S. Samek

Let’s take a look at what happened during the play in group stage of the League of Legends 2018 world championship. Cloud 9 had two matches on day one. The first one was against Kabum. Lead by Sneaky and his Kai’Sa the team won easily. The second game was against DetonatioN FocusMe. This match was closer, with DFM actully in the lead for a large part of it. Yet a couple later game team fights went the way of C9 to win them the contest and end the day at 2-0. DFM then played Kabum. This one went back and forth for a little bit, but DFM came back to take then win to finish 1-1 on the day. G-rex was next to do battle. The took on Gambit first then, KLG. Against Gambit they took an early led and pushed hard. Gambit was able to hold them off for a little bit, but faltered in the second defense to lose the game. KLG didn’t stand a chance against the G-rex snowball and lost big time. Gambit was the able to salvage a game against KLG by crushing them 13-3 in kills. Day two was led off by Edward gaming and Infinity gaming. EDG was able to take this match in dominating fashion outkilling 20-2. Iboy alone had nine kills for EDG in the smashing. The Dire Wolves then challenged Infinity. A come from behind win put Dire Wolves on the board and put Infinity at 0-2 for the day. Die Wolves and EDG fought to determine the day one group leader next. While the kills went blow for blow, the Objectives and gold didn’t. EDG took heavy leads in both of them and won the match to go 2-0 for the day. G2 battled Supermassive in the first game of the next group. This game wasn’t bloody with only five kills between the teams. Yet supermassive took objectives and the game. Ascension then got a crack at Supermassive. Similar to the game with G2 Supermassive took many objectives on the way to victory and a 2-0 start to groups. Ascension and G2 were next. They were locked in a tight match for a while, but then G2 stole it late and took the win to move to 1-1. Day 3 returns to our day one teams. C9 took on Kabum once more. Sneaky led the way like in the prior matchup with Kabum as C9 moved to 3-0. C9 then finished the group by playing DFM. This wasn’t as close as the first meeting. The results were the same though as C9 finishes 4-0 in groups. DFM then battled Kabum to try and earn the second spot from the group in knockouts. Kabum got the victory to force a tiebreaker. Yet in the tie breaker it was all DFM. They finished out the group stage with a 7-0 perfect game. G-rex continued to crush on day three. They defeated KLG and Gambit to pick up the 4-0 mark and move on to knockouts. Gambit and KLG battled next to end the day. It was close, but not close enough as Gambit eliminates KLG with a win. Day four finishes out the play in groups. G2 found a way to make a splash on day four. They picked up wins against supermassive and Ascension gaming to finish 3-1. Supermassive however defeated Ascension to also finish 3-1. The tie breaker went the way of G2 as they crushed Supermassive 16-3 plus bonus to take seed number one. EDG got more than they planned for today. The battled Infinity and got handed their first loss of the tournament. They then took out their frustrations against Dire Wolves in a romp by the score of 17-2 Dire Wolves and Infinity would close out the day with a match. This was a kill fest at 24-13. It also included a Penta kill by Renyu on Kai’Sa for Infinity. That was the play that closed out the win and helped Infinity eliminate Dire Wolves. Now we move on to the knock out stage of groups. C9 meets Gambit, G-rex gets Supermassive, G2 gets Infinity and EDG will take on DFM. C9, G2, G-Rex and EDG are my picks to advance. The only change from my pre-stage predictions was G-rex in place of the prior pick Gambit. I think G-rex might be the hottest team at the moment even over C9. Gambit however played well enough to get passed one team, but should struggle against a strong C9 team. Check them out Saturday and Sunday to see which team wins the best of five series and advance to the group stage of the main event.