League of Legends LCS Gauntlet Round 1 preview: Can FlyQuest win?
By Josh Tyler
Only one more North American League of Legends team will get to represent LCS at the World Championship. FlyQuest and Clutch enter the Rift first for that honor.
Two LCS teams – Cloud9 and Team Liquid – have already punched their tickets for the World Championship in Europe next month. One more League of Legends team from NA will join them, but first they’ll have to make it through the Gauntlet run. Seeded based on championship points earned during the regular season, the two lowest-seeded teams face off tomorrow to start their climb to that final spot.
In this corner…
We have Clutch Gaming, maybe the most improbable team to make the Gauntlet considering they got no championship points out of the Spring Split. Finishing second-to-last in the standing during the spring (only a game ahead of the disappointing 100 Thieves), Clutch was always a team with more talent than the results bore out.
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They rebounded, of course, to squeek into the playoffs on the last day of the season in the fifth seed. From there, well, you all know.
They took down TSM, three games to one, in a stunning upset in the quarterfinal round. They took Team Liquid to a fifth game, narrowly losing the series 3-2. And, just to show that those two series were no fluke, they managed to take CLG – the consensus third-best team entering the playoffs – to the brink of elimination as well before being reverse swept.
In that corner…
FlyQuest, a team you may have forgotten about because they haven’t played in several weeks. This team made the Gauntlet purely on the back of the championship points they earned in the Spring Split by finishing fourth in the playoffs (following a fourth-place regular season record of 9-9).
The Summer Split was not kind to FlyQuest, unfortunately. The team’s performance dropped off massively and they missed the playoffs with the second-worst record of any team in the LCS (5-13). Even though they proved to be a strong team in the spring and they’ve had plenty of time to study their potential opponents FlyQuest is entering this match-up without a lot of optimism.