StarCraft Pt 2: Serral

Bonjwas of StarCraft

"Bonjwa is a term used to describe a player who dominates the StarCraft scene for a long period of time. A bonjwa has a very high winning percentage and successive title wins. However, a bonjwa is not defined by his statistics or records. Rather, a general consensus is reached that he is the most dominant progamer of his era." - Liquipedia

StarCraft Broodwar prides itself on being one of the most skill intensive, mechanical video games of all time. To break this down, the game is very unforgiving, requiring players to manage their units while also juggling an economy and many more tiny minutia throughout a potentially 30+ minute long match. This requires high APM or actions per minute that no other game really sees. If you watch someone play StarCraft at a high level, their fingers seem to be dancing across the keyboard and their screen view is flipping between 5 things at once. On top of the mechanics required, the games features deep strategy, army positioning, resource management, fog of war, dozens of different unit types and an everchanging meta game. Unlike most modern games this is a one on one game, there is no teammate to pick up the slack. It's truly unparalleled, which is why being the best at this game is a feat.

Look at that sweet APM.

A Bonjwa is more than just being the best player. It's being the best at a level where no one else can come close to matching your prowess. The community has agreed this period of pure dominance must last 3 to 5 years for you to be considered for the title. That's not so say a Bonjwa can't be defeated, it just means when a major event takes place, the Bonjwa is a clear favorite before they have even sat down for a game. A Bonjwa losing a tournament would be considered an upset. StarCraft Broodwar has seen 5 Bonjwas over its lifetime. These players are not up for debate as they have defined entire eras of a game which has seen nearly 25 years of competition.

BoxeR

NaDa

iloveoov

sAviOr

Flash

Just like in the NBA, G.O.A.T. discussions are very common on message boards and here I am brining it up for yet another player. I can already hear StarCraft Broodwar diehards whining "the term is dead" and "stop posting the same thread" and "Flash was the last Bonjwa". The differentiation here lies in discussing StarCraft 2 over Broodwar, a game which is considered to have no Bonjwa. But why is that? StarCraft 2 is 10+ years old, surely it has had a number of dominant players. Starcraft 2 has had its fair share of great players like MVP, Life, and Maru who have shaped how the game is played and hold records that are hard to surpass. Here's where it gets tricky. Broodwar was largely a game fueled by community content after its expansion was released. In essence, the developer didn't support it much beyond the initial release outside of scarce patches because that's just how games worked in the 90's. Modern games have new stuff released almost monthly in an effort to retain players and interest in the game. StarCraft 2 fell somewhere in the middle, where it received lots of love from Blizzard, until around 2016 and then the updates became few and far between before 2020 where they officially stopped touching the game altogether. This translated to a game which evolved quite a lot from 2010 to 2016.

Serral's Journey

Hailing from Finland, Joona "Serral" Sotala has been playing SC2 since 2011. He is a Zerg player (a man after my own heart) and as of Dec 2022, is only 24. If you want Serral's complete picture, read more here. I don't want to get too lost in the sauce, I mostly want to focus on his career from 2017-2022. Before this period Serral was prolific, but he was an average Zerg player with not many high placing finishes to make a name for himself. This was largely due to the fact that he was very young at this time; starting to compete at age 10. By 2017, he was beating players of fairly high calibers, but mostly from Europe. His name started being mentioned among the best foreigners of SC2 while he was consistently making top 8's. When Serral reached 18 and finished his schooling, he was able to focus all of his efforts towards improving at a game he was already very good at. Other professional players have called him the Finish Phenom due to his mechanical prowess and unrivaled strategy. The average professional player of StarCraft 2 plays with an APM ranging from 250-400, while Serral has a peak APM of nearly 1000. On top of that, he is said to sometimes practice 16 hours a day, which was unheard of outside StarCraft Broodwar pro teams. His ability to devote so much time to practice cannot be understated. His father even claims that Serral will practice his mechanics with an unplugged keyboard during road trips with the family. Moreover, like a real-life Beth Harmon, he can visualize StarCraft 2 games in his head and while he is sleeping. This level of proficiency and dedication to StarCraft has not been seen outside of Korea ever. Finally, it is almost paradoxical just how humble, reserved and laid back Serral is. He never bad-mouths his competition and his celebrations are understated. He is a shy interviewee who would rather put his nose to the grind-stone than act arrogantly or prideful. Truly one-of-a-kind.

By 2018, Serral had slowly built momentum and started winning major events. In fact, he holds the record for most professional matches won in a row. He won 32 matches in a row without dropping a single one and these were mostly played in larger events in front of hundred of people while on stage. When I attest that Serral was dominant during this stretch, this is not hyperbole. This culminated in him beating the best players in Europe to qualify for the WCS (World Championship Series) tournament which was the most prestigious tournament at the time. In this era of SC2, Blizzard had region-locked events, meaning Europeans were competing against Europeans while Koreans faced Koreans. WCS was different because it forced Koreans and Europeans to face-off for the title of World Champion. The winner could be considered the best player in the world until the following year. Before 2018, no foreigner had ever won. Serral entered this tournament as a fan favorite, but no one expected him to upset the Korean dominance that had been established for 20 years! Astoundingly, Serral not only proved the doubters wrong, but beat 3 of the best Koreans on his road to a very decisive victory. One could argue that 2018 Serral is the best player to ever touch SC2, by the widest margin the game had ever seen.

2019, featured a Serral who now entered events with a target on his back; being considered the world champion will do that. Rising stars like Reynor from Italy and established titans like Maru from Korea started to give Serral a run for his money. No longer was he smashing every event he entered. This meant he was only getting 1st place half the time instead of every time. His worst finish for the year was 4h place at WCS 2019. Even though Serral was no longer untouchable, his ability to consistently be right at the top, competing for the best player title held true for the entire year! Koreans had lost a step in the years following the Life match-fixing scandal, yet they were still the better region over Europe. So, whenever the Bonjwa conversation was started, everyone always points to how Serral won most of his victories in European only tournaments. Outside of WCS, the other major tournament to pit Europeans and Koreans against each other was GSL vs the World. The GSL (global Starcraft League) was a tournament series which took place in Korea and was considered by many to be the premiere event that actually determined the best player in the world since it was mostly made up of Koreans. In GSL vs the World, Koreans faced off against the best Foreigners, just like the WCS, but this tournament had homefield advantage and the expectation was that Koreans would dominate. Serral won in 2018 and 2019. These two victories, far more than WCS 2018 proved to the world that the huge 'gap' between foreigners and Koreans was now gone. Serral changed the narrative. Now it was no longer a question of are the Koreans better than Europeans? Now the question was 'Who is the best player in the world?' and is it Serral?

The greatest foreign hope delivers

Let's Make The Damn Argument

As someone following SC2 for some time, I would consider 4 players as the best of all time for SC2 and they are as follows:

MVP: A Terran Korean player form the very early days of Starcraft 2, he crushed his competition and was widely considered the best player from 2010-2014. He has won 4 GSLs and was the first player to do so. The reason I don't like MVP as a Bonjwa was because of the nature of SC2. In those early days, player were still figuring out the game and the meta was in a constant flux. Players from this era were nothing compared to the current era. Games were slower, sloppier and less skilled than the modern era.

LIFE: A Zerg Korean player who rose to prominence from 2012-2014. Many SC2 community members don't even mention his name an automatically rule him out of GOAT conversations due to his match-fixing scandal. That doesn't take away from his 3 GSL wins and a WCS win in 2014. I will not include him in the Bonjwa argument because his career was cut short due to his own stupid mistakes.

MARU: This Terran Korean player that many consider to be the best to ever play the game from 2018-2022. He has won GSL 5 times, more than any other player and has achieved feats matched by few others. Whenever Serral is brought up in bonjwa conversations, Maru is always pointed to as his biggest competition. It's a bit of a joke in the community that the SC2 gods don't want Serral to face off against Maru because whenever they play in a tournament together, they never end up actually facing each other directly. The few times they have faced-off, Serral has nearly always beaten Maru, which has caused fans to blame Maru's occasional slumps. I often rule out MAru as the Bonjwa because of how inconsitent he is. One minute he is winning everything and the next he loses to players much less skilled than him in the quarterfinals.

SERRAL: As already explained, Serral's brilliance in SC2 has spanned from 2018-2022. Just look at the overall SC2 winnings to paint the best picture of Serral's absolute dominance. He has over $100,000 more than his closet competitor and some would argue that most of the money in SC2 comes from Korea, which means he had to earnt hat money the hard way. The Triple Crown is an award given to players who have won major events in all 3 regions, Korea, USA, Europe. Serral has done it twice. Life and MVP have also done it twice, but Serral did in in back to back years. Serral may even have 4, but there are very few Korean Foreigner events after the pandemic started.

Serral is unlike anyone we have ever seen in SC2. He completely dominated the game for an entire year, winning every event he entered before going on to win the World Championship; being the first foreigner to EVER do so. From 2019-2022 he continued to be consistently in the top 3 players, never placing below 4th in any event he entered. This longevity and unrivaled peak means he should at least be considered as the Bonjwa of SC2 if there was going to be one. With such an ever evolving game, to stay this fucking good at the game for so long is a feat. To do so in such an overwhelmingly dominant fashion, defying all expectations of a foreigner makes Serral the GOAT and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. If you still don't believe me, just look at the chart below...

Do you see the number of gold 1st places?

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