This is Part 2 of our five-part series on League of Legends and the future of eSports. Read Part 1, on the growth of the game and the appeal of LoL, or Part 3, on Riot Games and their plans for the future.

NEW YORK CITY — “Faker,” the voice boomed, and the arena exploded.

It was the semifinals of the League of Legends world championships in Madison Square Garden on a Friday night in October. No matter which team people were supporting, they had to cheer for Faker, born Lee Sang-hyeok, the 20-year-old mid laner extraordinaire for SK Telecom T1 and now three-time League of Legends world champion. He is known to many as the “Michael Jordan of League.” For those blasphemous LoL fans, he is simply called “God.”

He is also the key, many believe, to growing League of Legends beyond its niche audience. He is a “marketable star,” as more than one public relations staffer referred to him over the weekend. If League of Legends and eSports in general are ever going to expand into the mainstream, stars like this are the ones who will get them there. Poker had Chris Moneymaker. UFC has Ronda Rousey. LoL has Faker.

So what sets him apart? Why is Faker the greatest to ever play this game? What makes him pop?

These are all questions that Riot Games, the maker of League of Legends, is asking itself. While Faker doesn’t work for the company, Riot is understandably invested in the success of its greatest player. They want him, the slight 20-year-old from Korea who speaks through a translator, to be an American sensation. This is a tall order.

In person, Faker doesn’t exactly stand out. He is small — standing maybe 5’9” and weighing no more than 150 pounds — and handsome, with the low swoop haircut that is favored now by college-aged men from Seoul to Baton Rouge. He’s also added a pair of sharp glasses to his wardrobe. When he walks out with his teammates to the center of the floor at Madison Square Garden, and to the cheers of 15,000 fans, all that sets Faker apart is a propensity to hold his posture a little straighter than his counterparts — he used to sometimes slouch in interviews, but it’s clear he’s been working on it.

When the announcer says his name, and the crowd erupts, Faker steps forward and gives a slight wave. A journalist huddled below the stage remarks how much better he’s getting with the crowd, which I at first take as a joke and then realize it isn’t. The journalist means it — that small step out, half smile, and wave to the crowd is an improvement for Faker, who after a few years at the top of the game is just now getting used to the attention that comes with it.

This isn’t easy for him, but then again, the pressure on the young man is immense. His gameplay is analyzed. His public comments are broken down, obsessed over, parsed — in a recent interview, he was asked multiple in-depth questions about the new mouse he was using. That pressure, combined with an unusual intensity, doesn’t exactly make Faker a quote machine. Here he is in an interview with The Rift Herald before the quarterfinals of the world championships this year:

Ryan: After Season 4 there was a mass exodus of Korean players who all went to China. At the time you told ESPN that you wanted to stay in Korea to represent your nation on the world stage, how do you feel like you have been able to do that in the past couple years since you said that? Faker: We have had a pretty fantastic performance so far, so I’m pretty satisfied with the results.

Not all LoL greats are like this. Faker’s teammate, Lee “Wolf” Jae-wan, is a charming and quite funny dude. A bit pudgy, Wolf laughs often, ribs his teammates, shows off to the crowd. He’s clearly the heart and soul of the team — after big wins, the guys sometimes take turns going over to hug him. He’s the Rob Gronkowski to Faker’s Tom Brady — a lovable goof who can be that lovable goof because he doesn’t have that same heaping pressure applied to him. He’s a star, sure. But he’s not the star.

And with a moment’s thought, you do start to realize how strange this all must be for Faker. He got his start as a gamer, playing at home, communicating with friends through a microphone and an internet connection. He found his refuge, his calling, behind a screen, playing a game more beautifully and consistently than any man or woman before or since. Someone then paid him to play the game. (Former top player Imp said in a Reddit AMA that stars make more than $150k annually, but Riot could not confirm that for me, as contracts are private agreements between organizations and players.)

But that wasn’t enough. Faker, who is still not old enough to legally drink in the United States, was then expected to become the face of a game with a worldwide audience in the millions, an ambassador for a growing movement that is, every day, becoming more and more mainstream. This, again, is a lot to ask a 20-year-old kid.

What isn’t in doubt is Faker’s ability to play.

“It’s weird. You actually think a lot if [his team] is down, it doesn’t matter,” said Rivington Bisland III, an analyst and caster who works for Riot. “SKT has Faker, so they will win. He is that Michael Jordan-type player. He’s going to hit the 3-pointer when you need him.”

For someone who exploded onto the world stage at age 17, Faker’s maturation has been a wonder for many to behold. He’s only seeming to get better, and while plenty of players before him have shone brightly only to burn out, he remains focused, driven, committed to The Game. In a sport where many of the world’s top competitors retire by age 23, fried from countless hours in front of screens, living in group homes with teammates, and drinking what one imagines to be an ungodly amount of energy drinks, Faker seems ready for more, ever more.

“I don’t see him stopping anytime soon,” said Bisland. “It’s infinite joy for him. So why would you ever stop?”

Even for the new fan, Faker’s greatness can be understood just by taking in the basic action — while most players wait for help from other teammates before entering into skirmishes with the other team, Faker often feels confident going in alone. Numerous times in the 5-game semifinal match with Rox Tigers, you’d see the “SKT FAKER” champion (a character in the game) wade into a seemingly overmatched and impossible situation, only to accomplish his objective and somehow bounce out of there, still alive and kicking.

YouTube is full of these moments of brilliance, captured in edited montages in which Faker goes up against numbers and leaves them all for dead.

The other thing that sets Faker a part is the sense he has for timing, the feel for the map, something that’s hard to quantify or even explain. It’s beautiful, really, his way of seeing the entire game unfolding. In a 40-minute game with thousands of micro-decisions that need to be made, many every second, Faker can at once remain totally committed to the fight in front of him but never lose track of the bigger picture. He will fight multiple opponents simultaneously and, in the back of his mind, somehow realize and remember that he’ll need to provide support to a teammate on the other side of the map in exactly two minutes time.

He does this all quietly, which is unique for a top player.

“Faker is much more vocal now. He used to be very quiet. He still somewhat is,” Bisland says. “He’s very dedicated to League. That made him very quiet at the beginning, but as a player he understood that speaking would be a simple way for him to up his level and his team’s level, so it became something that he embraced.”

Needing to “embrace” the simple act of speech is not something you’d expect from someone tasked with being the face of a sport, but Faker isn’t exactly following any model here. League of Legends has never had a crossover star before — there’s no one for Faker to emulate, really. He just has to be himself.

And despite all the outside noise, there is a purity in Faker’s approach to League. For someone who is expected to bring the game to a mainstream audience, he doesn’t seem to care about a game’s entertainment, really, or what fans want. He is driven by a desire for perfection, and one gets the sense listening to him talk about League he cares not so much about beating his opponents but about playing the game exactly the way it is meant to be played. He hates “mistakes” as he calls them, incorrect decisions that he makes, even though he’s faced with thousands of them every match and they are inevitable.

These mistakes haunt him.

This is Faker talking about the semifinal clash that night between Rox Tigers and SKT, which just about everyone in and around the sport described as the most entertaining and perhaps greatest match ever played:

Though the semifinals match against ROX was a fierce match, I don’t think it’s quite right to call it the greatest series in the history of League because both SKT and ROX made many mistakes in the match which left much to be desired in our eyes. This only makes us want to improve.

That isn’t so much the quote of a competitor. Those are the words of an aesthete. Faker was disappointed in the match not because it lacked entertainment for the fans but because it was played imperfectly. It was messy. It lacked precision. And when your standard is perfection, as one suspects Faker’s is, anything less than that is ugly. Yes, for fans it may have been fun. They screamed at the big moments, enjoyed the back and forth, the comebacks and the climactic win, which SKT claimed in the fifth game of the match.

For Faker, though, he couldn’t see what the fuss was about. He is a man responsible for making this game accessible to more and more fans, but it’s not clear if he even cares what fans think.

He had just given them the most entertaining League match perhaps ever, but he only saw the mistakes, the imperfections. And, for Faker, where is the beauty in that?