Road to BlizzCon 2019: herO (#7 WCS Korea)

Down, But Never Out

by Wax

As we head into the Global Finals, we inevitably end up sorting the players in a variety of arbitrary categories. The favorites. The contenders. The underdogs. The no-chance-in-hell's.

I get the feeling that many StarCraft II fans are going to place herO into the underdog bucket, but my personal designation for him is slightly different. As I see it, herO is the 'wild card' of the tournament, which isn't to say he's not an underdog. Wild cards are generally underdogs as well, but not all underdogs get to be wild-cards.


Two series played a major role in my coming to this conclusion (extremely scientific, I know). The first is herO vs Trap from the IEM Katowice round-of-12. Now, if you skipped it at the time just because it was a Protoss vs Protoss that ended 3-0, I highly recommend you go back and watch it now. Not because the games were any 'good' in the conventional sense, but because they're utterly incomprehensible. Twice, Trap blew games that seemed borderline-unloseable—a one base and two upgrade level advantage in game one, and a twenty-two worker difference in game two. herO achieved this both times by seemingly saying "f*** it," determining the one move that gave him a 1% chance at winning the game, and somehow hitting on that 1%.



The second series is more recent: herO vs Dream from GSL Super Tournament II on Disco Bloodbath from Super Tournament 2. While the score says it was an uninteresting 3-0 stomp for herO, soO happened to be re-streaming the match on AfreecaTV with Stats providing commentary (among other progamers). The running trend of the night seemed to be Stats not knowing what the hell herO was doing, be it a greedy Adept shade-in, cutting Probes for a semi 'all-in' off three bases, or going Phoenix-Colossus in 2019. While Stats struggled to understand what was going on, he ultimately appreciated the fact that herO was getting the wins. Stats mentioned he wanted to learn herO's unpredictable style but just couldn't bring himself to do it. "Maybe I'm the one who doesn't understand the game," he mused.

If I had to distill all of that into one defining strength for herO, it wouldn't be that he's aggressive or unpredictable—it would be that he's decisive. Honestly, he always has been, even if it's been overshadowed by his other attributes in the past. Indeed, herO was great at a lot of things during his peak years in 2014-2015, back when he was regularly winning tournaments or earning a place on the medal stand. If you go back and watch some matches where he gets to show off his Blink-Stalker micro (say, this match against Jaedong on King Sejong Station), you'll wonder why the Korean government lets this war criminal walk free. Likewise, his micro was impeccable on Immortal-Sentry all-ins—PartinG may have been the public marketing face of the "Soul Train," but herO was arguably the player who rode it to more tournament success. On the other hand, herO wasn't just about all-ins—he was an excellent macro player player as well. He may not have been on the level of a peak Rain or Zest—tough contemporaries to be compared to—but he was certainly good enough to out-macro other top players in championship-winning tournament runs.

But through the lens of the present, ahead of the 2019 Global Finals, it's the comebacks, the base-trades, and the weird games that are standing out to me the most. Of all the players in StarCraft II history who have been considered 'good,' herO might be unmatched in the frequency and speed at which he arrives at the decision to just throw his entire army at his opponent's base. And I don't mean this as an insult. herO always seems to be a half-beat ahead of his opponent in this specific kind of decision making, his army already marching across the map before his opponent has fully processed that "F2-A-move" is one of herO's options.

herO's decisive attacks don't always end up being the right decision, and sometimes his execution in a desperation attack or all-in is poor (like when he famously forgot the elimination condition of StarCraft II against Polt). In a similar vein, warping in four Dark Templars and hoping to find no detection isn't a high win-rate plan. But more often than not, herO's games suggest that 'stabilizing' from behind is an overrated aspiration (or reserved for the factions that have MULEs), and that giving yourself a chance to go for a game-winning move is better than waiting for an opportunity that may never come. After all, a victory grabbed from the whirling maw of chaos is still another victory in the end.

Maybe that's the fundamental reason that herO has often been fond of cheesing and going all-in: not just because the strategies themselves are so strong (they certainly are), but because they guarantee you at least one timing to seize the initiative and try to end the game on your own terms. It's as if he's always thinking 'You never know if your opponent is going to suck—why don't I go ask him with my army?' It's probably not a coincidence that herO's strongest year in Legacy of the Void was 2017, when "dive straight into the teeth of the opponent's defense" was a bigger part of the Protoss ethos.




At the risk of committing StarCraft heresy, herO is ever so slightly reminiscent of Boxer in his twilight years. Even when the progaming pioneer's mechanics had been surpassed by many of his peers, Boxer still had two big things going for him: his ability to create strategies and his decisiveness. Be it through a massive drop or leave-no-defenders-behind attack, Boxer rarely seemed to go down as a passive participant in the game.

It's clear that herO hasn't aged quite as gracefully as some of his peers at the Global Finals. Whether it's due to balance patches, shifts in the meta, declining mechanics, or just straight-up lack of motivation, herO is not the same all-around player he used to be. Some of his losses this year have been brutal to watch—his matches against Rogue and Dark in particular—with none of his tricks seemingly able to faze his opponents at all. However, if I had to attach the cliche of "anything is possible in a game as unpredictable as StarCraft" upon just one of the underdogs at the Global Finals, it wouldn't be SpeCial with his finely-tuned strategies or Reynor with his latent talent. It would have to be herO, a player with the audacity and decisiveness to alter the flow of any game.