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Northern Ireland26693 Posts
On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation.
Indeed, minus the WC millstone, he’s really rounded out his resume over the years. Not just being consistently good and a contender, but consistently winning things. Getting the international LAN monkey off his back, etc.
I need to write down more of my Aligulacing haha, I just initially do it and have it vaguely in memory, so I can’t remember the exact span it was. But there was a period where he was comfortably gapping the field, quite significantly by win rate, as well as average tournament placing. Indeed, some of his single year average on the latter would have been all-time records. Except that pesky Serral fellow had an even better average placement.
I’m ballparking it, but I think Maru was gapping the best of the rest by like, a very significant amount, as high as 10%. Could be 6,7 but whatever it was was, at this level, huge. Serral gapped Maru by as much again, which is bonkers.
Maru reminds me a bit of Roger Federer. Aesthetically a joy to watch, and just a cut above when on form. He probably wins like 30+ Grand Slams, unless someone shows up who’s as good or better. Then Nadal and Djokovic turn up. Fed is still in the GOAT conversation, but there probably wouldn’t even be a conversation if that hadn’t happened.
I feel quite similar with Maru as regards Serral. I had Inno as my GOAT for a while, as many others did, but Maru just kept on going and kept on winning things. In addition, not always at the same time but he’s shown mastery of basically every Terran playstyle possible. For me, Maru becomes the GOAT by miles IMO but for that pesky Finn. I don’t rate Rogue’s claim as highly as some do.
I do rather intensely dislike some of the fanboyism that tries to devalue either player to make the case for their boy. They’re both unbelievable players who’ve given us amazing games to watch, try to copy and fail miserably.
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On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation.
After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation.
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Northern Ireland26693 Posts
On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation.
I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things.
Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals?
I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play.
In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet.
I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit!
Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in.
So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly.
Either way I’d love to actually know!
I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer.
Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger.
Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates.
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If the NBA went from what it is to a 10 team league, was no longer NEARLY as popular in the USA, and some other countries started playing it and being better than the USA at it, I don't think anyone would call a player from this theoretical "dead" NBA era the GOAT. That's analogous to the state of SC2- to some, Serral can never be the goat because he's the king of the "dead" era.
Like, Soulkey could be the best player in BW for the next 5 years and no one would call him the goat.
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On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates.
Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation.
EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so.
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Irrelevant to you. I think seeing one contender massively outperform other contenders in raw numbers is rather interesting.
Most players in SC2's history survived on team salary, not tournament prize money. Salaries have always been the backbone for the vast majority of pros.
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Northern Ireland26693 Posts
On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so.
Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon.
The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain.
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On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain.
In 2018, both Maru and Serral had pretty comparable numbers though.
+ Show Spoiler +Controlling offline events and only looking at Maru vs koreans and Serral vs koreans, Aligulac yields a 27–10 (72.97%) in matches for Maru and 22–4 (84.62%) in matches for Serral. Serral has a higher % but Maru has played more sets (won more and lose more).
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On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain.
I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25.
Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem.
I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game
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Northern Ireland26693 Posts
On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game
To be clear I wasn’t addressing his performance, I was building off my earlier point about how he can seemingly just practice off the grid and workshop and then turn up doing Serral things.
Which aside from his actual gameplay I think goes a bit under the radar. To which a frequent response is ‘yeah but nobody’s practicing hard so it doesn’t count really’.
I chose 2018 because it was his breakout year, and thus the closest to the Kespa pullout. I mean were people not practicing then either?
I’ll add that, barely ever mentioned in such discussions, Jin Air did actually remain as a concern for another 2 years after this.
Given Maru went Super-Saiyan, Rogue did his Rogue things, Cure was super competitive and Trap became the best Protoss for a period from post-Kespa to JAGW disbanding, I think there’s a solid argument to be made that JAGW players benefitted from at least a similar setup to the Kespa era. And certainly a better potential practice environment than some of the other Korean players, and Serral etc.
If my theory is correct, and I think it has some legs, Serral and others were able to hang with something approximating a Kespa era team. Even if we concede that JAGW weren’t training with the absolute full intensity of the Proleague days, that’s still a hell of a practice environment to still have.
Not every pro-Serral point is a dig at other players, I just think his ability to drop off the radar and turn up and wreck things seemingly solo is quite remarkable.
People were worried going in when Serral skipped RSL, and Clem and Reynor went to Korea, meaning the entire field of contenders were all in Korea, and Serral was in Europe doing, whatever it is he does. I must say even I felt this was dicey, I mean how do you get that quality practice in?
I’d be fascinated to know his process if nothing else, a lot is mystery. It was very interesting when Lambo and crew talked at length about how they prepared Reynor for a World Championship (IIRC his first). Don’t have a Terran who can play like Maru in Europe? OK just play Archon mode against a couple of solid European Terran pros to approximate it.
I’ve never really heard how Serral preps in much detail, but whatever he does it does seem pretty effective
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Northern Ireland26693 Posts
On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game
At best he was genuinely dominant, at worst he maybe didn’t peak for the big WC events, but his overall season win rate was still the best going for a bunch of those years
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On July 30 2025 00:45 WombaT wrote:
If my theory is correct, and I think it has some legs, Serral and others were able to hang with something approximating a Kespa era team. Even if we concede that JAGW weren’t training with the absolute full intensity of the Proleague days, that’s still a hell of a practice environment to still have.
Not every pro-Serral point is a dig at other players, I just think his ability to drop off the radar and turn up and wreck things seemingly solo is quite remarkable.
People were worried going in when Serral skipped RSL, and Clem and Reynor went to Korea, meaning the entire field of contenders were all in Korea, and Serral was in Europe doing, whatever it is he does. I must say even I felt this was dicey, I mean how do you get that quality practice in?
I’d be fascinated to know his process if nothing else, a lot is mystery. It was very interesting when Lambo and crew talked at length about how they prepared Reynor for a World Championship (IIRC his first). Don’t have a Terran who can play like Maru in Europe? OK just play Archon mode against a couple of solid European Terran pros to approximate it.
I’ve never really heard how Serral preps in much detail, but whatever he does it does seem pretty effective
I've often thought that how he came out of the Finnish backcountry swinging in 2018 has never been given enough attention during discussions like this. Koreaboos drone on about the end of Kespa the year before, ignoring how the skills they had obtained were still relevant a year later, but this guy who only gets practice against "categorically inferior foreigners" and never saw the inside of a teamhouse is able to bop Maru, Stats, Rogue, Inno, Classic and Dark somehow? And take the WC? That to me is almost a bigger story than how he's been able to stay at the top of the scene for over half the game's life at this point, and his performance last week on a rough patch with all his top EU practice buddies off in Korea just brings the same question back up.
You can say one thing for Serral, he cooks
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On July 30 2025 06:49 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game At best he was genuinely dominant, at worst he maybe didn’t peak for the big WC events, but his overall season win rate was still the best going for a bunch of those years
But it wasn't?
Maru has a comparable % but much more games in 2018. Dark has an outright better rate than Serral in 2019 both in % and in number of games.
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On July 30 2025 15:42 Argonauta wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2025 06:49 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game At best he was genuinely dominant, at worst he maybe didn’t peak for the big WC events, but his overall season win rate was still the best going for a bunch of those years But it wasn't? Maru has a comparable % but much more games in 2018. Dark has an outright better rate than Serral in 2019 both in % and in number of games.
Comparable? 11% more by Serral is not comparable, especially not at that level. And you haven't even addressed the issue that Maru played a lot more lower tier Koreans in qualifiers. If you control for that that fact, the discrepancy is widened by 2-7% depending on the player and year.
Dark's as well as all Korean's numbers can be controlled under the same concept.
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On July 30 2025 16:26 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2025 15:42 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 06:49 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:On July 29 2025 05:51 Argonauta wrote:
I guess we have quickly forgotten that Maru won Dallas, the single other international offline event of 2025. (Im not counting Zagora due to its low prize pool and lack of koreans).
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game At best he was genuinely dominant, at worst he maybe didn’t peak for the big WC events, but his overall season win rate was still the best going for a bunch of those years But it wasn't? Maru has a comparable % but much more games in 2018. Dark has an outright better rate than Serral in 2019 both in % and in number of games. Comparable? 11% more by Serral is not comparable, especially not at that level. And you haven't even addressed the issue that Maru played a lot more lower tier Koreans in qualifiers. If you control for that that fact, the discrepancy is widened by 2-7% depending on the player and year. Dark's as well as all Korean's numbers can be controlled under the same concept.
True, I have not controlled for that specifically, but I have controlled indirectly by setting offline matches only. And if you look at the list of matches, Serral scores victories vs Taeja True and Trust (one each). Whereas Maru scores a win vs Forte and perhaps another vs Patience? (not sure if Patience will enter your list), so if we control for that Maru will be in the winning side.
And I think that % of difference is offset by the fact that Maru won 27 matches, which is the total of matches played by Serral (both won and lost) as the bigger number of times you play the harder it is to maintain a high % rate.
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On July 30 2025 16:40 Argonauta wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2025 16:26 PremoBeats wrote:On July 30 2025 15:42 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 06:49 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 06:57 Mizenhauer wrote:
[quote]
I didn't forget anything. Once again, Maru his furthered his case as GOAT, only to be upstaged by Serral who continues to push past him. It's a very peculiar situation. After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game At best he was genuinely dominant, at worst he maybe didn’t peak for the big WC events, but his overall season win rate was still the best going for a bunch of those years But it wasn't? Maru has a comparable % but much more games in 2018. Dark has an outright better rate than Serral in 2019 both in % and in number of games. Comparable? 11% more by Serral is not comparable, especially not at that level. And you haven't even addressed the issue that Maru played a lot more lower tier Koreans in qualifiers. If you control for that that fact, the discrepancy is widened by 2-7% depending on the player and year. Dark's as well as all Korean's numbers can be controlled under the same concept. True, I have not controlled for that specifically, but I have controlled indirectly by setting offline matches only. And if you look at the list of matches, Serral scores victories vs Taeja True and Trust (one each). Whereas Maru scores a win vs Forte and perhaps another vs Patience? (not sure if Patience will enter your list), so if we control for that Maru will be in the winning side. And I think that % of difference is offset by the fact that Maru won 27 matches, which is the total of matches played by Serral (both won and lost) as the bigger number of times you play the harder it is to maintain a high % rate.
Serral
True rank 30
Trust rank 67
TaeJa rank 60
Maru
Leenock Rank 41
Forte Rank 56
Patience Rank 57
Dear Rank 27
Keen rank 52, 2 matches
My methodology was to exclude games with top 40-80 and <80 and then calculate win rates, so 2 new categories. True and Dear wouldn't have fallen into that category.
But Trust, TaeJa, Leenock, Forte, Patience and 2 Keen matches would have been corrected for.
If we want to be super precise: you only looked at matches versus Koreans, so you leave out 1 win and 1 loss versus Serral in Maru's calculation. Meaning Maru goes from 27-10 to 28-11, which is another win rates decrease.
One could also look at the amount of matches and see that of Serral's 4 losses, 2 were Bo1s who are much more volatile In total, but to top it off, they were even ZvZs.
So taking all context into consideration, imo Serral's numbers are much more impressive.
And no. You can't simply assume that Serral's win rate would drop if he played more matches. That is not how you control for such differences 
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On July 30 2025 17:34 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2025 16:40 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 16:26 PremoBeats wrote:On July 30 2025 15:42 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 06:49 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 07:43 Argonauta wrote:
[quote]
After blizzard pull out and GSL shrunk I am not sure if any tournament is meaningful anymore for the GOAT conversation. I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things. Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals? I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play. In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet. I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit! Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in. So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly. Either way I’d love to actually know! I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer. Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger. Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game At best he was genuinely dominant, at worst he maybe didn’t peak for the big WC events, but his overall season win rate was still the best going for a bunch of those years But it wasn't? Maru has a comparable % but much more games in 2018. Dark has an outright better rate than Serral in 2019 both in % and in number of games. Comparable? 11% more by Serral is not comparable, especially not at that level. And you haven't even addressed the issue that Maru played a lot more lower tier Koreans in qualifiers. If you control for that that fact, the discrepancy is widened by 2-7% depending on the player and year. Dark's as well as all Korean's numbers can be controlled under the same concept. True, I have not controlled for that specifically, but I have controlled indirectly by setting offline matches only. And if you look at the list of matches, Serral scores victories vs Taeja True and Trust (one each). Whereas Maru scores a win vs Forte and perhaps another vs Patience? (not sure if Patience will enter your list), so if we control for that Maru will be in the winning side. And I think that % of difference is offset by the fact that Maru won 27 matches, which is the total of matches played by Serral (both won and lost) as the bigger number of times you play the harder it is to maintain a high % rate. Serral True rank 30 Trust rank 67 TaeJa rank 60 Maru Leenock Rank 41 Forte Rank 56 Patience Rank 57 Dear Rank 27 Keen rank 52, 2 matches My methodology was to exclude games with top 40-80 and lower than top 80 and then calculate win rates, so 2 new categories. True and Dear wouldn't have fallen into that category. But Trust, TaeJa, Leenock, Forte, Patience and 2 Keen matches would have been corrected for. If we want to be super precise you only look only at matches versus Koreans you leave out 1 win and 1 loss versus Serral in Maru's calculation Meaning Maru goes from 27-10 to 28-11, which means another win rates decrease. And no. You can't simply assume that Serral's win rate would drop if he played more matches. That is not how you control for such differences
That is a bit odd becasue Keen was very good in TvT in fact it scores 1 Win and 1 loss vs Maru, just not very active overall. That is why I did to not do so (it creates more biases than it resolves). For including Serral vs Maru in the Maru score true! I forgot that one.
But yes, you can assume the more games you play the harder it is to maintain a high % rate. In the particular case of SC2 is because:
1) the more you play the more exposed your play style is.
2) because most of the tournaments are bracket style and not league style, the more you play the higher you go in those brackets, the difficulty of winning increases.
But coming back to the overall point. Serral was not superior than its peers in 2018-2019.
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On July 30 2025 18:04 Argonauta wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2025 17:34 PremoBeats wrote:On July 30 2025 16:40 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 16:26 PremoBeats wrote:On July 30 2025 15:42 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 06:49 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:On July 29 2025 08:32 WombaT wrote:
[quote]
I think it is still pretty meaningful, it’s just testing different things.
Who can best manage a shrunken overall tournament scene, with fewer real teams, and peak for the one big mega tournament? If you’re a top contender, how do you balance needing practice against players on your level, versus potentially giving too much away to your direct rivals?
I don’t weight recent times as highly because things are shrinking, but it does at the same time bring that element into play.
In this specific domain, Serral is clearly on another planet.
I genuinely don’t know how he does it, I’d love an interviewer to deep dive a bit!
Going into EWC, Serral skipped RSL, and both Reynor and Clem went to Korea, which had people including myself worrying how he’d prep. Everyone in the EWC field who could conceivably win the tournament was over in Korea going in.
So either he just kept in shape versus players at his level by just eating the ping disadvantage, or he cooked up some other practice regimen where he was able to arrive at EWC in peak condition despite not regularly playing the handful of players who can hang with him regularly.
Either way I’d love to actually know!
I can’t speculate too much without knowing specifics, I have a hunch that just in terms of an ability to work things out solo, Serral is absolutely without peer.
Aside from the aforementioned, there’s little scraps to feed on. I’m not sure Reynor has managed to beat him since they became teammates. So in the one case he’s properly workshopping with someone else, the result is they don’t close the gap to him, he takes their ideas and makes himself even stronger.
Usually being teammates narrows the gap based on familiarity and the ability to counter known tendencies, Serral seems to have just flipped that. I don’t think, for example that $o$ famously 3-0s Maru if they weren’t teammates. Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation. EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game At best he was genuinely dominant, at worst he maybe didn’t peak for the big WC events, but his overall season win rate was still the best going for a bunch of those years But it wasn't? Maru has a comparable % but much more games in 2018. Dark has an outright better rate than Serral in 2019 both in % and in number of games. Comparable? 11% more by Serral is not comparable, especially not at that level. And you haven't even addressed the issue that Maru played a lot more lower tier Koreans in qualifiers. If you control for that that fact, the discrepancy is widened by 2-7% depending on the player and year. Dark's as well as all Korean's numbers can be controlled under the same concept. True, I have not controlled for that specifically, but I have controlled indirectly by setting offline matches only. And if you look at the list of matches, Serral scores victories vs Taeja True and Trust (one each). Whereas Maru scores a win vs Forte and perhaps another vs Patience? (not sure if Patience will enter your list), so if we control for that Maru will be in the winning side. And I think that % of difference is offset by the fact that Maru won 27 matches, which is the total of matches played by Serral (both won and lost) as the bigger number of times you play the harder it is to maintain a high % rate. Serral True rank 30 Trust rank 67 TaeJa rank 60 Maru Leenock Rank 41 Forte Rank 56 Patience Rank 57 Dear Rank 27 Keen rank 52, 2 matches My methodology was to exclude games with top 40-80 and lower than top 80 and then calculate win rates, so 2 new categories. True and Dear wouldn't have fallen into that category. But Trust, TaeJa, Leenock, Forte, Patience and 2 Keen matches would have been corrected for. If we want to be super precise you only look only at matches versus Koreans you leave out 1 win and 1 loss versus Serral in Maru's calculation Meaning Maru goes from 27-10 to 28-11, which means another win rates decrease. And no. You can't simply assume that Serral's win rate would drop if he played more matches. That is not how you control for such differences That is a bit odd becasue Keen was very good in TvT in fact it scores 1 Win and 1 loss vs Maru, just not very active overall. That is why I did to not do so (it creates more biases than it resolves). For including Serral vs Maru in the Maru score true! I forgot that one. But yes, you can assume the more games you play the harder it is to maintain a high % rate. In the particular case of SC2 is because: 1) the more you play the more exposed your play style is. 2) because most of the tournaments are bracket style and not league style, the more you play the higher you go in those brackets, the difficulty of winning increases. But coming back to the overall point. Serral was not superior than its peers in 2018-2019.
Who are his peers in this context?
And how do you define superior?
The thing is that you can't ignore that Serral played more volatile Bo1 ZvZ (50% of his losses offline) and go on to say that his win rate would be more negatively affected if he played more games. If we want to control for context fine, but then apply it consistently.
Then rather also include online matches and control for matches against <40. That way your sample size is bigger, while still getting rid of lower ranked players.
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On July 30 2025 18:11 PremoBeats wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2025 18:04 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 17:34 PremoBeats wrote:On July 30 2025 16:40 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 16:26 PremoBeats wrote:On July 30 2025 15:42 Argonauta wrote:On July 30 2025 06:49 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 23:24 Charoisaur wrote:On July 29 2025 23:05 WombaT wrote:On July 29 2025 16:16 Argonauta wrote:
[quote]
Yeah how Serral can maintain such a level gap wit the rest of the competitions in a day and age in which everybody seems to go half gas with SC2 practice is an interesting topic, albeit irrelevant for the goat conversation.
EDIT: which pros can have the luxury to keep practicing SC2 looking at the unknowns of the next year? I think only the one that have won 200.000 dollars can do so. Sure but Serral was also doing this way back in 2018 as well. It’s not a purely recent phenomenon. The natural flipside of this particular coin is with somewhat similar conditions, Serral created a gap to the field that he’s managed to maintain. I don't think his dominance from 2018-22 was the same as from 23 to 25. Back then there were lots of players that could occasionally take bo5/bo7s from him like Inno, Zest, soO, Stats, TY, Cure, Dark, Rogue, Classic, Maru and of course Reynor and Clem. I know you singled out 2018 but the sample size in that year wasn't really high with him only playing 2 tournaments with the toughest competition and even then his games weren't as dominant as today, with Stats for example pushing him to G7 while being ahead in the series and winning the long macro game At best he was genuinely dominant, at worst he maybe didn’t peak for the big WC events, but his overall season win rate was still the best going for a bunch of those years But it wasn't? Maru has a comparable % but much more games in 2018. Dark has an outright better rate than Serral in 2019 both in % and in number of games. Comparable? 11% more by Serral is not comparable, especially not at that level. And you haven't even addressed the issue that Maru played a lot more lower tier Koreans in qualifiers. If you control for that that fact, the discrepancy is widened by 2-7% depending on the player and year. Dark's as well as all Korean's numbers can be controlled under the same concept. True, I have not controlled for that specifically, but I have controlled indirectly by setting offline matches only. And if you look at the list of matches, Serral scores victories vs Taeja True and Trust (one each). Whereas Maru scores a win vs Forte and perhaps another vs Patience? (not sure if Patience will enter your list), so if we control for that Maru will be in the winning side. And I think that % of difference is offset by the fact that Maru won 27 matches, which is the total of matches played by Serral (both won and lost) as the bigger number of times you play the harder it is to maintain a high % rate. Serral True rank 30 Trust rank 67 TaeJa rank 60 Maru Leenock Rank 41 Forte Rank 56 Patience Rank 57 Dear Rank 27 Keen rank 52, 2 matches My methodology was to exclude games with top 40-80 and lower than top 80 and then calculate win rates, so 2 new categories. True and Dear wouldn't have fallen into that category. But Trust, TaeJa, Leenock, Forte, Patience and 2 Keen matches would have been corrected for. If we want to be super precise you only look only at matches versus Koreans you leave out 1 win and 1 loss versus Serral in Maru's calculation Meaning Maru goes from 27-10 to 28-11, which means another win rates decrease. And no. You can't simply assume that Serral's win rate would drop if he played more matches. That is not how you control for such differences That is a bit odd becasue Keen was very good in TvT in fact it scores 1 Win and 1 loss vs Maru, just not very active overall. That is why I did to not do so (it creates more biases than it resolves). For including Serral vs Maru in the Maru score true! I forgot that one. But yes, you can assume the more games you play the harder it is to maintain a high % rate. In the particular case of SC2 is because: 1) the more you play the more exposed your play style is. 2) because most of the tournaments are bracket style and not league style, the more you play the higher you go in those brackets, the difficulty of winning increases. But coming back to the overall point. Serral was not superior than its peers in 2018-2019. Who are his peers in this context? And how do you define superior? The thing is that you can't ignore that Serral played more volatile Bo1 ZvZ (50% of his losses offline) and go on to say that his win rate would be more negatively affected if he played more games. If we want to control for context fine, but then apply it consistently. Then rather also include online matches and control for matches against <40. That way your sample size is bigger, while still getting rid of lower ranked players.
His peers are the other players of sc2 that qualified for the tournaments they played SC2 at.
I dont understand why you want to perceive ZvZ as an special match up that has to be treated any different than PvP or TvT (or any non mirror really).
Superior in the context of this thread is to be perceive as unbeatable by a given narrative. In the same way nobody says Dark was superior than his peers in 2019 I dont see why you want to make the case for Serral in 2018 and 2019.
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EPT
