Power Rank - Esports World Cup 2025

On July 28 2025 17:08 PremoBeats wrote:
Haha, pretty different weddings we had :D

Yeah, the issue about online cups is true. But if they are included in the KeSPA and the non-KeSPA periods I wouldn't mind them too much.
They are more of an issue when comparing players who play them a lot (MaxPax, Reynor, Clem, herO, Classic) versus others that don't (Maru, Serral, etc.). Then the win rate comparisons massively lack context, as the online players boost their win rate in relation to the players who do not participate in them with lower skilled pros (Similar to the findings I had in regards to Serral versus the Koreans). Clem versus Serral's 2025 is a good example. Clem's win rate is around 5% higher than Serral's versus Koreans, but if you control for players like grape or LunaSea who aren't even in the top80, his win rate is actually a lot lower.

Funny that you mention it... when I looked at all the work I still have to do I thought about other people who might contribute. We could even fuse some data to look if they correlate. Definitely something to think about!

Don't know if you saw it beneath the wall of text in the other thread.. but here are the fun facts/quirks/statistics I talked about:

- He was on rank 1 on Aligulac for over 40% of the game’s existence. If you include rank two it is over 50%.
- Serral is the only player to be listed as the best versus all three races multiple times at different points of time in his career and did so four times overall.
- Only player to go over 3800 Aligulac rating
- Only player to go over 3900 Aligulac rating
- Serral is either rank 1 or 2 since the beginning of 2018.
- Serral wasn’t overtaken by anyone on Aligulac since April 2023.
- Longest ever consecutive run of not losing a match versus Koreans: 26
- 2nd longest ever consecutive run of not losing a match versus Koreans: 19
- 3rd longest ever consecutive run of not losing a match versus Koreans: 18
- Longest ever consecutive run of not losing a match: 47
- Highest yearly win rates ever achieved (only versus Koreans): 96,30%, 85,71%, 2x 85,11%
- Highest career long match win rate, despite others having much shorter careers (only versus Koreans): 70,73
- Highest career long match win rate overall: 79,17%
- Highest prime match win rate versus Koreans: 80,27%
- Highest prime match win rate overall: 86,23%
- Highest life time tournament win percentage: 38,10%
- Even if you include all GSLs that Serral missed from 2018-2025 as a loss, his tournament win percentage is the highest in the history of the game.
- When he goes into a tournament, he on average reaches the semi-finals (average place of 3,24)
- Player with the most official and unofficial World Championships
- Participated in 9 consecutive World Championships, won 3, has an average place of 4,39 and win rate of 33,33%
- Most Premier Tournaments wins with top Korean participation by far (tied with Maru)
- Most Premier Tournament wins overall by far
- One of two players (Mvp being the other) to achieve the Triple Crown twice
- Played his longest match against Trap, with an in game time of 3 hours 5 minutes and 38 seconds
- Serral has a positive match record versus every pro he played regularly, including all relevant GOAT contenders from his time: Dark, Cure, GuMiho, herO, Solar, Maru, ByuN, Classic, Bunny, Stats, soO, INnoVation, Rogue, Trap, Zest, Reynor, Clem and MaxPax. Dark, Rogue and Clem are the only 3 players that achieved to put Serral below a 60% win rate versus them.
Dark -10:6:1- 58,8%
Cure -24:2:1- 88,9%
GuMiho -11:4:0- 73,3%
herO -10:3:0- 76,9%
Solar -18:7:1- 69,2%
Maru -19:4:2- 76,0%
ByuN -14:6-0- 70,0%
Classic -12:3-0- 80,0%
Bunny -9:2:0- 81,8%
Stats -9:4:0- 69,2%
soO -8:4:0- 66,7%
Innovation -16:8:0- 66,7%
Rogue -8:7:0- 53,3%
Trap -14:3:0- 82,4%
Zest -10:5:0- 66,7%
Reynor -34-15:0- 69,4%
MaxPax -21:7:0- 75,0%
Clem -32:23:0- 58,2%

Yeah for sure. The problem comes just in that period of Covid time where prestige Premiers had to be played online. Filtering just for offline events excludes a sizeable chunk of very competitive, serious events just because of those unique circumstances. Maru and Trap were notably very strong in that period to pick two examples.

I was just doing some initial eyeballing, I’d be interested to do something more rigorous on the ‘weak era’ question. Almost certainly pointless in terms of changing minds, especially given people’s propensity to count or discount results when it suits. So post-Kespa is super weak, but Maru’s GSL quad or Rogue’s WCs add to their GOAT claims, but it counts against someone like Serral. If we can’t even establish when the ‘weak era’ is, how do you analyse it?

I tend to agree with you that scene depth and top tier champ contenders exist in the same ecosystem, but are ultimately different things. If we look at peak Kespa, it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t harder to win the big prizes consistently. On the flip side, you also don’t really see many names outside the current crop contending that much. There are fewer of them now, but it’s the same names. Peak Kespa was deeper and with more scary A or B tier players, and they could eliminate the big dogs, but they didn’t generally actually contend for titles. WoL was probably the only era this actually happened with any regularity.

Put another way, in terms of competitive depth, take Serral out of the equation at the recent EWC and who wins? I’ve genuinely got zero idea. Amongst the rest it really felt placement was down to narrow margins, who showed their best on the day, and bracket/matchup luck.

Cure had a fantastic tournament and looked absolutely locked in. Except he ran into Serral with his 10% win rate versus that opponent. Reynor looked super strong, but had narrow defeats to both Maru and Serral. Classic was in monster mode, Clem didn’t look like peak Clem, but good enough to potentially win if he dodged Classic’s PvT. Maru showed strong games. herO underperformed, Solar was pretty locked in and seemed to just tilt after being eliminated and show a bad series in the 3rd/4th playoff which I think wasn’t representative of his overall play. Zoun showed some good stuff too.

I think it’s crazy to argue that that this epoch is as competitive as some others, but I think Serral skews this perception by virtue of being Serral. If you take the win rate king, who doesn’t have a weak matchup, nor seemingly ever massively underperforms on the biggest stages out of the equation, and I think you see way more variance and volatility, consistent with SC2’s general history. Indeed, minus Serral there were probably more players who you could realistically expect to win the tournament than some other WCs from the past.

Merci for the various statistical and factoid nuggets!

How do you not lose a match in 47?! A big part of why I rate such things so highly, is simply that I didn’t think they were possible. The topic of ‘Will there be an SC2 Flash?’ used to crop up pretty frequently, and most folks thought no, at least not with comparable win rates.

I was amongst that cohort. I felt SC2 was in a middle zone of increased volatility given its mechanical difficulty and sheer speed, between BW and WC3.

My rationale was a double one, WC3 is slower, less BO dependent, so if you’re the better player overall, you can still generally show it. A bad engagement, or build disadvantage is a disadvantage may still put you behind, but you don’t necessarily get put massively behind as much. Conversely, because BW is so mechanically difficult, someone like Flash can still claw back disadvantages through purely better macro alone. Less so in SC2. Some players do have a mechanical advantage for sure, but most decent pros can max out and keep their money down to a similar level. An S class player will be better than a B class, obviously, but SC2’s macro is ‘easy’ enough that if there’s a game state where the S class player ends up 30/40 supply down and 20 workers down based on a bad build interaction, or a few errors it’s a gap they can close and come back, but not just from macroing better.

I’ll also add that it wasn’t that it wasn’t that I didn’t think it was possible in elite level play, I didn’t even think it possible in elite versus non-elite play either. Say S class versus a bunch of B class players. The B class players are still good enough, and SC2 ‘easy’ enough that they can win a set if they’ve a sufficient build choice advantage, they’re good enough to close that out, even if they won’t generally win in an even game state. Given Bo3 is the norm for earlier tournament stages, this means that worse players simply need to get a sufficiently big BO advantage in 2 out of 3 games.

He’s difficult to fully parse because he was something of a crazy maverick talent, but I think it’s interesting to look at someone like Stephano versus Serral. The gap between foreigners and Koreans was bigger, and only Stephano could really close it. So naturally one would assume he’d be super dominant against other foreigners. Except he wasn’t. Super strong obviously, but not that. This is no diss on Stephano, I’m just pointing out that even if you’re the better player overall, it’s really hard to be that much better that you don’t have the odd Bo3 where your builds don’t match up well versus your opponents, or you make a big irrecoverable error in a set.

To my knowledge the only players who have similarly dominant records in any comparable sense to Serral at any level are Special versus Latin Americans, and TIME/Oliveira against other Chinese players. Serral’s not just done this versus foreigners overall, he’s basically done it against the entire field

I recall a pretty funny exchange on one of Harstem’s shows, where he was asked if it was tilting playing Serral on ladder. To paraphrase, ‘I don’t like losing, but I only drop 4 MMR so it’s not too bad.’ When then asked how much he gets for a win, his response was ‘You know what? I don’t know.’

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