#1: Maru - Greatest Players of All Time - Page 23

On March 21 2024 01:07 PremoBeats wrote:
I seriously wonder how much ratios had to be distorted to come up with this conclusion.

While I was lying sick in bed, I was bored and took my time to analyze StarCraft2 data. I made some excel sheets, typed in the numbers and what I saw was absolutely insane at times. So here I share the statistics I found and hope you enjoy this little summary I wrote, after the GOAT debate was settled - at least for me

- There is a player who achieved the Triple Crown twice, which only 2 other players achieved (MVP being the other).
- There is a player who has the highest win rate vs top Korean players in 5 years out of 13 StarCraft2 years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023) - by far the most dominant.
- There is a player who won the world championship twice (most wins among two others)
- There is a player who holds the longest winning streak against at least Top 100 players (47 consecutive wins - 12th of May 2018 till 6th of October 2018)
- There is a player who holds the longest winning streak against top Koreans (19 consecutive wins 17th of May 2023 till 3rd of August 2023; 2nd place the same player with 18 consecutive wins 4th of August 2018 till 1st of May 2019)
- There is a player who achieved an over 90% match win rate in a year (2023) overall - which no one else ever achieved (The closest is Maru with 76% also in 2023)
- There is a player who achieved an over 73% (73,24%) game win rate in a year (2023) vs Koreans, which no one else ever achieved (closest is Serral with 69,86% in 2018 and Maru’s 69,44% also in 2023).
- There is a player who achieved an over 85% (!!!!) match win rate in three years (2018, 2020, 2023) vs Koreans. The next best other players being Maru with 78% in 2023, Serral with 76,76% in 2019 and herO with 74% in 2017.
- There is a player who has by far the most Premier Tournaments wins with top Korean Participation (16) and overall (25)
- There is a player who has NO negative win rate vs ANY pro player since his first Premier Tournament win in 2015 which he played on a regular basis (at least 10 games) - which no one else ever achieved

Here are these player’s records against the top Koreans (wins:Korean player wins: draws):

vs Maru: 13:4:2
vs Dark: 8:5:1
vs GuMiho: 10:4:0
vs Solar: 16:7:1
vs Cure: 17:3:0
vs ByuN: 12:5:0
vs Classic: 8:2:0
vs Bunny: 9:2:0
vs stats: 9:4:0
vs soO: 8:4:0
vs Innovation: 16:8:0
vs Rogue: 8:6:0
vs Trap: 14:3:0
vs Zest: 10:5:0

And here the records vs some top world players :

vs Reynor: 31:16:0
vs MaxPax: 18:4:0
vs Heromarine: 26:4:0

That player has been so dominant since his rise to the top in 2018 in Seoul that he won more tournaments - with participation of the best Koreans in the world - in 6 years of playing StarCraft 2 than all players who have been present among the top players for much longer.

That player is Serral. I have no idea how anyone can deny that Serral is the GOAT of StarCraft 2. Not one player comes even close to such a dominance over such a long period of time while at the same time amassing more important trophies in less time than anyone else.
Serral's win rate vs his weakest matchup (Zerg) is higher than most pro's overall win rates.

To anyone arguing flash = SC2 GOAT: Flash never had win rates that even come close to Serral's and had lower win rates than Innovation at time. He also was only present in SC2 for around 2 years. He most definitely is the SC GOAT though.

To anyone arguing Innovation/Maru: These two both failed to show up on the really big stages. Maru only ever got a 2nd place at Worlds with his 2023 defeat against Oliveira. He didn’t do what sOs, ROgue or Serral did: Go to a big stage, where the best of the world compete and win.
The same is true for Innovation. Both Maru and him falter when competition from outside of Korea is present/when the big stage calls. Also both have lower win rates vs the top players and less achievements.

To anyone arguing sOs: sOs, who is a 2 time world champion, only has 5 premier tournament wins. If you consider Rogue and Serral, who also are in the debate, sOs falls short. The same holds true as for Innovation and Maru. Less achievements, less dominance.

Rogue has won 11 premier tournaments from 2017 to 2022. He, as well as Serral, won 2 Worlds.
Now let’s bring Serral into the equation. Out of his 25 premier tournament wins which span from 2018 to 2023, 16 are with top Korean participation, Serral won 2 World Championships. Him and Rogue in my opinion are the only two players who are consistent and showed up when the best of the world are present. They have achieved similar high end feats.
BUT: Serral has way more Premier Tournament wins (with top Korean participation and yet even more without) and was more dominant in his win rates and records versus other Korean players.

To people arguing that Serral never won a GSL, I have to reply “So what”?
He played the best of the best from GSL and defeated them time and again (see record vs these players and overall win rate vs Koreans above).
Does anyone seriously believe Serral would not have won the GSL if he was born Korean? And at the same taking Premier titles away from players who now claim them? If anything, Serral's dominance would have been EVEN MORE apparent for the aforementioned reasons.
Plus, Serral even went to Korea twice and both times won the GSL vs Worlds where the best of the GSL participated. He is able to beat these players and he has done so on Korean soil without being Korean. So if all people have to offer is: “Meh, GSL” it simply seems like a last straw to hold on to.
That argument sounds a little bit like this: Real Madrid (Serral) who defeated all Premier League teams (Chelsea, Man City, Liverpool etc.) in the Champions League (GSL vs World, World Championship, etc.) is not better than Liverpool because it never played in the Premier League. The argument is absurd. The Premier League (Korea) sends its best teams (Maru, Dark, Rogue) to the Champions League (GSL vs World, World Championship, etc.) and these best teams get beaten by Madrid (Serral). No one in their right mind would argue that Madrid isn’t the best team in the world when they won the Champions League, simply because it didn't play versus Wolverhampton. This argument makes no sense at all.
All this is not even taking into account that out of the last 6 years, the world champion only came out of Korea 2 times. Meaning yes, Korea still has the broadest and best player base, but at the top, there are several other players from around the world who are able to show them their limits.
Serral is also probably the best player to prepare for his opponents as Katowice 2024 has shown yet again. Does anybody in their right mind think that such a format would be worse for Serral?

Plus, one has to keep in mind that Serral did all this without TeamHouses or the Korean infrastructure which was way beyond anything that is even present nowadays in Europe.

Anyways, these are my thoughts.

Share statistics, if you disagree

On March 21 2024 01:07 PremoBeats wrote:

To anyone arguing sOs: sOs, who is a 2 time world champion, only has 5 premier tournament wins. If you consider Rogue and Serral, who also are in the debate, sOs falls short. The same holds true as for Innovation and Maru. Less achievements, less dominance.

On March 21 2024 01:15 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


"Does anyone seriously believe Serral would not have won the GSL if he was born Korean?"

To the KR prep elitists, yes.

Also, great post but i think i read this somewhere by another TL user. Did you steal their post or something?

Also, looking at the poll someone started a few pages ago, seems like the votes are in favor of Serral 2:1 so maybe the majority of TL actually agrees with Serral as #1 but it just looks more disputed going by the comments

On March 21 2024 16:18 PremoBeats wrote:


I posted it both on this and the Serral thread. I also posted it weeks ago on Youtube... the data I collected is all in Excel sheets, so this is definitely written by me

On March 21 2024 16:21 PremoBeats wrote:


Well, everyone makes mistakes, as the #2 post about Serral by TL proved, right
Because it was written that Serral went 7-0 at IEM 2024 in games and 17-1 in matches... I texted you guys yesterday and now this part stands corrected.
But at this moment, it still says that Serral and Maru never met in an offline final although the post was created after IEM 2024 where Serral beat Maru 4-0.

As I was looking on liquipedia for Premier Tournament wins and it says 5 for sOs over there, so can you please tell me where my notion is false? Or are you referring to the World Champion part? And if this little "mistake" is the only thing you have to disagree on, then I am pretty satisfied with something I researched while having a 40° fever.

And yeah, it is fair to claim Maru is the GOAT.
I simply disagree, as - in my opinion - the length of Serral's dominance as well as the scope of it (Aligulac's Hall of Fame is simply ridiculous on that one... 50k to 30k with 3rd place being around 13k) and on top his overall achievements make Serral outperform Maru and Rogue. You put more emphasis on Maru winning GSLs, which is fine. Maru won the bulk of his Premier Tournaments in 2018 and after (iirc only 2 wins before that year) and my point is, that Serral would have taken many Premier Tournaments of Koreans, if he in fact was born over there. This is concluded by his insane win rates versus all of these players. It is simply incredibly unlikely that he would have never won GSLs and thus taken titles away from Rogue, Maru, Inno, etc, given the statistics we have. And as I only counted tournaments with top Korean participation, it is also not very likely that Serral in turn would have won less of the ones he did.
We will never know though, as Serral was born in Finland, but in my opinion, his dominance is simply too big to put any other player above him.

Cheers anyways and thanks for your guys' effort.

On March 21 2024 16:49 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


Ah my bad, I was thinking of a post made by AdrianHealeyy. Some reason it felt similar but after reading his post (which was also stats-heavy), it's pretty different. I guess I just thought both posts were really good and confused them

"Because it was written that Serral went 7-0 at IEM 2024 in games and 17-1 in matches... I texted you guys yesterday and now this part stands corrected.
But at this moment, it still says that Serral and Maru never met in an offline final although the post was created after IEM 2024 where Serral beat Maru 4-0."

Dang nice observations. I honestly dunno how someone can continue to be so snarky when they make mistakes too lol

On March 21 2024 16:21 PremoBeats wrote:


Well, everyone makes mistakes, as the #2 post about Serral by TL proved, right
Because it was written that Serral went 7-0 at IEM 2024 in games and 17-1 in matches... I texted you guys yesterday and now this part stands corrected.
But at this moment, it still says that Serral and Maru never met in an offline final although the post was created after IEM 2024 where Serral beat Maru 4-0.

As I was looking on liquipedia for Premier Tournament wins and it says 5 for sOs over there, so can you please tell me where my notion is false? Or are you referring to the World Champion part? And if this little "mistake" is the only thing you have to disagree on, then I am pretty satisfied with something I researched while having a 40° fever.

And yeah, it is fair to claim Maru is the GOAT.
I simply disagree, as - in my opinion - the length of Serral's dominance as well as the scope of it (Aligulac's Hall of Fame is simply ridiculous on that one... 50k to 30k with 3rd place being around 13k) and on top his overall achievements make Serral outperform Maru and Rogue. You put more emphasis on Maru winning GSLs, which is fine. Maru won the bulk of his Premier Tournaments in 2018 and after (iirc only 2 wins before that year) and my point is, that Serral would have taken many Premier Tournaments of Koreans, if he in fact was born over there. This is concluded by his insane win rates versus all of these players. It is simply incredibly unlikely that he would have never won GSLs and thus taken titles away from Rogue, Maru, Inno, etc, given the statistics we have. And as I only counted tournaments with top Korean participation, it is also not very likely that Serral in turn would have won less of the ones he did.
We will never know though, as Serral was born in Finland, but in my opinion, his dominance is simply too big to put any other player above him.

Cheers anyways and thanks for your guys' effort.

On March 21 2024 17:14 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


I think they are counting sOs's Kato as a 3rd WC, which most people do. But there are some people who only count Blizzard WCs as official official WCs. So I don't think there was anything exactly incorrect in your post, though most people would consider Kato a WC.



There's a difference between "based on Serral's performance at the tournaments he enters, he would probably do well in a smaller and less competitive tournament in a region that he has won 2 out of 2 premiere tournaments at that were also hosted by the same organization" vs "based on Maru's performance at the tournaments he enters, he would probably do well at the biggest and most competitive tournaments on the international stage where he has never really shown great results" vs "based on MVP's results, if we excuse his injury and he magically got a physical buff that no other player gets to have in this hypothetical situation, he would perform better than he had and thus we can move him up the GOAT ranking".

You can apply Serral's results to a smaller, less competitive tournament with less money. You can't apply it to Maru for a bigger tournament with the world's best players with way more money at. Also we don't even need to apply it to Maru, because he's tried and tried and failed and failed to win a WC. Serral doesn't have that stain on his record, instead he has 2 out of 2 premiere GSL tournament wins that he competed at.

The MVP injury thing is a true hypothetical where you would have to unfairly buff one player's abilities/condition in order to try to rank them higher. Innovation losing motivation is a lack of determination/discipline/etc. Life getting banned stripped away the integrity of his achievements, you could say that perhaps he could have done well at this tournament or vs this opponent in his era before he got banned, but you can't extrapolate that he would still be performing well in the modern day. (Hence, I'm of the opinion that MVP is overrated and gets too much benefit of the doubt compared to other players).

On March 21 2024 18:49 PremoBeats wrote:


A couple of things:
1. Serral is widely considered to be the best strategic player and his preparation skills have always been way above average. This, if anything, should give him no disadvantage in GSL, but rather the opposite. Serral is used to playing against cheese, as most lower tier Pros try to get him uncomfortable anyways, as that is their "only" chance of defeating him.
He further is the only player who has a positive win record versus ALL players he played regularly (at least 10 games) with records that are at least in the 60% win ratios, some - for example against Maru or herO - even in the 70%.

2. From now on, when I talk about Premier Tournaments, I only talk about those with top Korean participation. Maru has won 15 of those, Serral 16. Out of the 16 Serral won, the highest skilled Koreans were present, including Maru. Out of the 15 Maru won, the highest skilled Koreans were present, but not Serral.

3. From 2018-2023 he could have played in 18 GSLs. Now we can make assumptions about several hypotheticals.
a. Let's say Serral would have won 3 out of the 18 possible attempts (very low assumption I know, but let's just go with this number). That would put him at 19 PT wins and Maru still at 15.
But this is only true if Serral wouldn't have been responsible for kicking Maru out in group stage or any of the final rounds.
b. Because if he did, Maru's score would drop. This would make the results even more glaringly obvious.

Meaning:
4. We know that Maru never won a World Championship. And the assumption that Serral would have never won a GSL is extremely unlikely. And it is very much in the scope of probability that Serral would have kicked out Maru in any of his attempts.

5. All of the above is taking into account that high tier players will be kicked out by lower tier players in the GSL, as well as in any other tournament. BUT: This is still an uproar. If it wasn't, it would be norm and no one would talk about it. So yes, this could happen to Serral too (and also did before, for example at IEM 2023), but that still does not mean that he probably never would have won a GSL.

So to get to the core of these thoughts...
Even if Serral only won 2 or 3 GSL, it would make it utterly obvious that he could have won each format and he would outrank Maru even more on PT wins with top Korean participation. What argument would be left against Serral being the GOAT, if he won even 2 GSLs?
And... Do you seriously believe that Serral would have never won a GSL looking at his records, dominance and overall statistics versus the players of GSL?

On March 21 2024 18:49 PremoBeats wrote:


A couple of things:
1. Serral is widely considered to be the best strategic player and his preparation skills have always been way above average. This, if anything, should give him no disadvantage in GSL, but rather the opposite. Serral is used to playing against cheese, as most lower tier Pros try to get him uncomfortable anyways, as that is their "only" chance of defeating him.
He further is the only player who has a positive win record versus ALL players he played regularly (at least 10 games) with records that are at least in the 60% win ratios, some - for example against Maru or herO - even in the 70%.

2. From now on, when I talk about Premier Tournaments, I only talk about those with top Korean participation. Maru has won 15 of those, Serral 16. Out of the 16 Serral won, the highest skilled Koreans were present, including Maru. Out of the 15 Maru won, the highest skilled Koreans were present, but not Serral.

3. From 2018-2023 he could have played in 18 GSLs. Now we can make assumptions about several hypotheticals.
a. Let's say Serral would have won 3 out of the 18 possible attempts (very low assumption I know, but let's just go with this number). That would put him at 19 PT wins and Maru still at 15.
But this is only true if Serral wouldn't have been responsible for kicking Maru out in group stage or any of the final rounds.
b. Because if he did, Maru's score would drop. This would make the results even more glaringly obvious.

Meaning:
4. We know that Maru never won a World Championship. And the assumption that Serral would have never won a GSL is extremely unlikely. And it is very much in the scope of probability that Serral would have kicked out Maru in any of his attempts.

5. All of the above is taking into account that high tier players will be kicked out by lower tier players in the GSL, as well as in any other tournament. BUT: This is still an uproar. If it wasn't, it would be norm and no one would talk about it. So yes, this could happen to Serral too (and also did before, for example at IEM 2023), but that still does not mean that he probably never would have won a GSL.

So to get to the core of these thoughts...
Even if Serral only won 2 or 3 GSL, it would make it utterly obvious that he could have won each format and he would outrank Maru even more on PT wins with top Korean participation. What argument would be left against Serral being the GOAT, if he won even 2 GSLs?
And... Do you seriously believe that Serral would have never won a GSL looking at his records, dominance and overall statistics versus the players of GSL?

On March 21 2024 19:13 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


Similar yes, better probably too. His record has proven we could expect that much at worst.

Even the most extreme cases like sOs who won an insane 3 WCs reached the Code S finals a couple times, and we know Serral has far superior achievements/winrate/dominance/H2H/etc.

On March 21 2024 18:49 PremoBeats wrote:


A couple of things:
1. Serral is widely considered to be the best strategic player and his preparation skills have always been way above average. This, if anything, should give him no disadvantage in GSL, but rather the opposite. Serral is used to playing against cheese, as most lower tier Pros try to get him uncomfortable anyways, as that is their "only" chance of defeating him.
He further is the only player who has a positive win record versus ALL players he played regularly (at least 10 games) with records that are at least in the 60% win ratios, some - for example against Maru or herO - even in the 70%.

2. From now on, when I talk about Premier Tournaments, I only talk about those with top Korean participation. Maru has won 15 of those, Serral 16. Out of the 16 Serral won, the highest skilled Koreans were present, including Maru. Out of the 15 Maru won, the highest skilled Koreans were present, but not Serral.

3. From 2018-2023 he could have played in 18 GSLs. Now we can make assumptions about several hypotheticals.
a. Let's say Serral would have won 3 out of the 18 possible attempts (very low assumption I know, but let's just go with this number). That would put him at 19 PT wins and Maru still at 15.
But this is only true if Serral wouldn't have been responsible for kicking Maru out in group stage or any of the final rounds.
b. Because if he did, Maru's score would drop. This would make the results even more glaringly obvious.

Meaning:
4. We know that Maru never won a World Championship. And the assumption that Serral would have never won a GSL is extremely unlikely. And it is very much in the scope of probability that Serral would have kicked out Maru in any of his attempts.

5. All of the above is taking into account that high tier players will be kicked out by lower tier players in the GSL, as well as in any other tournament. BUT: This is still an uproar. If it wasn't, it would be norm and no one would talk about it. So yes, this could happen to Serral too (and also did before, for example at IEM 2023), but that still does not mean that he probably never would have won a GSL.

So to get to the core of these thoughts...
Even if Serral only won 2 or 3 GSL, it would make it utterly obvious that he could have won each format and he would outrank Maru even more on PT wins with top Korean participation. What argument would be left against Serral being the GOAT, if he won even 2 GSLs?
And... Do you seriously believe that Serral would have never won a GSL looking at his records, dominance and overall statistics versus the players of GSL?

On March 21 2024 19:13 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:


Similar yes, better probably too. His record has proven we could expect that much at worst.

Even the most extreme cases like sOs who won an insane 3 WCs reached the Code S finals a couple times, and we know Serral has far superior achievements/winrate/dominance/H2H/etc.