Chapter 25. The Man With the Dancing Left Hand: suhO¶
A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二十五 左手会跳舞的男人 suhO
Written by BBKinG in 2004. First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 16, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19638219
This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.
Su Hao, who competes under the tag suhO, is known among Chinese esports fans as the man with the dancing left hand, because of the speed and precision with which his left hand works the keyboard.
Su Hao was born on the thirtieth day of the sixth lunar month in 1983, into an ordinary working-class family in Xinyang, a city in the south of Henan Province. He was an only child, and since both of his parents were the eldest in their respective families, calling him the eldest grandson of the senior branch is the plainest way to describe where he stood in the family as a whole, and nobody would dispute it. That is normally the child a Chinese family raises to be the most conventional of them all. Instead, twenty years later, in 2003 and 2004, his almost flawless play in Warcraft III, a game adults of the time called electronic heroin, made him one of the two Chinese players sent to the Warcraft III event at the World Cyber Games, first in South Korea and then in the United States. He also signed with the Shaanxi Provincial Sports Bureau and became a registered state athlete. And now this Su Hao, with his soft fringe, round face and small eyes, his fondness for watermelon milk tea and his resemblance to a slimmed-down Maitreya Buddha, sits across from me and calmly talks me through a childhood and adolescence that most people would call unusual.
"I was born into a very ordinary family." Su Hao repeated that sentence three times while describing his home life. It was ordinary in the sense that it was no different from any other family raising a child born in the 1980s. He was brought up strictly. His marks in primary school were excellent, and he was allowed to play games only once his homework was finished. Even so, his parents regularly hauled him out of the arcade and gave him a beating at home.
"That was the fault of the media back then. They played up every negative thing about video games and made them out to be a public menace." Su Hao's voice noticeably hardened as he recalled those beatings.
Su Hao liked only games he could compete in. He seemed to have been born with an instinct for them.
As a boy, he could see the trick behind an arcade game his friends had spent ages mastering just by watching it once. Usually a few solo attempts on his own were enough for him to beat every one of them, one after another. His favourite games were the aeroplane shooters. Where other players wondered how many stages they could clear, Su Hao worked out how many points he could score once he had cleared them all. While clearing a stage he was already refining his inputs so that he could finish the job more perfectly, which brought his score close to the maximum. The perfectionism that would push him to want everything higher and better was taking shape early. His memory was unusually good too. He could read a story magazine or a novel once and still retell it accurately some time later.
That perfectionism and that memory would later prove enormously useful when he had to analyse and summarise the tactics of the world's best players.
"If I had not chosen to go to a key high school, perhaps I would never have taken this road." Su Hao's face was perfectly calm as he said it.
Xinyang is a large place, covering a big share of southern Henan Province. The key high school Su Hao entered was the best in the area, so it gathered every academic star in the region. Before high school he had been a top student, cheerful and outgoing, with a large circle of friends, the kind of child his family, his friends and his teachers all approved of. At the key high school his light was drowned out by the talent around him, and he gradually became one of the students the teachers criticised. Academic competition among classmates was fierce, and nobody even went outside between lessons. "Only me and a few of the other students who were doing badly would go and stand on the balcony during the break," he said, mocking himself. Twelve lessons a day and two days off a month was a routine he never got used to.
Little by little the confidence and openness of earlier years disappeared, replaced by a deep sense of inferiority and withdrawal. That period shaped his character profoundly. Even after he became famous, people who know Su Hao notice that there is nothing showy or arrogant about him and think of him instead as shy and reserved. That is the mark high school left.
"Looking back now, I feel my classmates were actually very mature. But if I could choose again, I still would not take that road." Four years after finishing high school, Su Hao remains firm about it. Those years at the key high school destroyed his confidence and turned a confident, outgoing boy into a quiet one.
Esports gave Su Hao his confidence back and brought him out of the lowest point of his life.
In the 2001 college entrance examination Su Hao won a place at Xi'an International University and began his first year. In 2002 he had intended to enter the StarCraft event at the Xi'an regional qualifier for WCG. He had already won an internet café tournament in Xi'an over the National Day holiday in 2001, along with placings in several smaller events, and that first taste of success left him eager for WCG. Then registration for the Xi'an qualifier suddenly closed two days earlier than announced. Su Hao, travelling back to Xi'an from Henan on the original schedule, missed it, and the disappointment was severe.
As it happened, that was the year StarCraft passed its peak and began to decline. After thinking it over, Su Hao gave up the idea of becoming a StarCraft player. Counter-Strike had by then become the mainstream esports title, so he started studying it, going onto Chinese and foreign sites every day to download demos, the recorded replays, of high-level European and American matches, working through the tactics the best players used and analysing the technique behind each weapon. Later, playing a match against strangers in an internet café, he used tactics so bold that he took several opponents apart in moments. They assumed he was running cheat software and crept round behind him to watch how he was playing, only to find that he was not. One of them told him, in some astonishment, that it was lucky he was clean, because otherwise they had been ready to teach him a lesson.
"I was studying Counter-Strike very seriously back then, because I found it fascinating. If Warcraft III had not come along, I might have ended up as a professional Counter-Strike player," Su Hao said, amused.
In 2002 a new game gradually became the choice of Chinese esports enthusiasts: Warcraft III, Blizzard's major release built on the conventions of Western fantasy literature and usually shortened to WAR3. Like StarCraft it is a real-time strategy game, and its tactical thinking has something in common with chess. Both sides start from exactly the same footing, gathering resources, expanding their population and building up an army. The units in that army are divided into types that counter one another, and victory goes to whoever applies their tactics more skilfully. From the moment Blizzard released it, WAR3 captivated Su Hao, who had loved StarCraft, and he began to specialise in studying its techniques.
"Winning the WCG 2003 Chinese national title was really a matter of luck plus ability." Su Hao laughed, entirely without pretence.
The WCG 2003 national final was the turning point of Su Hao's life. He was up against more than twenty elite Warcraft III players who had fought their way out of hard qualifiers across China. It was the first time he had seen so many of the country's best standing right in front of him. During the opening ceremony of the WCG 2003 Chinese final he watched the stirring WCG promotional film play across the big screen, and when the music came in and lifted his fighting spirit he was shaking all over with excitement. He clenched his fists and told himself, over and over, I have to win, I have to win.
Then the draw was announced, and Su Hao found he had the worst bracket possible, because it meant facing almost every famous Warcraft III player in China in turn. He was a complete unknown at the time, and hardly anyone in the audience had heard of him. But that thought, I have to win, sounded the charge, and he threw everything into a task that was close to impossible.
In the round of twelve, with six places at stake, Su Hao drew MagicYang, the player known as the Korean killer. South Korea's Warcraft III players were the strongest in the world, and MagicYang had beaten them repeatedly. He had held the top spot on the Asian battle.net ladder and was hugely popular with the crowd. Facing a player of that stature, Su Hao's hands began to shake. He had never felt anything like it.
"I wasn't afraid of them, I was just so worked up that I could hardly keep my hands on the keyboard," Su Hao said, without embarrassment. The match began, and he tried to relax into it. At their first contact, though, the gap between them gave him a shock: MagicYang's hero was already level 6 while his own was only level 4. Units in the game are divided into heroes and ordinary soldiers, the hero leading the soldiers and gaining levels through combat, growing stronger with each one. Two levels may not sound like much, but it meant MagicYang's entire operation was developing twice as fast as his own, and a gap that wide alarmed him.
"I just kept telling myself, I have to win, I have to win. And then I noticed that MagicYang had made a very small mistake, small enough to be fatal." Su Hao's eyes lit up as he described it.
What he had spotted was that every time their armies met, MagicYang sent his soldiers after Su Hao's hero rather than Su Hao's soldiers. So Su Hao used his hero to draw the fire while his own soldiers killed MagicYang's. Whenever the hero was close to dying, he used a town portal scroll, which pulls a hero straight out of the fight and back to base. Once the hero had recovered there, it charged back in to draw fire again. After a few rounds of this MagicYang found that nearly all his soldiers were dead, that Su Hao had lost very few of his own, and that Su Hao's hero had gained several levels from all the kills. The advantage swung across in one move, and Su Hao pressed on into MagicYang's base to take the match.
"After that match my luck seemed to keep getting better, especially in the final against CQ2000, who was the most famous player in the country at the time." Su Hao grew animated recalling it.
CQ2000's army was about to reach the entrance of Su Hao's base. All he had to do was wait for the main force to get into position and walk in, and the match was his. At that moment CQ2000's hero got a little greedy and went chasing after Su Hao's hero, which was low on health. In the instant before the blow that would have killed it landed, Su Hao's soldiers finished off several of CQ2000's soldiers elsewhere on the map, and the kills levelled up Su Hao's hero, instantly restoring some of its health. So the blow not only failed to kill, it was the greed behind it that had carried CQ2000's hero deep inside Su Hao's encirclement. With ambushes closing in from every side, there was nothing left for it to do but die there. CQ2000's army was suddenly leaderless, and in the version of Warcraft III played at the time a hero was worth ten ordinary soldiers, so losing one left the whole army useless. Su Hao seized a chance that comes once in a lifetime, drove his army straight into the enemy base and wiped it out.
He had won. Su Hao never told me what that felt like, because in that moment the only way to know was to be him, eyes closed, smiling, going over it slowly and repeatedly on his own.
The trip to South Korea that followed was the first time Su Hao had left the country. What struck him about South Korea was how clean it was, and how fast cars moved on the roads. Before the tournament, in the practice room, he happened to run into 4K.Grubby, who had just won the European championship. They played four practice matches and Su Hao won all four. Afterwards 4K.grubby came over, shook his hand and said, "Good game."
"We never actually met in the tournament itself, but looking back I can see that I had so little competitive experience that I did not know to hold something back in a practice match. It earned me my opponent's respect, but it cost more than it was worth." Su Hao was analysing it as carefully as he was remembering it.
"Before I left for the WCG world final in South Korea I went home to sort out my passport, and my father gave me a pendant that had been consecrated at a temple. My luck has been good ever since." Su Hao said it happily, fishing a gold-coloured pendant out from under his collar.
When the conversation turned to his family, his expression became more complicated.
In his third year of primary school, Su Hao's father spent a full month's wages on a Famicom clone, the console everyone in China called the red-and-white machine, and carried it home. Su Hao still remembers how happy he was. Before that school year was over, the family had locked it away.
His family were strongly opposed to video games at first and regarded them as an electronic drug. Both his parents are very traditional people, and they doted on their son. Money was tight at home while he was at university, but they refused to let him go without anything in Xi'an. The first two years of his fees almost exhausted their savings, and they borrowed a great deal from relatives. Asking his family for money left Su Hao ashamed and guilty, and he badly wanted to do something to help cover the household's costs.
Travel had been his greatest love since childhood, and the prize money he had won over the past two years would have taken him anywhere in the world. Instead he saved all of it and handed it to his parents. His last two years of tuition and his current living costs all came out of his winnings. He no longer asks his family for a single yuan, and he regularly earns money to help support the household. None of us used to understand why Su Hao had that determination and that confidence behind I have to win. Where does a belief in winning that firm actually come from? Perhaps now we are beginning to understand.
After WCG 2003 and the trip to South Korea, his family's view of games began to change¶
In the wake of WCG 2003, Su Hao's relatives discovered that playing games could in fact be a profession. This was especially true once CCTV-5, the national sports channel, launched a programme called Esports World and Su Hao began appearing on it regularly. Every Friday his relatives, whether they lived in the countryside or in the city, would put everything down and gather in front of the television waiting for him to appear. Every appearance delighted the relatives who had watched him grow up, and if an episode went by without him, they would telephone to ask why. None of them understood what esports was, but they considered being on national television a respectable thing, and they told everyone what a fine young man he had become.
"I have signed with the Shaanxi Provincial Sports Bureau and I represent Shaanxi in CEG, the China Esports Games league. My parents don't object to what I do any more." Even so, saying it did not smooth the frown from Su Hao's face. Perhaps, as the eldest grandson of the senior branch and at the same time an explorer of an esports world nobody around him yet understood, he still had a great many knots left to untie.
Su Hao on the esports industry¶
"The audience for competitive gaming is extremely broad, because it places very few limits on age, physique, gender or even nationality. Chinese esports should find its own path rather than copy the way the industry developed abroad." That was how Su Hao saw it, from the position of a professional player.
The first time Su Hao was asked for an autograph was after he won the WCG 2003 Chinese national title. "It felt great. It really felt great," he said, laughing. From then on, signing autographs and posing for photographs with fans became one of the important parts of attending a tournament, and he took it seriously. Even after several hours of matches, exhausted in body and mind, he would still smile and give people what they asked for.
One autograph stayed with him. It was after an event in Shanghai, when a woman in her forties came up and asked him to sign something. Su Hao was taken aback, and then learned that she was asking on behalf of her son, a boy of about ten who was too embarrassed to come over himself. Su Hao immediately walked across and had his photograph taken with his young fan as a keepsake. After that, parents asking for autographs on behalf of their children became a regular occurrence, which made him think of the way his own parents had chased him down and dragged him home. Chinese parents today are clearly very different from the ones before them in how open-minded they are and how they guide their children.
There have been two moments in Su Hao's competitive career when he wanted to cry. The first was winning the Chinese national title at WCG 2003, and he never actually cried. The second was at the China versus South Korea showdown in Shenyang, and it was the crowd from the northeast that brought it on.
The South Korean national team sent four of the country's top professional players. Representing China was a golden combination that included Su Hao and MagicYang. All of them were elite players, but South Korean esports was far better developed and their players were a good deal stronger than the Chinese, particularly since the Korean side had brought in check[pooh], one of their very best. From the opening matches the Chinese players were in a difficult position. The crowd in the northeast, though, roared their encouragement like a wave breaking, and it filled Su Hao with a passion and a sense of mission to win glory for his country. He swore to himself that he would not let the people in that hall down, that he absolutely would not. In the end Su Hao brought down all four of the visiting players, beat check[pooh], South Korea's leading man, and took the championship of the China versus South Korea showdown.
"In that moment, with the crowd around you chanting your name like a tide coming in, I played above myself and finished a job that should not have been possible." A year on, Su Hao still spoke about that match with real feeling.
As a university student himself, Su Hao knew perfectly well how much esports meant on Chinese campuses, but the enthusiasm of Beijing students still startled him. In June 2004, while training in Beijing for WCG 2004, he was invited, as a member of the YollinY esports club, to give a talk and play exhibition matches at North China University of Technology in Beijing. The university hall held a thousand people and was so tightly packed that there was no room to move. Su Hao and his teammates gave a full presentation on the theme of how esports was developing, using slides. The talk ran for several hours, and the crowd below the stage only grew, which brought home to him how powerful the appeal of esports had become.
South Korea has esports leagues running the whole year round, as well as world-level events such as WCG, and its scene has reached a very mature state. The Korean broadcaster MBC was about to launch a tournament called WEG, run on a purely commercial basis and organised by OnGameNet, the well-known Korean esports company. OnGameNet's director had personally invited Su Hao to come and compete in their league. Players in it receive a dedicated sponsorship fee, a salary and prize money. The league runs four seasons a year, the winner of each season takes US$20,000, and there are various other benefits on top.
"The Chinese esports market is huge, but all the money is being taken by foreign companies." That was how Su Hao summed up the state of the industry.
Professional players are very particular about the equipment they use, from mice and mousepads to keyboards and graphics cards. Just as some countries spend heavily on improved swimsuits for their swimmers, better equipment lets a player show what he can really do. Su Hao's mouse was bought in South Korea. His mousepad and headset are both well-known German products, and his keyboard is an American Dell model made in China.
"The mouse I use is not as advanced as the famous brands, but it fits an Asian hand very well. Compared with Chinese manufacturers who simply copy the shape of foreign mice, that makes it a rare thing." Su Hao regrets that Chinese manufacturers produce only low and mid-range goods and have yet to bring out a high-end product designed for Chinese users. In fact, even ordinary enthusiasts have started paying attention to basic equipment like mice and keyboards, and a high-end, responsive optical mouse has become something close to a badge of membership.
"A mid to high-end optical mouse sells for somewhere between 200 and 500 yuan, but it is a pity that the market is almost entirely divided between Microsoft and Logitech, two foreign manufacturers. All of their mice share one problem: they are a little large for an East Asian hand, which means most enthusiasts using them over a long period suffer from hand fatigue and wrist strain." Su Hao believes Chinese manufacturers are perfectly capable of serving the high-end market at home, and lack only the courage to innovate and a correct sense of where they fit in that market.
The YollinY esports club¶
"I have been lucky. Everyone at our club is a good person." Su Hao is a member of the YollinY esports club, the forerunner of today's WE, and he loves the close, ambitious atmosphere there. Including the team manager, the club has fewer than eight people, yet at the WCG 2004 Chinese national final it took five of the places for the world final in the United States across three disciplines: Warcraft, StarCraft and FIFA. It is a world-class roster, and no exaggeration.
"Pei Le is the manager of the YollinY esports club. I met him back when I was playing StarCraft, and in May 2004 I joined YollinY and went to Beijing to train. Pei Le has a warmth you rarely find in a leader. He is happy to spend time helping other people, and he handles things thoughtfully." Su Hao had a great deal more to say once he got on to his teammates. "Dangqi has not been at the club long, but he is very good at business negotiations. He has CET-6 English, so he is our diplomat when we travel to tournaments. The slides and materials for our talks at the universities in Beijing were all his work."
Su Hao said he gets on well with Cui Sen, who is from the northeast, and considers him to have the openness and generosity typical of people there. During the training camp in Beijing the two shared a room. One day Cui Sen was left helpless by one of Su Hao's strategies, but he laughed and promised to beat him the next day, and sure enough he came up with a new approach and did. Su Hao was not about to give in either, and on the third day he worked out a counter. On the fourth day Cui Sen came running over, delighted, to say he had found a way to counter the counter. The two of them kept sharpening each other that way, and the way Cui Sen faced defeat head on, without the slightest discouragement, made a strong impression.
Talking about Sky, runner-up at the WCG 2004 Chinese national final and his own teammate, Su Hao described someone who has kept a child's innocence. "Sky is like a kid who doesn't know anything. He loves asking questions, and the team calls him the Hundred Thousand Whys." Something amusing seemed to occur to him. "For example, Sky is eating sunflower seeds and notices they are white, so he asks why the seeds are white. Everyone explains that it is the salt on the outside, so he asks why salt is added. Everyone explains that it is for flavour, and then he finds something new to ask about."
Plans for the future¶
"The truth is that there is plenty for us to do once we stop competing. We are not the dead end people imagine." Su Hao was optimistic and definite about his own future.
To begin with, he accepts that esports cannot be compared with traditional sports like football or basketball, but he points out that it has a very wide base, that its audience is enormous and that it costs relatively little to follow. Its clearly defined audience is attracting more and more IT manufacturers and companies from traditional industries. Commercial tournaments running across the whole year are becoming more frequent and better organised, and a national esports association is reportedly about to be approved by the State Council.
Su Hao is also optimistic about the future of esports clubs.
"I could be a coach. When an esports club produces results, the coach and the players split the money fifty-fifty, and bringing through a new generation of players is going to take a great many coaching staff with experience of major tournaments. Organising and planning events is another option. South Korea has already taken it to a very high level. There was one Korean tournament held on a beach, with a stand built for tens of thousands of spectators. At the opening ceremony the organisers had the inspired idea of bringing in two helicopters to deliver two players to the venue, and the atmosphere went straight to its peak. The cheering and screaming was deafening." A look of longing came over his face as he spoke.
"The Chinese esports market is several times the size of the Korean one, and we have a lot of room to improve on the commercial side of running events. Esports is now the ninety-ninth sport recognised by the state, and I am a player under contract to a sports bureau, so going to work in a sports authority is another good direction for the future." Su Hao's plans for the years ahead are very clear, and he is full of confidence about them.