Chapter 26. MagicYang, the Hero Who Beat Korea's Best

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二十六 抗韩英雄 MagicYang

Written by BBKinG in 2007. First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 17, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19638736

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.

"Hello everyone, I'm MagicYang." These days, at half past seven every Friday and Sunday evening, a great many esports fans sit waiting in front of a television or a computer for that short, familiar voice to come through on the GamesTV channel.

A forum user called Palocc once summed up Lao Yang's "ahead of his time" grasp of Warcraft III tactics like this:

In the Reign of Chaos era, when everyone else was still fighting with soldiers, MY fought with trees. In The Frozen Throne era, MY had developed the Cyclone strategy long before Moon did. When everyone else was struggling with wisps being hunted down, MY already knew the blind spots in the tree lines of every map by heart. When Night Elves facing Undead were still being torn apart by a Frost Nova the instant they town-portalled home, MY invented the famous *MagicYang town portal.

People who like MagicYang all call him Lao Yang, Old Yang. There is a director at the television station, an easy-going man in his forties, who calls him Lao Yang too whenever they record a programme, which often leaves MagicYang at a loss. Lao Yang is not actually old. He was born on April 28, 1981, in Xuhui District, Shanghai, and on the day he turned 26 he happened to be casting the live broadcast of the G League grand final, which GamesTV was hosting. To thank him for what he had done for esports and for the channel, the organisers secretly arranged a large cake and celebrated his birthday at the start of the broadcast, to his complete delight.

Lao Yang is not tall and is on the thin side, with a high nose, a slender oval face and a pair of bright, alert eyes, yet he carries a steadiness and a modesty that do not match his age. He is the sort of person you would not notice in a crowd. When you first meet him he seems serious and hard to get on with, and only later do you realise that this is simply because you do not know each other yet. Broadcast work sometimes runs from six in the afternoon until the early hours, and afterwards his colleagues go out for a late meal together. Around the table, his liveliness and his stream of clever remarks are practically the source of the warm atmosphere. Perhaps it is exactly this mixture of steadiness and easy company that earned him the name Lao Yang.

Lao Yang's surname is not Yang at all. His real name is Zhou Chen. The name MagicYang comes from a science fiction novel he loves, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, in which there is a hero called Yang Wen-li. Because the man could deploy tactics like a magician, people called him MagicYang. Zhou Chen had been fascinated by the use of tactics since he was small and had always regarded Yang Wen-li as a hero, so when it came to choosing an English name for himself, he took MagicYang.

MagicYang was born into an ordinary Shanghai family. Ask his mother about his childhood and what she remembers most clearly is how much he loved telling stories. Ask Lao Yang and what he remembers most clearly are the cartoons, which he can reel off one after another: Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Dragon Ball, Rurouni Kenshin, Slam Dunk, One Piece and many more. He says those cartoons carry a great deal of inspiring and profound thinking. Take Sanji, the cook in One Piece, who is convinced that somewhere in the ocean there is a sea called All Blue and spends his life searching for it. Sanji is willing to fight through any hardship for what he believes in, and that struck a chord with Lao Yang, who for a while competed under the name All-Blue. Those childhood cartoons clearly left a deep mark on him.

Asked about the atmosphere he grew up studying in, Lao Yang described his family's demands on his schoolwork as "slightly restrictive". In that relatively relaxed environment he had plenty of time and opportunity to try the things he enjoyed, board games of every kind above all, and among those especially Go. Lao Yang says what he likes about Go is the sense of the whole board that it demands, the way a calm surface conceals a tactical exchange of move and counter-move that never lets up for a moment.

Once he had mastered every board and card game he could find, he began designing his own. In junior high school he designed a naval warfare game set in the Second World War, with more than twenty types of ship built so that each countered another, every one of them with its own attack and defence values and its own way of being used. The game was played on a map he had drawn himself, with the two sides taking turns, a little like today's browser games. Lao Yang not only spent a great deal of time working out all the game data, he also wrote a rulebook, then introduced the game to his classmates and friends and kept balancing it. He says he misses those games. They were extremely crude compared with games today, but in the mid-1990s, when computers were far from common, they were great fun.

For all that Lao Yang loved games that made him think, and even though he had his own Famicom clone in primary school, he came to computer games relatively late, so late that his esports career only properly began when he was about to graduate from university.

In 2001, Lao Yang entered the StarCraft event at the Shanghai regional qualifier for WCGC, the predecessor of WCG, and lost in the knockout stage to a player called Sky. Dragon. He says it was purely an experiment, and that he learned a great deal from it.

At the start of 2002, in his final semester at university, Lao Yang was recommended by his school for an internship as an internet café administrator. After a boring month of it he quit and went home to concentrate on preparing for WCG. A few months later, competing as =Y.J=WCG for the Yijing team, he came through to the winners' bracket final of the StarCraft event at the WCG Shanghai qualifier, where he met Open of the SVS team. It was a Zerg mirror. Scouting told Lao Yang that Open was going for mutalisks, so he immediately switched to a three-hatchery mass zergling attack, killed all of his opponent's workers and won the match. That win did a great deal for his morale and his confidence. He went on to take the StarCraft title at the Shanghai qualifier and a place at the WCG China national final in Beijing.

At the WCG 2002 China national final, Lao Yang had the bad luck to drop into the losers' bracket, where he fought a brutal match against PJ, one of China's best-known StarCraft players, who was competing in South Korea at the time of writing. The two were evenly matched, and they played until every mineral patch on the Lost Temple map had been mined out. Lao Yang finally knocked PJ out by capitalising on a mistake, only to be beaten in the next round by Ma Tianyuan, who went on to earn the place at the WCG world final in South Korea.

Lao Yang says he had planned to give up StarCraft after WCG 2002, because WCG had shown him how big the gap was between him and the top Korean players, which left him feeling there was nothing to be done about it. So in early 2003, after joining the SOZ team, he switched to Warcraft III with the help of his friend Qin Qian and started training sixteen hours a day on battle.net, Blizzard's worldwide online play platform. In less than a year he was ranked first on the Asian battle.net ladder.

That number one ranking made Lao Yang a name in the world Warcraft III scene almost overnight, and MagicYang became the only Chinese player the Koreans knew. The tree strategy he studied and refined, built around the Night Elf Ancients, left the Koreans with no answer, and eventually pushed Blizzard in the United States to weaken the Ancients' attributes when it patched the game. But fame and money arriving that quickly began to unsettle him.

The competition he remembers most from that period was an esports event Philips held in Beijing, and he remembers it for two reasons. The first is that the organisers who invited him were willing to reimburse his return flight between Shanghai and Beijing, the first time he had ever been on a plane. The second is that he was crushed there. Lao Yang did not even get out of his group. The defeat shocked him, but it also sobered him up. He began to look hard at his own problems, and his frame of mind grew calmer.

In 2003, after a year of preparation and one competition after another, Lao Yang made his way through the Chinese events comfortably and took one of the three places in the Warcraft III event at the WCG world final in South Korea. He flew out with suhO and ChinaHuman (CQ2000) to what was then the centre of world esports, and for MagicYang, leaving the country for the first time, the strong sense of mission that came with representing China was electrifying.

WCG 2003 was the first time the organisers ran Warcraft III as an official event. The version being played was still Reign of Chaos, very different from the game today, and because it was a relatively new title, not many people were following it, and fewer still were studying its details and designing tactics for it. Before they left, Lao Yang and suhO had analysed every map in the pool. On one map called Dragon Spa, for instance, they found that at several creep camps, if you quietly had a wisp do a little damage to the enemy hero, the hero would not heal back to full at the fountain, and if the opponent was even slightly careless with it, the hero would die at exactly the wrong moment while clearing those camps.

Nobody expected that detail to prove decisive. At the WCG 2003 world final, MagicYang came up against the Korean star Ex_Bifrost. Lao Yang lost the first game. The second reached fever pitch: during one exchange of fire he refused to town-portal out so that he could kill as many enemy units as possible, and by the time he did leave, his hero had one point of health left. Once he had healed it back to full in an instant, he swept through his opponent's base and forced the decisive third game. That third game was on the Dragon Spa map. Lao Yang saw that his opponent was about to go and clear that creep camp, so he quietly used a wisp to damage Ex_Bifrost's hero, and later, while Ex_Bifrost was managing two places at once, the hero died "by accident". Lao Yang seized the opening, killed every one of his opponent's units in one run, and took the win. When the match was over, the normally mild Ex_Bifrost smashed his own keyboard. He must have been certain that the loss was down to a mistake of his own.

Lao Yang then went on, improbably, to beat another Korean, the Orc player TopSpeed.WeRRa. It was results like these that earned him the title of Korean killer among esports fans online. Unfortunately, he ran into his teammate ChinaHuman (CQ2000) in the quarter-finals and lost. ChinaHuman (CQ2000) went on to live up to expectations and finish second in the Warcraft III event at WCG 2003, losing by the narrowest of margins to the Bulgarian Human player Insomnia.

Afterwards, some people online suggested that Lao Yang had been clearing the road for ChinaHuman and had then lost to him on purpose. Lao Yang only smiles and says nothing, but given how badly he wants to win, I believe the answer is no.

As soon as he was back from South Korea, Lao Yang began practising the new version of Warcraft III, The Frozen Throne, and at the end of 2003 he signed with GamEdge as a professional player.

From then until the end of 2005, Lao Yang competed at CBI, CIG, WWI, ACON4, CEG, WCG and more. He never stopped practising, but 2004 seems to have been a trough: he was knocked out of the WCG Shanghai qualifier by SYC, which naturally left him feeling he had failed. Perhaps it takes adversity for a person to understand himself. Lao Yang says his strength is that he likes studying tactics and likes games that make him think, and his weakness is that he is not built for the physical side of the game. With that pair of qualities he has cried, laughed and fought on, and asked how he sees life now, he sums it up in eight characters: travel to the ends of the earth, and be at ease wherever you land.

In early 2005, Lao Yang and WE.SKY were invited by the WEG organisers to South Korea for a televised league that ran for three months. Lao Yang's first opponent was the French Human player TOD, who had finished fourth at WCG 2004 and was not to be taken lightly. Lao Yang answered with a tactic nobody saw coming, working two fronts at once so that he could level his hero and take an expansion at the same time, and every time the two met he detonated wisps to burn away his opponent's hero mana, buying time and avoiding an early engagement. TOD clearly had no immediate answer to something so unfamiliar, and in the end, faced with Lao Yang's finished army, he typed GG, short for good game, which here means a concession. Lao Yang then came through round after round until he ran into Moon, the Korean player who was already at his peak and was being called the alien, the fifth race. Moon's formidable multitasking and his wealth of international experience were exactly where Lao Yang was weakest, and nothing Lao Yang tried made any difference. He finished fourth; WE.SKY finished third.

Lao Yang must have been in real pain at that point. The cruel gap between his dream and reality was tormenting a tactician who wanted badly to win, over and over again. And it was exactly then that his fate quietly began to turn.

After he came back from South Korea, chance intervened. Zhang Zhexi, a director at GamesTV, and Huang Hao, then a director on You Dian Feng Kuang, a programme on Shanghai's Lifestyle channel, who later joined GamesTV as well, introduced Lao Yang to GamesTV to work part-time as a Warcraft III caster.

His first recording session was alongside the caster BBC. Lao Yang no longer remembers the details of the match, and he says he was not nervous. BBC remembers that they were casting WC3L, and he says that while calling the match Lao Yang would suddenly propose a better way to handle some particular situation, which was genuinely striking.

Two years on, the BM pairing of BBC and MagicYang is regarded as a classic of esports casting. Their partnership keeps growing more accomplished, funny, sharp and original, and fans have gone as far as collecting their lines into a "BM quotations" compilation that circulates online.

Interviewed about his earliest impression of Lao Yang, BBC said he had discussed tactics with him at an offline event as far back as 2003, and had thought even then that the man expressed himself well and would suit casting work. Asked what he made of Lao Yang's refusal to retire and his determination to go on competing professionally, BBC said he supported that dream completely. People say the golden years for a professional esports player are 18 to 22, he said, but as long as Lao Yang earns enough to keep himself and can still hold on to his dream of competing, why should we not support him in chasing it and let him do what he loves?

"I'm not a perfectionist," Lao Yang says. "If I lose, I lose. Take the lessons and start the next game."

I envy him.

Glossary:

*The MagicYang town portal: on the programme, MagicYang demonstrated how to spread an army out quickly. He first picks a fairly open spot as the landing point, then drops a building with a large footprint in the middle of the army. Because of the way the game works, units make way for their own side's buildings, which scatters the army immediately.