Published on September 17th, 2014 | by Dan
League of Legends World Championships Primer
This article is a preview of the League World Championships written by community member Aniion. Read up for a quick rundown of teams, players and what to expect from one of the biggest E-sports events in world!
The League of Legends 2014 World Championships officially starts in a few short hours. The Group Stages this year are being split between Taipei, Taiwan, and the city-state of Singapore, where the top teams from North America, Korea, China, Europe, Taiwan & SEA, as well as 2 Wildcard teams from Latin America & Brazil, and Turkey/Russia/Oceania, will battle it out to determine who makes it out of Groups, and into the Quarter-Finals.
As with many E-Sports tournaments, the 3 Korean teams are the favorites to win this year, with both Samsung sister teams (Samsung Blue & Samsung White) coming in as 1st and 2nd seeds. Samsung White even managed to qualify for Worlds with a definitive 3-1 tiebreaker victory over the Season 3 Worlds Champions, SKT T1. In almost every Finals prediction, either one or both of these teams are mentioned, so be sure to keep an eye out for their games.
The only real challengers to the Korean dominance this year lies in the form of EDward Gaming, the 1st seed from China`s LPL, having being the only Chinese team to come 1st in both Spring and Summer Playoffs with crushing victories of 3:0. With possibly the best ADC in the world, in the form of NaMei, EDG looks to make their international debut in a strong fashion.
Although the EU and NA teams are all skilled in their own right, the only ones who are in contention of make it as far as the semi-finals are Alliance & Fnatic from EU, and TSM & Cloud9 from NA. They are the 1st and 2nd seeds from each of their respective regions, and each of them boasts various strengths and weaknesses. Alliance carries among them Froggen, the best mid-laner in Europe, recognized even by Koreans as a strong competitor, whereas TSM has the skills acquired by revamping 2/5ths of their roster in recent months, as well as having 1 of the only 2 players to have ever competed at all 4 World Championships. These teams have been bootcamping in Korea for weeks leading up to the tournament, so expect to see a great deal of improvement in all their games.
Groups A & B kick off this weeks of games from Thursday, September 18th to Sunday, September 20th on the Riot Games Twitch Channel as well as livestreamed on the official LoLEsports YouTube channel. The Worlds Preview show starts at 4 AM EDT (1 AM PDT), followed by 6 games, scheduled to start at 5 AM EDT (2 AM PDT) and running for approximately 6 hours. The full schedule, in your local time, can be found here.
The first game will be EDward Gaming vs. Samsung White, which will China’s 1st seed team vs Korea’s 2nd seed (but arguably stronger) team, so be sure to watch that. If you aren’t able to watch that game, or any of these games, there will be a full replay of each days games at 1 PM EDT (11 AM PDT) on their Twitch channel. If you’re worried about spoilers, you can avoid them by visiting the Riot spoiler-free match videos page here, or by visiting the spoiler-free LoL Event VoDs subreddit. I personally recommend the LoLEventVoDs subreddit, since it has links to multiple websites for the games, as well as direct timestamps for the YouTube match videos, for those of you who want to skip the analysis or champion selection.
Enjoy the matches over the next few weeks and make sure to tune into KBMOD on Tuesdays for some League with Fedzski!
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nipnops
DanI put the OO in Swagoo. One of the founders of KBMOD. I stream on Twitch as well as writing and editing for the website.
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