This is a big weekend in the world of eSports for two reasons.
The big reason is the 2015 League of Legends World Championship wraps up on Saturday with the Grand Final between SK Telecom and Koo Tigers. Worlds is one of the most watched sporting events in the world and two of Korea’s best going should be a pretty intense matchup even if we expect Faker and MaRin to cement their status as two of the best in the world.
On the other side of the world, the Road to BlizzCon nears its conclusion. Two rounds of 16 will take place at ESL’s studio in Burbank ahead of next weekend’s tournaments at BlizzCon. On Friday and Saturday, Hearthstone’s World Championship group stages will wrap up to set the stage for the playoffs in Anaheim. Sunday is all about StarCraft’s WCS Global Finals round of 16 where we’ll be watching to see how far the lone foreigner, French Protoss Lilbow, can go.
I think I’ve mentioned it before on the blog but an acquaintance of mine is trying to drag me back into playing League. He’s an ADC and he’s looking for a regular support main to keep him dying. So not only have I been scrambling to learn new champions (I’m not very good at Bard or Soraka but I picked up Sona and Thresh surprisingly quickly) but I’ve been watching the World Championship to pick up a thing or two.
One of the more interesting storylines from Worlds, besides the Western teams doing surprisingly well, especially Cloud 9, is how diverse champion selection has been through the first four days of group stage matches. In the 2014 Worlds, only 58 champions were contested during the whole event. In one week, the teams have contested 59 champions and we could see more champions introduced to counter other team comps as the month progresses.
But what lessons are there to be learned from picks and bans from the first week of Worlds?
Ahead of today’s start of the 2015 League of Legends World Championships, Riot released a six-part documentary series looking behind the scenes at six professional players including SK Telecom mid Faker, TSM mid Bjergsen, paiN Gaming ADC brTT, Origen mid xPeke, Flash Wolves support SwordArt and OMG ADC Uzi.
et geekera 