strength. Squirtle’s GSL loss came against Mvp.



We spend so much time thinking about how the loser might have done better—strategic choices that went wrong, errors in control or judgement—that we often simply ignore how well the winner played. How Zest's royal road against soO was the ultimate display of the defensive power of protoss, or how herO's miniscule adjustments and feints threw ByuL off the scent of the incoming all-ins. To focus overwhelmingly on the opinion that 'one player choked' while ignoring the brilliance of the other is to denigrate both players involved.

So does that one weakness, that final flaw on the biggest of stages matter? On some level, yes it does. There’s a reason we, as a culture, celebrate the champion; the winner who takes the big prize home at the end of the day. We all obviously aspire to that level of success. As anybody who’s ever excelled at an early age will know, you’re constantly warned that at the next level up, it’s likely that you’ll find it tougher; that there will always be that one person better than you. The joy of the champion is that they beat the odds and ride that wave to the top, becoming the best player in their family, then amongst their friends, then their team, then the world. The disappointment of the loser is that they do the same; up until that fateful day when they realise that their dream will never be achieved; the day they realise that they will never stand unchallenged at the top of the scene. The tragedy of the Kong is that that knowledge of inferiority never kicks in, and they carry on fighting, chasing the trophy that might never come. In that way, while the champions represent our aspirations, it is the Kongs, more than anyone else in the Starcraft scene, who represent us at our idealistic best. They are the ones with the talent; the ones who spend hour after hour, day after day ensuring that that talent doesn’t go to waste; chasing their dream no matter the odds, no matter the setbacks.





The moment that stands out most to me from Squirtle’s career isn’t his storm through the IPL 4 brackets, nor his ultimate demise in the following GSL campaign, nor even his many successes in the GSTL for both StarTale and Incredible Miracle. It’s a game from the forgotten season of GSL—Season 1 of 2013—the final GSL played on Wings of Liberty. Up 1-0 in the winners match of the Round of 16, he faced Soulkey on Neo Planet S.



As a bitesize recap, it doesn’t sound like anything particularly special—a baneling bust followed by a zerg out-macroing his opponent off a much better economy. But to watch it was to see Squirtle’s career distilled into a single game. It was to see a player lose a game inside five minutes, only to spend the next twenty-five trying fruitlessly to fight against the dying of the light. It was to see a protoss play one base to three against one of the best zergs in the world for close to half an hour; to see him take perfect engagements time after time; to see him put every last remaining drop of talent on the table to stave off defeat. We knew that Soulkey had won; Soulkey knew that he had won; but despite the inevitability of his fate, Squirtle went about his task to prove us wrong, and the impossibility of that mission only accentuated his performance in one of the best games of the year. It’s that fighting spirit which sums up the Kongs to me. They, more than anyone else in the scene, believe that they have the potential to be the best, without ever getting that magical confirmation of coronation.






Whether they are robbed of their skills by the irrevocable build-up of injuries, run out of time before life or the military comes calling, or simply fall out of love with the game, every professional gamer in Starcraft 2 has a ticking clock counting down to the end. In that regard, there’s always a degree of urgency associated with the struggle for respect and glory, especially given their short career lifetime. Results are everything, and each competition; each match; each set is a battle for players to stamp their names in the game’s history. In an interview conducted with ByuL by Xsportsnews just prior to BlizzCon, he outlined his philosophy after his third sapping defeat in a starleague grand final:




Again, then, I ask—does that final step matter? For a lucky few, Starcraft is a way to earn a living; for the rest, it’s an arena to unleash their competitive drive. ByuL’s answer cuts to the core of what so many in Starcraft chase—respect and glory is the ultimate goal. Championships might be the most effective path to get there, but to disregard all other achievements is short sighted in the extreme.

Winning in Starcraft is hard, but losing is even harder, and the courage, determination and mental strength it takes to brush off a defeat, and to stand up for another go is often overlooked. If the pure act of winning was all that was important, we’d love Mvp for his 2011, not his 2012; we’d adore RorO and Sniper. Years from now, when games, seasons and champions slowly begin to blend into one another in our memory, what we will be left with are the storylines of the players we have now followed for over half a decade. There will be players who fade away, champions who will be lost in time, but I doubt we’ll ever forget the Kongs. In their own way, they will be among the most successful of them all. Let’s not deny them the respect they’re due any longer.

Writer: munch
Gfx: shiroiusagi
Photo Credit: GOM, ESL, ThisIsGame