Another day, another title hop, and this time it’s coming from Florida Mayhem’s DPS line in the form of Jung-woo ‘Sayaplayer’ Ha who has rebranded himself under the moniker ‘Spyder’.
Jung-woo Ha has been signed to the Valorant professional team T1, a team well-known for stomping the original matches of Valorant‘s invitational tourneys prior to the rise of Sentinels followed by G2 making an extremely strong international team.
T1 once belonged at the top of the power rankings, held up by legendary names such as Tyler ‘Skadoodle’ Latham and Braxton ‘Brax’ Pierce (the same Brax from the iBuyPower match-fixing scandal back in 2014); now they’ve been relegated down to 28th in rankings from TheSpike.gg, as the competition becomes far more fierce and the names that are beginning to join the title are becoming far more storied.
Valorant is the flavor of the year, and multiple leagues are noticing a bit of a dip in the player base; a dip that has had disastrous consequences for some regions that were already a bit scarce in interest for the titles.
Yet the question that many are currently pondering, especially those that haven’t followed the Overwatch League, is precisely who Jung-woo Ha is and what his story is thus far in terms of gameplay.
Jung-woo Ha is a hitscan DPS player that prefers Widowmaker; a character with massive damage potential as long as they don’t miss the first shot, operating much as an AWP does within Counter-Strike.
In 2019 during the GOATs meta, he played Brigitte playing as a peel for the tank line, yet still found opportunities to bring his desired heroes to bear.
Jung-woo Ha has recorded the most final blows in a single map across the life of the Overwatch League thus far against the Los Angeles Valiant in 2019, notching an impressive 42 kills while the Valiant floundered and struggle to deal with it; 13 of which were kills solely conducted by the player with no other members of his team doing damage, giving him two records within the Overwatch League that have yet to be surmounted.
In Overwatch League, where character movement can be erratic and the pacing obscenely fast, Sayaplayer worked best when he was given space in the backline in which to eliminate exposed enemies with fantastic flicks and impeccable aim; he’s well-known within Overwatch League for constantly practicing and honing his skills.
It’s difficult to state how much of an impact he can currently offer to T1, and whether he can lift the team higher up on the current rankings. He’s a solid pick-up and largely considered to be one of the best raw aimers in competitive first-person shooters to date. We’ll see whether the legends are true soon enough; T1’s last recorded match was on August 27, and there is currently no scheduled upcoming match for the organization.