Pro StarCraft player plays with his foot, naps, shames opponent in Zotac cup showmatch

In the Zotac Cup Masters Showmatch, professional Starcraft player Lim “Larva” Hong Gyu not only completely dominated his opponent, Luo “Legend” Xian, in the finals – but threw in a fair bit of dickish taunting. It’s okay to be better at other players in competitive games. It’s even okay to showboat a little – but when that showboating turns to complete disrespect, it’s just a little uncool.

In the first of the three matches, Larva pulled one of his worker units away from his base, and made it dance by clicking around it. It’s a common taunt in the Korean StarCraft scene, a display of condescension. It’s the sort of thing that would handicap most players, but was an ample display of Larva’s incredible skill, along with his lack of good grace.

“Larva’s a showman, and historically, in Brood War, some people are showy but they can literally never back it up… Larva is spectacularly good, and that game was a great demonstration of it. That was just so much bravado!”

It got worse though. During the final moments of the second match, Larvae removed his hand from the keyboard, and played with his foot instead. It is, in the parlance, a dick move.

In the third match, he even pretended to sleep for a while, laying back in his chair and taking a nap. While some may call it a bit of showmanship, it very definitely hurdles right over the line of good sportsmanship.

Zotac, the hardware company responsible for the championship wasn’t too pleased, announcing plans to ban Larva from future tournaments (Weibo via Kotaku)

“The final official decision from ZOTAC is: Officially ban Korean player LARVA from attending any ZOTAC CUP competition organized by ZOTAC! We also want to promise not to invite any professional or non-professional players with a similar track record from participating in ZOTAC CUP competitions… ZOTAC really, really hopes Korean player LARVA would apologize to his opponent Legend Luo Xian for his uncivilized personal behavior during the competition.”

Zotac has also posted a statement on its site in English, saying that they believe in the “importance of sportsmanship that all competitors and spectators should act in a respectful sportsmanlike manner at all times.”

“ZOTAC CUP will take proactive action to ensure it does not happen again in any future ZOTAC CUP tournaments. For any ZOTAC CUP tournaments in the future, we will make sure our rules on sportsmanlike conduct are clearly communicated to competitors.”

Of course, this sort of showboating is probably exactly the sort of thing audiences want to see – so Zotac’s reaction may see its fair share of community backlash.

What do you think? Did he display gracelessness or was his taunting justified?

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Last Updated: December 6, 2017