2025 GSL Code S Season 2

RO4 and Grand Finals Preview

Start time: Sunday, Jun 15 8:00am GMT (GMT+00:00)

by Wax

GSL's 2025 journey will come to an end on Sunday night, as herO, GuMiho, Classic, and Rogue head to the FreecUP studio to contend for what may be the final Code S championship.

The two semifinal bouts are mismatches on paper, with the Protoss duo favored to advance and create a mirror-match grand final. However, the desperation factor of chasing Korea's last EWC seed helped Rogue and GuMiho overcome the odds in the RO8, and it may push one of them over the finish line on Sunday night.

Semifinal #1: Rogue vs herO

Championship Sunday will begin with the more lopsided of the semifinal bouts, as Korea's #1 player herO takes on a struggling legend in Rogue.

Among the players who have pursued a second act after military service, Rogue may be bearing the heaviest burden of expectations. Not only does he have the greatest pre-military career of any returnee, but he's come back in an era where herO has already proven it's possible to return to full strength. Unfortunately for Rogue, "possible" and "probable" are entirely different things. While other players have enjoyed moderate success and gone on some feel-good underdog runs, herO is an extreme outlier in having become a legitimate world championship contender. In hindsight, we should have known that even for a three-time world champion like Rogue, a herO-esque trajectory was always unlikely. Instead, fifteen months after his return, Rogue has only collected a handful of middling finishes, and sits in a similarly middling 15th place in the Aligulac.com rankings.

Any Zerg player not-named-Serral would be facing an uphill battle against herO in his current form, but for Rogue specifically, it's like trying to climb an active volcano. He's currently 0-14 in matches against herO since his return from military service, and that losing streak extends to twenty matches if you include the last few months prior to his conscription. For as fantastic as herO has been in PvZ, that's simply an insane stat—even the quasi-retired DRG managed to fluke out a win against herO in the last year.

After reviewing a few of the most recent Rogue vs herO series, I can see how the record got to be so dire. Rogue has the approach of someone who used to be the best player in the world, trying to take herO on in straight-up games. However, that just doesn't work against the actual best PvZ player in the world. I don't think I saw a single standard game where Rogue was able to meaningfully pressure herO in the mid-game, or just in general, make herO feel uncomfortable at all. I found it amusing that Rogue said in his TL.net interview that he might have a shot against herO in the late-game, because going by their previous matches, he's probably going to die before he gets a chance. For Rogue's sake, I really hope that he was just masking his true intentions, and that his actual plan is to unload the most devious all-ins known to man.

Aligulac.com gives Rogue a mere 8.47% chance of winning, so if you're picking him to advance, you'll have to believe in the following three things. First, you have to believe that the results of DreamHack Dallas weren't a fluke, and that they were indicative of the scene being in a state of heightened parity. SHIN beating Clem and Classic beating Serral can't be miracles—they have to be part of a larger trend that Rogue can cash in on.

Second, you must have tremendous faith in the mythos of Rogue as one of the game's greatest clutch players. You have to be looking back to 2021 Code S Season 1 finals, where a slumping Rogue was the only thing standing in the way of a peak-power Maru and the G5L. You have to trust that Rogue will once again defy logic and upset the GSL's strongest player, despite the fact that he's shown little of that clutch ability in 2024/25.

Third, you have to believe that GSL preparation is the ultimate equalizer in StarCraft II. We've seen great examples of that this year, like Cure's barrage of all-ins in the Season 1 finals or with Bunny's TvT mech-pushes in this season's RO8. Of course, Rogue himself provided one of the most memorable demonstrations in the past, using Roach-Ravager timings to completely discombobulate Maru in the aforementioned 2021 finals.

Personally, I think these factors will help Rogue keep the series close, but I don't think he'll be able to overcome herO in the end. In their previous games, herO simply outclassed Rogue in a way that makes me feel the gap is too wide to completely bridge.

Prediction: herO 3 - 2 Rogue

Semifinal #2: Classic vs GuMiho

The second semifinal also has a clear David vs Goliath dynamic. Classic has been the epitome of the "locking in for EWC season" narrative, shrugging off a so-so off-season to place top four in all three live tournaments he's competed in this summer. While it sure helps to be focused and motivated, what helps even more is to play in a favorable meta. Classic's most memorable career games may involve trickery and all-ins, but his overall body of work has shown us that what he really wants to do is play a boring-but-effective macro style. To that end, the 5.0.14 patch has really given him a big boost in PvZ and PvT, where he's able to grind most opponents down with orthodox play.

On the other hand, the already unorthodox GuMiho has become even more eccentric in 2025. In TvZ/T, it's been by choice, as his long-favored mech composition has become more viable. But in TvP, it's been out of necessity, as he's one of many Terrans who feels the match-up is simply too difficult to play straight-up.

In a way, you could say GuMiho was ahead of the curve in TvP. Back in December's HomeStory Cup finals, GuMiho shrewdly assessed that he had little chance of beating Clem's off-race Protoss in straight-up games. He proceeded to cheese the heck out of the Liquid ace, narrowly taking a 3-2 victory. Since then, other Terrans have also come to the conclusion that going all-in in nearly every game is actually a pretty good way to play TvP against top players.

Ironically, GuMiho's play becoming 'standard' might have worked to his disadvantage. In an environment where everyone is looking out for the SCV-pull all-in, GuMiho himself has actually become one of the easier Terrans to defend against. When he faced off against Classic and herO in Code S Season 1, his all-ins looked completely non-threatening compared to his peers with superior execution and micro (his macro games didn't look much better). Classic might have been caught off-guard by Cure's piercing all-ins in the Season 1 semifinals, but it's hard to envision him falling to GuMiho in the same way—especially when he doesn't have to respect the threat of macro as much.

Generic 'attack with Marines, Tanks, and SCVs between 6-8 minutes' strategies probably aren't going to get the job done, so this series will depend on how far outside the box GuMiho wants to go. While he did suffer a rather one-sided 1-3 defeat to herO in last season's semis, it's notable that the one map he did win was in a macro-mech game. GuMiho was losing for most of that bout, but herO's unfamiliarity with the composition caused him to take a single horrendous fight that led to a come-from-behind victory for the Terran side. Along those lines, GuMiho's best chance of winning this semifinal could be for him to fully embrace his weirdness and try strategies that Classic has never practiced against. That could mean things like more TvP mech, Barracks floats, a BC rush—the less sensical, the better. I don't think those kinds of strategies give GuMiho a good chance of winning, but it's still better than his chance of winning by playing anything resembling standard.

Since the 5.0.14 patch, Classic has a comfortable 10-2 match score lead against GuMiho (26-14 map score), while Aligulac.com gives him a 75%+ chance of winning the match. I'm going to trust the numbers here—I think GuMiho can play weird enough to make the series interesting, but it won't be enough to actually win.

Prediction: Classic 3 - 1 GuMiho

Finals Possibilities & Predictions

The least likely finals of GuMiho vs Rogue might be the most entertaining to the fans, as it would see Rogue try to solve GuMiho's Battlemech. GSL Zergs seem absolutely baffled in terms of what composition to make against the mobile Cyclone-Hellion hit squads, and so far, their best answer has been "kill him in the early/mid-game." That's precisely what Rogue had to do to beat GuMiho 2-1 in the RO8, as he lost quite handily to mech when trying to play standard. I don't think Rogue will have come up with a solution for GumiMech by Sunday night—and that's if he's even bothered to think about ZvT at all.

In a vacuum, Rogue vs Classic should favor the Virtus.pro Protoss, as I haven't seen anything from Rogue that suggests he can overcome Classic's patient and methodical late-game play. However, if Rogue actually manages to beat herO to reach the finals, it will mean that he was much, much better at ZvP than we previously thought. I'm not quite sure how that would manifest—maybe he'll reveal that he actually had the best mid-game all-in execution in the world, or that his late-game army control from 2019 miraculously came back to him overnight. Whatever the case, he would have the tools needed to take down Classic.

On the other hand, I think a herO vs GuMiho finals would simply mean that GuMiho emptied his bag of weird strategies against Classic, leaving nothing left to use against herO. This match-up has "GSL finals curse" written all over it, with a 4-0 sweep being a very realistic possibility.

As for the most likely finals scenario of herO vs Classic, I think it's very close to being 50/50. The 5.0.14 patch has seen Korean PvP revert to being an utter cheesefest, with the proxy-crazy threeway between herO, Classic, and Zoun in the RO8 serving as a great demonstration. While herO and Classic didn't face each other, herO's 1-2 upset at the hands of a 'weak' PvP player in Zoun showed us how volatile the match-up can be.

The two players actually clashed in the finals of the bi-weekly KSL cup just a day before the finals, which resulted in a 3-1 victory for herO. Amusingly enough, both players made sure to mind game each other by using 1-Gate Stargate expansion builds, as if to remind each other that the cheesiest thing a cheeser can do is to play a macro game.

Overall, I'll give herO a slight edge due to his superior mechanics and multitasking. The current PvP environment creates lots of hectic scenarios where there's action going on all over the map, and the smallest difference in reaction speed can open up a 10+ Probe gap. If we indeed get the kinds of games where Adepts, Oracles, and DT's are all hitting different bases at the same time, I trust herO to be the one that survives the chaos.

Prediction: herO 4 - 3 Classic