With the final game of group stages ending on Sunday morning for those in the United States, the teams for League of Legends’ Season 7 World Championships playoff stage were finally locked in stone. From Group A, the defending world champions, SK Telecom T1, took the first seed with in their group with Cloud 9 coming in second. Group B was Longzhu Gaming from Korea dominating with a perfect record while Fnatic surprisingly made it out second after staging a massive comeback in the second week of group stages. From Group C, hometown favorites, Royal Never Give Up, topped their group while Samsung Galaxy took a close second. In the final group, Team WE took first place while an unlikely Misfits Gaming won their tiebreaker against TSM to move out second.
With these eight teams determined, the bracket was also drawn for the quarterfinals of Worlds with one of the four first seeds being matched against the second seeds. The results were that SK Telecom would play against Misfits Gaming, Royal Never Give Up takes on Fnatic, Longzhu Gaming plays Samsung Galaxy in a regional matchup, and finally, Team WE locks horns with Cloud 9.
From the results of the group stages, here are some things to take away. Korea remains the strongest region by far with all three of their teams making it out relatively comfortably, however, they do look like they can be defeated. Europe showed up surprisingly well with both Fnatic and Misfits making impressive runs to win their spots. China were able to channel their home crowd advantage and took two first seeds, one of them even being over a Korean team. Unfortunately for North America and the LMS, things did not turn out well at this Worlds. Cloud 9 were the only North American team to make it out while the LMS did not even have one of their teams make it to the quarterfinals.