EPTI'm a long time SC fan and one of the many "silent" TL reader. Call it age or whatever else that changed my attitiude, but somehow I lately felt like contributing a bit myself to the discussions. It's fascinating to follow the discussions particularly on the GOAT threads and strength of Koreans vs the rest of the World. Quite a lot of emotiones involved, but big shout-out to writers like Mizenhauer for the excellent and entertaining content. One of the main reasons to come with an own article is to add to the content. It is surely not the most sophisticated and well written article. But my intention is to hopefully write something a few people will enjoy reading.
For curiosity I was trying to take an own look at winrates of some players. Being someone strongly believing in numbers and statistics I understand also the many different aspects such topics can be looked at. But usually a coverage of long enough time-periods gives a quite good impression and puts outliers (like Olivera's fairy tail run at Katowice 2023, great story but not the norm) in the correct perspective.
I decided to look at the following:
- Top 20 Players in Aligulac as of now (24th April) + Serral (inactive in Aligulac). I list them below
- Total winrates since Jan 1st, 2018 and Jan 1st 2023 (Sample size was quite small with start of 2024 in my opinion) against Koreans which I will name "2018 winrate" and "2023 winrate" for the text. 2023 - Today will also be "recent".
- Offline winrate since Jan 1st 2018 against Koreans
- Offline winrate since Jan 1st 2018 against non-korean opponents
Total Winrates since 2023
Unsurpisingly Serral and Maru come in on top of most comparisons. With total match win rates against Koreans since Jan 1st, 2023 of 85.71% and 81.13%, respectively. Rank 3-6 in that category are Hero (71.76%), Dark (69.05%), MaxPax (67.76%) and Clem (65.66%). Most surprising for me was the huge drop in winrates in the second half of the top 20 Aligulac players: Only 10 with a winrate >50%, the other 10 with 36.73% (Stats) to 49.02% (HeRoMaRinE).
In my opinion that means that winning against Koreans is on average more difficult, as only 7/20 have a 60% or higher winrate.
Comparing 2018 - Today vs 2023 - Today
If we extend this to the time period from Jan 1st, 2018 until today we obviously see some changes. But what surprised me in the comparison for the winrates against Koreans 2018 - Today vs 2023 - Today was consistency. I expected with rise and decline of players that winrates over this longer period should go up or down a lot. In fact, only 1 out of the 20 players (Stats, 60% 2018 vs 37% 2023 winrate) had a more then 10% difference in winrate. The three most improved players over that span of time had been Serral (+6.5%), Maru (+7.8%) and MaxPax (+9.9%). That came unexpected for me except for MaxPax. For Maru and Serral my thought process was more like "They had an excellent 2018 and didn't win everything after, so their winrates should go down". But in recent times they played apparently above their 6-year average winrate.
9 players improved their winrates, 12 did not and had in recent times worse winrates vs Koreans than since 2018. Comparing Korea vs the World only 1 non-Korean Player had worse total winrate since 2018 then since 2023 (Reynor, 60% since 2018 vs 57% since 2023). Only Maru, Hero and Byun improved their recent winrates from the Koreans. Watching at least most tournaments going on I would say this is quite well reflecting the ongoing Pro-scene. Non-Koreans are closing the gap, but it is still there as we will see later.
Comparing Online and Offline winrates since 2018
A big topic I always see here is the "inflated winrate" with online play. And we see indeed quite a big difference between online and offline play for some of these players. On one side we have Rogue (+12.2%), Classic (+10.1), Gumiho (+4.4%), and Stats (+1.7%) with better offline than online win rates. Shin had no difference between online of offline. Everyone else had lower winrates in offline matches. Dark (-0.4%), Heromarine (-2.1%), Serral (-2.2%), Reynor (-2.7%), and Maru (-3%) were pretty close and I would rate it consistent, no matter the circumstances they play in.
Some others however went drastically down offline, with Byun being the most extreme having -21.2% winrate offline compared to online. Clem, Oliveria, Showtime, and Hero are also in the -10% or more category. On this one my personal opinion would be two different reasons: Nerves on the end of Hero and Byun, facing tougher competition in terms of Clem, Oliveria and ShoWTimE.
Talking about total offline winrates since 2018, Serral (77.1%), Rogue (72.7%) and Maru (70.4%) have more than 70% winrate, with Maru coming in 3rd here. In my opinion that strengthens the argument on Rogue being a player for the big moments, but I think everyone agress on that anyway. Dark has a respectable 69.2% winrate, being 4th here with a big difference to the 5th, Classic on 64.2% winrate. For me personnally that shows the lack of respect Dark get's sometimes, being basically on-par with Maru on winrate, just lacking the same amount of titles.
Offline winrates against non-Koreans since 2018
All the talk is usually just against Koreans, and I totally agree it is a good metric to compare skill of players. I was however also curious how players perform in that category and how different it is between Koreans and non-Koreans, particularly the winrates of non-Koreans against their peers and if Koreans win everything (Sidenote: they don't and it's not only Serral winning, although he was responsible for quite a lot).
As comparison, while the players I checked have offline winrates between 27.5% and 77.1% against Korean competition, their offline winrates against non-Koreans varied from 64% to 94.5%. So basically everyone I checked had on average +22.4% more winrate against non-Koreans in offline events.
Everyone thinking that Koreans and non-Koreans are on the same level should be thinking about such a number. While I personally think that rating GSL vs non-Korean regionals is difficult, these numbers suggest that the average participant has a higher level than the average participant in a non-Korean regional event. But winning the whole tournament is a very different story, but for only one single player: Serral. He has an absurd 94.5% winrate against non-Koreans AND 77.1% winrate against Koreans since January 1st 2018. That is 12% higher winrate compared to the 2nd best vs non-Koreans (Hero, 82.46%). And while the gap is closer when considering winrates vs Koreans offline, it is still 77.1% winrate vs 72.7% on Rogue and 70.4% on Maru.
Funfact: The only player I looked at to have a worse win record (offline, since 2018) against non-Koreans than Koreans is Rogue, with "only" 65.6% wins against non-Koreans (26-11 matches), but 72.7% against his korean peers (101 - 38 matches)
Conclusions
Looking at only the current top 20 Aligulac players + Serral is off course not the complete picture, but it gives a good overview and for me it gives away some insights for me. Nothing extremly new but:
- Average Koreans are (much) better than most non-Koreans, given the comparison of winrates against their peers and then against the other group (Korean vs Korean, World vs World, Korean vs World, World vs Korean). Before checking the numbers I would have thought it to be much close. But +20% (offline) average winrate difference on a >6 year period is massive
- Serral is an outlier, no matter which metric you look at. Without him we as a community would have a lot of the discussions about skill level in different regions and tournamens. It's Serral > Koreans > Rest of the World for more than 6 years now.
- Most players are pretty consistent over longer periods of time
- Online vs offline comparison vs much less a difference than I expected before. But that could be a result of the high amount of online games reducing the variation, showing the "average" skill of each player quite well. Only a few show really serious differences (Rogue, Byun) between offline and online performance.
Here are the players and numbers, all derived from Aligulac (and sorry, I didn't figure out how to add a table):
Player Winrate 2023 Winrate 2018 Offline 2018 n-Kor Off 2018
Serral 85.71% 79% 77.08% 94.52%
Maru 81.13% 73% 70.41% 78.87%
Hero 71.76% 66% 54.68% 82.46%
Dark 69.05% 70% 69.23% 78.79%
MaxPax 67.76% 58%
Clem 65.66% 57% 43.75% 71.52%
Byun 63.05% 62% 41.30% 76.09%
Cure 59.29% 61% 52.00% 82.22%
Solar 57.84% 62% 57.84% 76.92%
Reynor 56.72% 60% 57.58% 77.27%
Rogue 54.55% 61% 72.66% 65.62%
HeRoMaRinE 49.02% 45% 43.33% 73.17%
Classic 49.01% 54% 64.22% 71.43%
Oliveria 45.29% 41% 27.50% 64.04%
Gumiho 44.55% 49% 53.39% 73.21%
Shin 43.48% 52% 52.34% 69.23%
Creator 42.21% 44% 38.14% 64.29%
Bunny 42.17% 47% 43.15% 71.43%
ShoWTimE 40.00% 41% 27.78% 66.23%
Lambo 38.00% 35% 28.07% 66.67%
Stats 36.73% 60% 61.34% 80.36%
Thanks to everyone reading the whole thing. And maybe someone can PM me how to add tables or link player names.
