EPT
Before we start thanks to Fireblast! who helped me out with a bunch of them!
January
2005 was a good year for "Tushin" aka "The God of War" - July, with most notably him joining the ranks of the few players with two OSL titles (the other ones being Boxer, Garimto and Nada). But let's not jump too far ahead and stick with the beginning of the year for a moment, since not only was it a good year overall for July, but it also started very good. To be precise he started the year by winning the second edition of the prestigious KT KTF Premier League with a 3-2 victory over Gorush in the finals, a detailed summary of the league can be found in our ever useful article section. The summary also includes links to all the awesome battle reports Arbiter[frolix] wrote throughout the whole season! Be sure to check them out.
A bunch of progamers in thick winter jackets? Well Ongamenet likes to go a bit on tour every now and then. This is the first week of the IOPS OSL Quarterfinals, which were held at a ski resort in the Kangwon province and again there are battle reports of Arbiter[frolix] for these games of this Zerg and Terran heavy OSL.
February
This happy man is the team coach of KOR and his team, while being the huge underdog, just won the third round of the OGN Sky Proleague with a 4-3 victory over KTF(live reports). In the 7th and decisive game Cloud was victorious over Chojja, whose defeat is being brought up again in the 4-0 landslide victory of Samsung Khan against KTF in the most recent play-off match of the (now joint between OGN and MBCgame) current season's 2nd round of the Sky Proleague, read about it on the last pages of this thread.
Oh Happy Year of the Zergs! After having been defeated by July in the finals of the KT KTF Premier League (see above) Gorush went on to be the first Zerg to ever win an MBCGame Starleague, namely the "You are the Golf King" MSL (I'm not kidding, that was really its name). He did so with a furious 4-2 victory over Nada (yes! it was Bo7! Jesus). Here are some VODs if you need to refresh your memory on how Gorush became one of the most feared Zerg players around.
After all the confusing play-offs and finals of the different rounds (KOR winning round three, see above) this is the actual grand finals of the last team league OGN did on their own. They arranged for the new joint OGN & MBCGame Sky Proleague afterwards, which has its second round's finals between SKT1 and Samsung Khan coming up soon.
Anyway, this is the picture of lucky Hanbit, who won the whole thing with a 4-2 victory over Pantech & Curitel (and have been sucking ever since). Great, long reports by Saro can be found here.
Alongside with Anytime and Pusan he has been labelled one of the three hopes of protoss - Stork. THis is him just having won the last Challenge League when it was still called that way, which got him the 4th seed for the subsequent OSL (EVER 2). He was still a debutant back then!
He had missed an OSL in the past already (Gillette 2004), but never before had he been forced all the way down to the offline Dual TOurnament (formerly Challenge League) preliminaries. But Boxer is not named the Emperor and arguably the greatest player of all time for nothing. All the way he went from there, all the way up to the So1 OSL Finals, but that is another story!
March
Similar to Gorush it was Nada's second big final this year, and likewise he also won it! Blitzkrieging July in a humiliating 3-0 victory (total playtime round about 40 minutes) he took his second OSL title! Sadly enough that's pretty much all he did this year. He fell to the OGn curse in the following OSL and failed to qualify for the one after it. But it got even worse with him even dropping back to the offline Dual Tournament preliminaries, failing there and not even being present in the Dual Tournament anymore. This means that he will at least be missing for 3 OSLs in a row. Feels wrong somehow, does it not? May Gryff be watching over him in this dark time! Link to VODs if you want: clicketiclick.
As already mentioned the OGN-only team league had already ended its last season, now it was MBCgame's turn to do the same, before their joint-venture could start. The displayed team GO won with a decisive 4-1 against Pantech & Curitel!
With his market value risen after his MSL win it was only a matter of time until one of the bigger teams would become interested in Gorush. SKT1 with players like Mumyung and Zerglee representing their swarm squad was obviously in desperate need of a more capable Zerg player and so Gorush switched from GO to SKT1 and also took Midas with him. Yeah, the Midas who as of now has a 11-1 TvP record on OGN. Heavy losses for GO, that is for certain.
It seems as if Korea is taking a more and more professional sports like approach on pro-gaming, similar to for example in the NBA the KeSPA held their first "draft for rookies" in March '05. The picture shows the accepted players, for more information as well as the players' names have a look here.
"What the hell?" might be the first thing crossing your mind when you see this picture. It was a Progamers' Association meeting with various kind of activities. They probably wanted to make sure Mumyung and July stay in shape or something like it. Our beloved Peter was part of the meeting as well, he might have some memories of it.
April
Some more switching on the roasters. Jju (picture) from Soul, Zerglee from SKT1 as well as Zergman from Plus were all contracted by Samsung Khan. Especially Jju seems to have been a very, very good choice, as you can certainly call him one of the main responsibles for Samsung's more than impressive recent Proleague performance.
Tossgirl wins the ladies MSL, need I say more?
May
"The birth of the joint Proleague" by MBCgame and OGN with Sunny and Clon preparing for a 2v2 match. The new Proleague consists of three rounds the second round's finals are up soon. It's probably the most gigantic league any game has seen in any country, including those boring FPS.
And another Protoss player winning the 4th seed for an OSL. As before with Stork it's a debutant, Anytime by name and as almost certainly most of you will remember he went all the way to the top from there, defeating players like iloveoov and Boxer on the way to his first OSL title. Who would have thought that beforehand considering he was a debutant in one of the weakest teams around?
June
Yes it is it! The famous "KOR head shaving incident" after which they went unbeaten for god knows how many games (I don't exactly remember), gotta love them!
Half a year is done, the second part will follow within a few days! Hope you enjoyed it.
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