Ret 'Grilled' interview (51 minutes)

"Yeah, I think in a Korean house it's absolutely crazy, you could be doing well for six months, but there's a hierarchy, so even if you're doing better than someone they might just have more credit from the past and you're not going to get that shot, in Korea it's very hard to get a shot, or it used to be, because there was only GSL. So it was like the qualifiers, and they're so hard to get through, and that's only to get to Code A, and getting to Code A, that's not like playing for all the fans and stuff.

HerO, before he joined TL, was always practicing in oGs, more than most, and he was actually, they were thinking about kicking him from the team, or letting him go home for a bit, because he didn't qualify for GSL a couple of times, and he was doing great in custom games. Now HerO is one of the winngest Protoss players in the world and you would think he was just born really skilled, but he has done years and years and years of low league training in these team houses, also from SC1.

I feel like the Korean players are all so good that some of them have an amount of luck at a certain point, so they start believing in themselves more and then they have also years and years of super competitive tournaments. So even if you just played the qualifiers for GSL every month you're gonna learn to deal with those situations where you have to deliver. It's so important to them, someone could be as good as someone else but if they get an unlucky break in one GSL qualifier then maybe they never get to show their skill. So it's really, I think the Korean environment definitely teaches you a lot of mental strength, and the ones who don't have it give up early."

"For me it's like if something clicks, like I will just have problems with a certain matchup or something, and then I realise like a small thing and then everything makes sense and then I can do really well for three weeks, a month, before something changes again and then I either get it really fast or it takes me a little bit longer. But I definitely recognise moments in my overall career when I had like 'Oh yeah, that's how I do that' and then I started doing that consistently.

The biggest example is in June of 2011, I played MLG and I lost a few games and I was like 'man, I should ling counter more often' and then one month later I won the European Blizzcon invitational with basically just ling counters. So I have those moments when I realise something is really good and then I can play it really well, and then that fades out and I'm kind of lost, like you can tell when I'm playing that I don't really believe in something, but when I really believe in something then I can do it to perfection. But if I'm unconfident or unsure then you can see in my play that I'm making like very insecure moves, things like that.

When I played StarCraft Brood War there was always a Korean player to watch and you could just follow his gameplan, and you knew exactly 'if I do this, if I make these five steps, I can win'. If I have like a five step plan in a game, where I know I'll win, then I can do those to perfection, but if it's like three steps and then you might win or you might not win, not really sure why or why some games go certain ways, then I become more uncertain and my moves will become less effective as well."

"I've known and played MC for such a long time and I don't think, I've beat him once or twice but he's beaten me like ten times. Whenever I play MC I'm like 'Woah, it's MC. The stuff I'm doing, it's not going to be enough for MC'. It becomes also a harder matchup for me with certain players, like Alicia and Puzzle, I don't really know them that well, so I respect them but with MC it's like 'it's MC!' because he was so successful, so it's harder to play against him for me.

Also because we used to be in oGs together so he knows so much about me. Early on in SC2 MC would watch my games and then try and tell me why I lost. So it's kind of a relationship where we both acknowledge he's better than me, so it becomes hard to play that person and think of ways where you can definitely beat MC. Like even though there are ways where you can definitely beat MC, because he's lost a lot of series against Zerg, if I don't believe in that in my head then I can't do it. So then it becomes like this mix of mechanics and stuff that sort of works, but it's not enough for those kind of matches.

It's another mental thing about Starcraft, I think a lot of people have certain players they'd rather not place, for whatever reason, and then when they do they play a lot worse than they should, so I think MC's just one of those guys for me."

"I think back then the playstyles the Zerg were using, I played a lot different, I was using muta-ling-bane in ZvT, trying to do a lot of multi-harass and using like BW-type styles to win these games. Then all the Zergs started winning with BL and infestors and just defending, and then for Zergs like me it's like 'well these guys, they're not doing anything and they're winning, so I should try this'.

But then I kind of lost my multi-tasking, even just the focus on winning through means that are like that, and not just BL and infestor, and then it became harder because I have never been the best with infestors, but I saw other zergs winning all the time, doing nothing and like making it look so easy. So I was like 'well how should I play then? like I've been playing a certain way for such a long time, with just like attacking, mutli-tasking and macroing, and then all these people are winning just sitting there with infestors and BLs'. Of course I wanted to win also, so I kind of started switching it up, and I think I've lost some of my unique skills that make me a dangerous player because of it.

I still haven't mastered sort of the imba style, so that's why my results after the patch have been way worse, compared to everyone else. So I'm like the anti-patch-zerg."

"I think for a while there everyone was trying to copy his style, because when you watch Stephano games it's like 'how did he win that?'. All of these zergs are in the same position and they always lose, and then stephano somehow wins the battle. He was one of the first who like always consistently very well planned the way he was gonna attack, like from where and how many sides, he always has the best engagements.

For a while I didn't realise this, so I watched Stephano and I'd just be asking questions like what to do, what to do. Then I realised 'yeah, it's only about engagements'. stephano was like the first one to really maximise his engagements, so that brought him a lot of success. I don't think you can say anything about Stephano and the patch, because he's one of the first to have played zerg in the most winningest, even if it's considered boring, but he definitely found like the recipe to win. So to be the first one to do that requires a huge amount of talent and being intelligent and planning how he's going to play games."