StarCraft: Brood War Race Dominance

About This Chart

Data Visualization Method

• Data: Observed top-four results — champion, runner-up, and both semifinalists — from completed one-on-one major individual leagues in Korean StarCraft: Brood War (OSL, MSL, ASL/SSL, and KSL). No estimated or interpolated values are used.
• Period and scope: 84 tournaments from 21 February 2000 to 24 May 2026 (OSL 33, MSL 26 including the four 2002 KPGA Tours, ASL/SSL 21, KSL 4). Team leagues, the World Cyber Games, overseas events, and exhibition matches are excluded. The 1999 PKO is excluded because Random and race-select entries make a single-race attribution unclear, and the in-progress ASL 22 is excluded as of the data date.
• Scoring: In each tournament the champion's race receives 5 points, the runner-up's race 3, and each of the two semifinal losers' races 1. Champions and runners-up are not also given semifinal points, so every tournament distributes exactly 10 points. Where a third-place match is played, both semifinalists still score 1 regardless of the 3rd/4th outcome.
• Race attribution: Only three races are tracked — Terran, Zerg, and Protoss — with no separate Random axis. A result is credited to the race a player actually used in that tournament, not their career main race. In same-race finals or semifinals, the points for each placement are summed to that one race.
• Chart form: A cumulative bar chart race ordered by each tournament's final date. Bar length encodes the running point total, vertical position the standing at that moment, and colour the race (Terran in blue, Zerg in purple, Protoss in gold). Bar movement and easing are presentational and do not represent a measured quantity. Ties are held in a fixed display order and do not imply an analytical ranking.

Creator's Note

StarCraft: Brood War is a one-on-one real-time strategy game built around three asymmetric races, and its Korean individual leagues have run for more than two decades. This chart puts that whole history on a single comparable scale to ask one plain question: across every season, whose deep runs added up.

Over the full period Terran and Zerg move almost in step, trading the lead more than once before Terran settles ahead. At the last completed season the totals reach Terran 311 and Zerg 306 — a gap of five points — with Protoss at 223. The author's reading is that the interesting part is how narrow the distance stayed and where the lead changed hands, not which race finishes on top.

Data Sources

• Liquipedia — results, brackets, and dates for the ASL and KSL seasons, and cross-checking across the whole set.
• Ongamenet Starleague (Wikipedia) — the OSL results lineage.
• MBCGame StarCraft League (Wikipedia) — the MSL results lineage, including the 2002 KPGA Tours.
• Namu Wiki — per-season league pages, cross-checked for results, race attribution, and OSL/MSL tournament dates (per-tournament links are kept in the project's source list).

Limitations

This score is an author-defined metric built for comparison, not an official ranking. Only top-four finishes count, so every result of eighth place or lower scores zero. The chart also covers individual leagues alone; team leagues, prize money, head-to-head records, and map-by-map win rates all sit outside it.

The number of tournaments and their format differ across eras, and patches, maps, and shifting metagames all affect who advances. Early-period records also carry gaps and naming inconsistencies, so the few Random and race-changing cases were attributed by the race used at the time and may leave some room for error.

A small number of placements were later stripped from official records after match-fixing penalties. To preserve each tournament's actual race distribution and the fixed 10-point structure, these are kept on a historical-bracket basis and flagged row by row in the source data rather than removed.

What This Chart Doesn't Show

A race's cumulative score is not a measure of race balance or inherent strength. The total blends individual player skill, how many professionals played each race, the number of tournaments per era, maps and patches, and who happened to qualify — none of which the chart separates out.

So it should be read as descriptive: which race the top-four finishes of these selected major individual leagues accumulated to, not a causal claim that one race is stronger than another. The title's question is a framing for the chart, not a conclusion drawn from it.