The best-of-one group stage is over and now we are on to Chicago for the Quarterfinals. The Quarterfinals will feature a best-of-five format with the winner moving on to Madison Square Garden for the Semi-finals and a chance to win the million-dollar prize awarded to the champion. This Friday night, the defending champions will take the main stage as SK Telecom T1 faces Royal Never Give Up.
eSports League of Legends World Championships at BookMaker.eu
SK Telecom T1 -480
Royal Never Give Up +330
HOW THEY GOT HERE
SK Telecom T1 qualified for Worlds after winning the Korean Spring Split and the Mid-Season Invitational. SKT was drawn into a rather weak group and unlike Chinese champions Edward Gaming made short work of their competition. They only dropped one game of the three-team round-robin first round of action, to arch-nemesis Flash Wolves, and crushed the rest of their opponents. SKT is again being touted as one of the best teams in the world and should be the favorites to win the tournament.
It was a story of two weekends for Royal Never Give Up in the Group Stage. RNG looked like a sleeping giant in their first two matches against TSM and Splyce, outplaying the two sides every step of the way en route to easy victories, but then things took a turn. The Chinese runners-up lost their last match on the first weekend and the first two on the second weekend to put their chances of making the Quarterfinals in serious jeopardy. They pulled through when it mattered though with another win over TSM to make it here.
MATCHUP TO WATCH
SKT have the advantage in the top-lane and the mid-lane with Duke and Faker, but the bottom lane will be where most of the action is in these games.
When these teams met at the MSI in May, RNG was playing a completely different style and got wrecked by SKT. Following that disappointment, they changed tack and replaced ADC Wuxx with Uzi and switched their tactics to play through the bottom lane.
Uzi has been one of the top ADC’s in the world since the switch and his teamwork with Mata has been fantastic to watch. After a brief transition period, these two have carried the team to this point and their play was huge in the Group Stage.
The job for SKT’s Bang and Wolf will be to just hold this lane to a draw and let Duke and Faker win their lanes in order for SKT to get the W. If they can neutralize Uzi and Mata, it will be very hard for RNG to pull off the upset.
THE PICK
This is a rough spot for RNG. If they had drawn a team like H2K or even Samsung, they might have a chance to make it to the semi-finals. Instead, they were given the toughest rout of anytime in the knockout stages as even if they knock off SKT they will have to face either ROX Tigers or Edward Gaming to get to the finals.
SKT sometimes looks like it’s bored going through the long stretches of league play, but has always been locked in when it matters. This is again looking like one of the best teams in the world and SKT will again beat RNG 3-1 to get to the Semi-finals.
ESports League of Legends Odds: SKT -480
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