he won a wcg 2003 game by having a wisp poke the korean's hero so it wouldn't heal back to full

in early 2003 magicyang quit starcraft. he'd been to wcg 2002, watched the top korean players, and decided the gap wasn't something he could train his way out of. so he switched to warcraft 3 and put sixteen hours a day into the asian battle.net ladder. in under a year he was ranked first on it. his night elf ancients play worked well enough that blizzard eventually weakened the ancients' attributes in a patch.

before wcg 2003 he and suho went through the whole map pool. on dragon spa they found something small: at a few of the creep camps, if you quietly had a wisp do a little damage to the enemy hero first, that hero wouldn't heal back to full at the fountain. and if the opponent wasn't careful with it, the hero would die in the middle of clearing the camp. that was the prep. not a build order. a wisp poke.

at the world final he drew ex_bifrost and lost game one. game two he refused to town portal out of a fight so he could kill as many units as possible, and by the time he left his hero had one point of health. he healed it back to full in an instant and swept the base. game three was dragon spa. the wisp went in early. ex_bifrost was managing two places at once and the hero died at the camp. magicyang killed everything he had in one run. when it was over, ex_bifrost, a mild guy by every account, smashed his own keyboard. he was certain he had thrown it himself.

he beat another korean at that same tournament, an orc player, and chinese forums started calling him the korean killer. what knocked him out of the bracket wasn't a korean.

(from a book i wrote in 2015 about how chinese esports actually got built, this chapter is free, link in the comments)