Jojopyun on First Facing Faker: 'I Got Absolutely Destroyed'

For a young professional gamer, confidence is part of the job. Jojopyun, the mid-laner for the European team MKOI, has plenty of it. But in a recent video interview, he recalled the day that confidence met reality — the first time he played against Faker in a practice session, and the lesson that followed.

Faker, whose real name is Lee Sang-hyeok, plays for the Korean team T1 and is widely described as the greatest League of Legends player of all time. He has won multiple world championships and has been a household name in competitive gaming for more than a decade. For a newcomer, sharing a lane against him is a rite of passage.

Jojopyun said that before that session, he had never faced anyone from outside his own region at the top level. “I thought everyone was actually pretty mediocre,” he recalled. “I was thinking, Faker can’t be that strong. I know he’s the GOAT, but is he really that good?” The term GOAT — greatest of all time — is standard internet shorthand in gaming circles, and Jojopyun used it without hesitation.

Then came the practice match. It was the first day his team arrived in South Korea, and they scrimmaged against T1 almost immediately. The result was brutal. “I got absolutely destroyed,” he said. “It wasn’t even close. The lane was over right away.” In League of Legends, the mid lane is a one-on-one duel for much of the early game, so a lopsided matchup there can decide the pace of the entire map.

What makes the anecdote resonate is that it is not really a story about losing. It is a story about calibration. Training games, known in the scene as scrims, are where reputations are quietly built and quietly dismantled, far from the cameras and the prize money. Players from smaller regions often arrive believing the gap is small, and discover it is measured in thousands of hours of deliberate practice.

For fans outside the gaming world, the dynamic resembles any high-performance field. A young tennis player meets a seasoned champion and learns that the difference is not one skill but dozens of small decisions made faster. In League of Legends, that means wave control, timing, map awareness and the ability to read an opponent’s intent before it becomes obvious.

Jojopyun’s candor has been widely shared among followers of the competitive scene, partly because such humility is rare in a culture that rewards swagger. He did not claim the loss was unlucky or that the matchup was unfair. He simply described the gap and moved on, which is arguably the more useful takeaway for anyone chasing a difficult goal.

The interview also serves as a reminder of how international the game has become. A European player traveling to Seoul for practice, measuring himself against a Korean icon, is now an ordinary part of the calendar. The scene’s center of gravity has shifted many times over the years, but the standard set by Faker still functions as a benchmark that newcomers test themselves against.

Whether Jojopyun closes that gap in future meetings is an open question. What he has already demonstrated is a willingness to say out loud what most players only admit privately: that the best in the world are, in fact, that good.