The Bi-weekly Gamer: A legendary competition

Columns November 4, 2015

The video game League of Legends (LoL), recently wrapped up its yearly World Championship in Berlin. The event was at the Mercedes-Benz arena, filled with a sold-out crowd of 30,000 passionate fans.

LoL is a game where two teams of five players face off against each other in a battle to destroy the other team’s base.

The Season 5 World Championship has been ongoing since the start of October and consists of the top teams from North America, Europe, Korea, Taiwan, and China, as well as two wildcard teams, paiN Gaming from Brazil and the Bangkok Titans from Thailand.

The Bi-weekly Gamer is a column about competitive gaming that appears in every issue of Nexus.
The Bi-weekly Gamer is a column about competitive gaming that appears in every issue of Nexus.

Starting off with a round-robin group stage, which took place in Paris, France, the 16 teams faced off for the top two seeds from their respective groups. Emerging out of the group stage, all three Korean teams came out looking strong, with fan favourites SKTelecom T1 going undefeated. Along with them, two European teams and the two Taiwanese squads passed on to the knockout stage.

Moving on to London for the quarter-finals, both Taiwanese teams were knocked out. Europe and Korea performed superbly and got all but KT Rolster (one of the highly rated Korean teams) out and into Brussels for the semi-finals. Both semi-final matches were 3Đ0 sweeps, with SKTelecom facing off against rookie European team Origen and Koreas third-seed team KOO Tigers dismantling European powerhouse team Fnatic.

After a long battle to the grand finals, SKTelecom faced off against rival Korean team KOO Tigers in Germany. The first game was incredibly one-sided for SKTelecom after some great decision-making and team plays. Game two was much more even between the two squads until a poor decision by KOO cost them the game. Game three, however, went to KOO after an atrocious early-game team fight by SKT led to a snowballed lead. The final game was once again one sided for SKTelecom, with KOO picking up just a single kill in the whole game. Star player Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok picked up his second world championship title and hoisted the Summoners Cup along with his team to the roars of support from the crowd.