Players worth watching, and what to take from each

Newcomer Learner Competitor Advanced

The short version

• Competitive StarCraft means Brood War. The scene grew up around the expansion, not the base game.
• Korea turned it into a profession: two individual leagues, a team league, and television.
• A handful of players defined how each race is played. Knowing them tells you what to copy.
• Every great player is known for one thing. Learn the one thing, and you learn a way to win.
• The game outlived its sequel's takeover and is still played professionally today.

Why this is worth twenty minutes

You watch a Brood War game and the commentary is full of names. BoxeR. YellOw. iloveoov. Bisu. None of them mean anything, so the game looks like two people clicking, and the history that would make it readable is spread across a wiki you have no reason to read.

Twenty minutes fixes that for good. Each name below is a style, and each style is something you can steal. It is also the best thing you can do for your own enjoyment of the game, which is a resource in lesson 1's taxonomy and is the one that decides whether you are still playing in a month.

Why it starts with Brood War

StarCraft was first shown publicly in 1996 and released on 31 March 1998. The expansion, Brood War, followed that November.

Professional play really starts with Brood War. The base game was unbalanced and the scene did not form around it. That is why every page on this site says Brood War when it means the competitive game.

The delay before release helped: the game shipped into a bigger and faster internet than the one it was designed for, and online ladders were ready for it.

What Korea built

By the early 2000s StarCraft in Korea was not a hobby with a competitive scene attached. It was televised, sponsored, salaried and structured. Two individual leagues ran in parallel, the OnGameNet Starleague and the MBCGame Starleague, each with its own qualifiers, seasons and finals. A team league, Proleague, ran alongside them, with corporate teams and drafted players. The World Cyber Games gave it an international frame.

Underneath the leagues were ladders: early Brood War ladders, then PGTour and ICCup, which is where most foreign players competed. Behind all of it were the PC bangs, the internet cafes where a great deal of Korean StarCraft was played.

What this means for you: the standard builds, the map knowledge and the timings you meet on any ladder today were worked out by full time professionals over more than a decade. When a build feels arbitrary, it usually is not. Somebody lost a lot of games finding it.

Players worth watching, and what to take from each

Names are spelled as Liquipedia spells them. Look any of them up and watch one game; the thing to look for is in bold.

BoxeR, the Emperor. Terran, and the first real star of the game. Watch him for dropships: small, inventive attacks that make the opponent answer somewhere they were not looking. If you play Terran, you are probably playing a little of his game already.

YellOw, the great runner up. Zerg, and famous for reaching finals and losing them. Watch him for relentless Zerg aggression, and for how pressure that never stops can still fall short against a patient defender.

Garimto. Protoss, remembered for beating BoxeR. Watch him for zealot control: the lesson 3 lecture uses a clip of his micro to show what "never waste a shot" looks like with melee units.

iloveoov, called Cheater Terran because he always had more units than you expected. Watch him for macro: production that never stops, and a build that keeps every option open. Lesson 11 uses him as the example of a player whose plan you cannot read.

NaDa. Terran, known for producing units faster than seems possible. Watch him for mechanics: the same hotkeys every game, every building always working.

Savior, the Maestro. Zerg, dominant in the middle of the decade. Watch him for denying the opponent's plan: he played the Zerg who is always one step ahead of what you want to do.

Bisu. Protoss, whose 2007 final win over Savior gave Protoss a new answer to Zerg built around corsairs and dark templar. Watch him for how one idea can change a matchup.

Flash and Jaedong. The dominant pair at the end of the decade. Flash for precision, Terran with almost nothing wasted. Jaedong for mutalisk control, the best way to learn what lesson 3 means by keeping every unit alive.

Grrrr and ElkY. Two foreign players who made careers in Korea: Guillaume Patry of Canada, who won a Korean Starleague, and Bertrand Grospellier of France. Watch them if you want proof that a player from outside the Korean system can learn to compete inside it.

How to use this

Pick the player whose one thing is closest to your biggest weakness. If you lose because your production stops, watch iloveoov or NaDa. If you lose fights you should win, watch Jaedong or Garimto. If you never make your opponent react, watch BoxeR.

Watch one game with a single question in mind: what does this player do in the first five minutes that I do not? Write the answer down. Then play one game where you copy only that.

What happened next

StarCraft II arrived in July 2010. It pulled the foreign scene together, and it began a slow migration of the Korean professional scene away from Brood War.

A match fixing scandal broke in 2010. It led to criminal proceedings and lifetime bans, and it reached players at the very top of the game. It is the hardest event in the scene's history.

Proleague switched to StarCraft II in 2012, which is the moment professional Brood War in Korea effectively stopped. Proleague itself ran until 2016 and then ended.

And then Brood War came back. Not as an institution but as a streaming phenomenon: former professionals playing for audiences on Korean streaming platforms, which produced a new league, the AfreecaTV StarLeague, from 2016. It is still running.

StarCraft: Remastered shipped in August 2017, with modern resolutions and a supported ladder, which is one reason you can find a match tonight.

The game that was supposed to replace Brood War did not. It is in its third decade because people simply want to play it, and that is not a bad reason to learn it.

What the lecture said

The history runs from ►41:00 to ►1:03:00 in the lesson 1 lecture, told by one of the class's teachers, who played for about ten years. It walks from the leagues and ladders, through BoxeR and his rivals, to the players of that year.

His conclusion is still the useful part: over a decade the game moved from offence to defence. Players expanded earlier and played to hold rather than to break. If your games feel like a race to kill the other player before minute six, that drift is what you are missing.