'The Second Summer' is the second and final part of the story of Yun 'TaeJa' Young Seo's career. In HotS TaeJa has won five offline tournaments and place top four on ten occasions. Part one.
Some of the story-lines discussed:
- Switching from WCS KR to WCS AM.
- Starting the Summer of TaeJa with a semi-final finish at Dreamhack Summer.
- Winning HSC VII and ASUS ROG Summer.
- Finishing top four at WCS AM S2 and WCS S2 finals.
- Winning a stacked Dreamhack Bucharest.
- Cooling off over WCS AM S3 and the Global Finals.
- Winning HSC VIII and Dreamhack Winter.
Some quotes to whet your appetite:
Switching to HotS:
Wings of Liberty had seen TaeJa in peak career form as it came to a close. The star Terran of Team Liquid had followed up his foreign tournament championships with two GSL Code S semi-finals runs in the span of the last three held before the switch to Heart of the Swarm. With the arrival of the new expansion, TaeJa flew out to Dallas for the MLG Winter Championship in the middle of March. After defeating SaSe, a foreign Protoss who had been a bane of his in WoL, 3:1 in the Ro32, TaeJa was ruthlessly eliminated in a 3:0 sweep by fellow Korean Terran Bomber.
HSC VII:
A couple of days after Dreamhack Summer, TaeJa played his WCS American Challenger group, beating hellokitty and Neeb without difficulty, earning a Premier League spot for Season 2. Less than a week later and it was time for TaeJa to board a plane for Germany, to play at HomeStory Cup VII. Rampaging through the two group stages, TaeJa reached the Ro8 with only a single map loss against him. Thrashing former GSL champion Seed in the Ro8 earned him a semi-final series against team-mate TLO. Having just beaten TLO 2:0 in Sweden, many would have predicted the monster Terran would roll over the Zerg on his team-mate's home soil. Instead, TLO would weather the assault of TaeJa going up 2:0 to claw back to 2:2 and a deciding game. TaeJa won the deciding map and moved on to his first final of HotS.
Facing Life:
Former GSL champion Life would have had many Terran players worried, but more concerning for TaeJa was that Life had beaten him in all of their only offline meetings. In online competition, as Code A and B level players, TaeJa had always held over the young StarTale Zerg, but once their rivalry had transitioned into the offline phase the Korean Zerg had beaten him in three straight series, going 7:0 in maps against Liquid's champion Terran. Another scary opponent proved to be little more than a shadow of a tree on a wall, as TaeJa continued his undefeated playoff run with a 2:0 series win to reach the final.
Complaining about not winning more than $10,000:
As only TaeJa could, he complained after the win about only winning tournaments worth at most $10,000 (though technically his ASUS ROG win that year had been worth $13,000). Phrasing aside, it was clear that TaeJa felt some level of frustration that his best form had seemingly always been on display in the medium-sized tournaments, never at the biggest events or in GSL Code S. No amount of foreign tournament wins could stack up to the prestige of winning events like GSL, WCS Global Finals and such. After years of top level play and sustained wrist damage, TaeJa was clearly reflecting on opportunities gone to waste in his career.
The entire article can be read at OnGamers.