How A Tournament Tried To Stop The Greatest Gamer Of All Time

It makes sense for players to do whatever it takes to win against the best of the best, but what happens when tournament organizers start doing the same?

While it's practically unheard of, it has happened before. This is the tale of the AfreecaTV StarCraft League and Starcraft’s Final Boss, Lee Young Ho, better known as Flash.

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#starcraft #esports #gaming

[Akshonesports]

Hello everyone, we wanted to apologize for the mispronunciation of Brood War and Afreeca in this video and will make sure something like this doesn’t slip through again.

[jerrytealeaf]

Another fun Brood War fact: At 3:08 the video mentions that FlaSh had RSI in his wrists. This severely affected his ability to play the Terran vs Zerg matchup which relies heavily on marines and medics, a fragile and APM intensive unit comp that requires a lot of quick and precise mouse movements. How did he solve this problem? He invented the 5 factory goliath build which revolves around the mechanical Goliaths, a much less demanding unit comp, and absolutely disrupted the meta and forced players to spend several ASL seasons figuring out how to counter his strategy. It was also an incredible gift for lesser-skilled players since the Terran vs Zerg matchup was widely considered the most mechanically difficult matchup in the game until FlaSh invented this new build.

[carmacksanderson]

AfreecaTV: We will control the map pool to make it impossible for Flash win!
Flash: Ah, finally, a challenge

[jerrytealeaf]

ASL: How do we stop FlaSh? Let's make the maps unwinnable for Terran!
FlaSh: *switches to Random*

[someguy]

Non sc players can't appreciate how good flash is. Another example: during his latest ASL championship run, they would poll the other pro players on who they expected to win before each match. Every time, they voted almost unanimously for flash. And they were right. He stomped everyone.

[Shmandalf]

This level of dominance is almost unheard of in any other E-sport. Its actually insane how big of a skill gap there is between this one player and his closest contemporaries. In Starcraft 2, you can bet on Serral, Reynor, Clem, Maru or Dark and still lose, for example. With Brood War, betting on Flash was just a guarantee.

[DarkLeviathan]

One of the very few times on the internet where you read "best ___ of all time" and it's actually not clickbait. Flash is the goat.

[coastfan]

I would have loved to have seen some mention or reference to his run playing as RANDOM in one of the most recent ASLs before he left for military service. It was just another one of the bullet points that showed how far and away better of a player he was than the other pros and having a professional random player in an offline tournament made for some very interesting games

[gaah]

You should've mentioned that he played as random in the last tournament before he joined the military and placed 3rd in that ASL. That's just insane.

[lewisnorden]

Starcraft is as complicated as chess but you then have to make 1000 movements in a minute

[BlueV]

Bro lost for the first time to a Protoss player in 11 years, given a huge disadvantage, and it was 2-3. Then he came back next season and stomped the shit out of him 4-0. Crazy

[tthunder]

6:32 I may not understand anything about the game but I can tell from their vices that it was legendary

[jbwon]

Crazy to think about how Starcraft birthed E Sports. When the game came out there wasn't even a spectator mode in the game so the spectator had to be a third player as Terran, float the CC into a corner and have the SCVs kill each other. Still makes me laugh when I remember the old casts of scouting workers find a random SCV chilling in a corner next to his CC

[Cernunns]

"While we could make an entire video about his feats and accomplishments... and we might.." - you should!

[TheDasErdinger]

Thank you so much for shining a light on Starcarft 1! More people need to know about it and I think you did a good job explaining why this game is so wonderful.
BTW Starcraft 1 is free so if anyone wants to check it out, please do so!

[FrankTheTank]

This is why this channel is amazing. I will never play StarCraft, let alone check out Korean esports on my own, yet I have immense respect for Flash regardless of the fact I only knew he existed like 10min ago. That was an inspiring story and well made video

[codespeed]

StarCraft was the prime of eSports for myself and my excitement for it. Really cool to see a video talking about a legendary figure of my fond memories

[MatildaHinanawi]

I'm glad you're bringing more attention to Brood War. Even today, it feels like a criminally underrated e-sport.

[hellowill]

You talk about winnigs, but his salary was insane too. Starcraft players had 200k/yr salaries in 2000-2010, while other games were barely esport tier.

[DaRbL]

Flash is an anomaly, a glitch in the matrix. Legend.