Europe’s Fnactic will take on China’s Royal Club and South Korea’s SKTelecom T1 and Najin Sword will battle it out for top prize.
After a week-long group stage and quarterfinals, the League of Legends Season 3 World Championships have reached the semifinals. Europe’s Fnatic will take on China’s Royal Club, and South Korea’s SKTelecom T1 and Najin Sword will battle it out as the four remaining teams to play for $1,000,000 and best League of Legends team in the world.
The United States vs. Europe rivalry set its course with Cloud 9 taking on Fnatic to begin the quarterfinals. Fnatic dashed the chances of the lone remaining American team by a 2-1 score, including a rather one-sided victory in the final game to close it out. Fnatic have now gone 16-4 in maps since the end of the Summer Season, and have only lost one match out of those to Vulcun at the beginning of the championships.
“We were planning the first game a lot, and we were expecting to win it,” said Fnatic midlaner Enrique “xPeke” Cedeño, who had defining plays with his Kassadin in Game 1 and Game 3. “I thought we would go to a third game. There we had a strategy that we prepared, we went for it again, and they pretty much had no response for it. We showed [our strategy] in the first game and they had no response, so in the third game we did the same and they hadn’t come up with anything.”
“We tried to make plays, we tried to do dragons, tried to force down turrets, and catch people out, it just didn’t work out for us,” said Cloud 9 Captain Hai “Hai” Lam. Lam says going into the match that they thought they had answers for Cedeño’s Kassadin, but in hindsight should have banned him before Game 3.
“When you’re in the middle of the game, you just forget about some things like that,” he said. “It was a misplay by our part, we just didn’t think it all the way through.”
Cloud 9’s loss to Fnatic continues the streak of no North American team ever beating another North American team in a best-of-3 or best-of-5 series in the history of the World Championships from Season 1-3. Team SoloMid’s third-place finish in Season 1 is the highest placing thus far.
On the same side of the bracket, Royal Club and OMG had their own history going, as both teams played in the Chinese Regional Finals just weeks before the World Championships, with Royal Club taking the finals over OMG. Although OMG had impressed many in the group stage with wins over SKT1, Royal Club would prove too much yet again, led by Jungler Liu “Lucky” Jun-Jie’s 14 KDA as the highest of any player at the championships.
“I think we just did better than OMG today, but that they’re still one of the best teams in the world,” Royal Club Captain Pak-Kan “Tabe” Wong told GameSpot. Wong says that they practiced heavily with SKT1 prior to their games. “They crushed us every day, every game we played. We improved really a lot during our practice. I hope to face SKT1 in the finals, but we have to focus on Fnatic.”
Cedeño says that Fnatic’s own practice against both Chinese teams has quite beneficial for their outlook at their upcoming games.
“We’ve practiced against the Chinese teams a lot, and I was not scared actually,” he said. “I think they are good, but they play really aggressive. It’s a play style that where, if you get used to it, it’s really easy to win when you have a small advantage. It’s all about that, and if we do it well I think we’ll win.”
On the top side of the bracket, SKT1 won a quick 2-0 series over Taiwan’s Gamania Bears, while Russia’s Gambit Gaming took Najin Sword to the limit in a three-game set. The loss by Gambit leaves Fnatic as the only team remaining from either the North American or European LCS.
“Gambit [are] really good at teamfights, but not so good at lane phase,” said Najin Sword AD Carry Kim “PraY” Jong-in. “So we tried to prolong the lane phase, and that’s how it worked for us.”
The week of World Championships games has produced 204,413 tweets under the #Worlds hashtag, including averaging 8,400 tweets-per-hour for the matches of Cloud 9 vs. Fnatic and Najin Sword vs. Gambit Gaming, says Nate Smitha, marketing analyst at Simply Measured, a social media analytics and reporting platform. #Worlds trended 28 times in the United States during this time period, for a total of 7 hours and 10 minutes. Last week, GameSpot reported that the League of Legends on Reddit was the most trafficked hub of any on the site for last Sunday’s kickoff to the World Championships.
The Semifinals will begin tomorrow at the University of Southern California’s Galen Center, home of the Championships for last season. Watch the event live on GameSpot each night. GameSpot eSports is live on location providing interviews every day of the championships.
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