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LoL 2017 World Championships: Play-in knockout stage

Riot games. (Image: Riot Games)
Roar Guru
27th September, 2017
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With the first round of the 2017 League of Legends World Championships behind us, we’ve already seen tonnes of great games. This stage of the tournament doesn’t necessarily bring the strongest players and teams, but it’s been a hell of a ride!

After just four days, we say goodbye to the first four teams: the LCL’s Gambit; the OPL’s Dire Wolves; the CLS’ Kaos Latin Gamers; and the LJL’s Rampage. Sadly for them, they just weren’t quite able to beat out the other two teams in their group (although the Dire Wolves took it all the way to a tiebreaker).

But no time to mourn! The knockout stage of the play-ins begins on Thursday at 1pm AEST – that only gives teams two days to prepare for a best-of-five against a team they’ve not faced at all yet. The winner of each bo5 will proceed to the group stage, with the group draw for the winners likely to happen after the final best-of series is complete.

Here is your preview for the next two days:

Match One: Cloud9 (C9) vs Lyon Gaming (LYN)
When: 1pm Thursday
C9’s round robin record: 4-0
LYN: 2-2

In my mind, the two Thursday matches should be a bit more interesting than the Friday games. LYN looked to be one of the stronger minor region teams (arguably the strongest after FB), while C9 put up a surprisingly strong performance, albeit against two struggling minor regions. This is not the best outcome for either region, but it could certainly be worse for them.

C9 had swift wins over their group opponents in the round robin stage. Jensen looked excellent, which is a relief for fans, and the supporting rotations from Smoothie and Contractz ultimately helped them win their games.

I know KDA isn’t the greatest metric – especially when the team is playing against two aggressive teams in ONE and DW – but all five players have top 10 KDAs in the first half of the tournament. Contractz and Smoothie only died three times each in the four games they played. So even given their opponents tendencies to go in hard, C9 generally didn’t give much up for it.

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Speaking of stats, despite losing two games, LYN’s WhiteLotus only gave up four deaths in the round robin, and Seiya only two. In their second game against WE, the game was incredibly close up until around the twenty-minute mark, only slipping away from LYN when WE made an unexpected and incredibly well-timed rotation to take baron. It had been kept close by some fantastic outplays from Oddie, and having the ability to pull that off against WE and Condi is seriously intimidating.

While I think C9 should win this 3-1, their weaknesses (especially in botlane) line up with LYN’s strengths. So long as C9 put as much effort into preparing for the game as Jensen seems to be in trash talking his opponents, they will be able to proceed to the Group Stage, but there is a real risk that they could underestimate LYN, who will absolutely take the reins if they are given the chance.

Match Two: Fnatic (FNC) vs Hong Kong Attitude (HKA)
When: 5pm Thursday
FNC: 3-1
HKA: 3-2 (incl. lost tiebreaker)

Our second game for Thursday is going to be a major region clash, between one of the best-known organisations in competitive League of Legends and a barely-known regional player. Though that description makes it sounds like this will be an easy call, this is actually the matchup I’m most looking forward to.

FNC had a shaky weekend, culminating in their last game against YG which they lost handily. It’s already a meme at this point, but Caps was being hard carried by his teammates too often, and all of the team members had their own stumbling moments. They have not had convincing early or mid games, and overall I am just not sold on this team. In their favour though, Rekkles does still look like the high-achieving AD Carry, and he was the key to their wins (… as well as their loss).

HKA struggled hard against FB with an average game time of nearly 48 minutes across three games. This means that regardless of how the games started, HKA really struggled to close them out. The tiebreaker in particular exemplified this; HKA lead for so much of the game, but they consistently got caught out, both as individual players, or by losing their baron to a steal. If they can correct that just a bit, they have a real chance of progressing from here, but it’ll be a challenge.

This is the series to watch in this round. It honestly could go either way; I’m going to give it to FNC, just because they have already shown that they can reach their win conditions a bit more consistently, but it could really go either way. I expect this to be a long series with long games.

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Match Three: 1907 Fenerbahçe Esport (FB) vs Team One (ONE)
When: 1pm Friday
FB: 4-1 (incl. won tiebreaker)
ONE: 2-3 (incl. won tiebreaker)

It’s unusual that the best outcome for one half of the matchup is also the best outcome for the other half, but here we have it. ONE barely scraped into the best-of series, and while FB are a number one seed, it was a close call for them. Both these teams had to play tiebreakers to secure their spots, and both of them played long and intense games.

FB had a bit of a dream outcome, but they have notable weaknesses. I’ve already visited the average game time between FB and HKA, and it takes two to have three nearly-fifty-minute games in the space of two days. I’m interested to see their how their picks evolve over a five game series; I’m surprised by the emphasis on Lulu and Karma supports, which of course did work out for them, but I wonder what they will move to if they’re forced off those champions.

ONE avoiding WE must have been a huge relief for them, and avoiding any of the major regions in this stage is a stroke of luck. Still, maybe I’m just being a salty OCE kid, but I really think that the reason ONE made it through rested heavily on DW throwing in the pick/ban phase of the tiebreaker.

Don’t get me wrong, ONE definitely played better than theri opponents, too – the Aurelion Sol roam was incredibly important, and showed an understanding of their opponent’s win conditions – but in their losses, they lost just a bit too hard for me to pexpect much of them.

FB have a reasonable amount of experience behind them, and overall I just have to give them the advantage. ONE clearly have some pocket picks available to them, and they may be able to use it to take a game, but I overall think this will be a 3-1 to FB, with some of those games being quite close

Match Four: Team WE (WE) vs Young Generation (YG)
When: 5pm Friday
WE: 4-0
YG: 2-2

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While the regional rivalry will be alive and well for this match, it is probably going to be a bit too one-sided. I really feel for YG in this; they’re a really promising team who gave FNC a run for their money for first in the group, but WE are just too dominant, especially with their home crowd advantage.

WE are not the invincible team that I think many of us expected. I’ve touched on the second game between them and LYN, and how they were being outplayed by Oddie repeatedly in the early game.

The key for WE was turning that around, though, and as soon as they did that through taking the baron they were able to snowball to a win. WE play a slow game, and they know their macro; regardless of who they ended up facing in this round, they were going to be the favourites.

If their social media is anything to go by, YG are taking this in stride. Although they are unlikely to progress from here, they effectively have no expectations on their shoulders; if they can even take a game, it will be a major success for them. YG do have a solid macro game; I would really like to see them use that early to try to gain leads, and go from there.

I do give this match to WE 3-0, but I really hope that YG can at least make WE fight for it. I want to see aggressive early games where WE’s slow starts are taken advantage of, and YG can build a lead to work with.

I’m so excited by the quality of games so far. Yes, some have just been an exercise in teams flexing their muscles, but there have been so many truly exciting moments in the tournament so far that I really can’t wait to see what this next set of games looks like. Who do you think will make it out? What are you hoping to see in the group stages?

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