Three Reasons Team Liquid will, or won’t, win the League of Legends World Championship

By s. samek | Sep 24, 2019

OAKLAND, CA - SEPTEMBER 09: Doublelift of Team Liquid walks onstage during the 2018 North American League of Legends Championship Series Summer Finals against Cloud9 at ORACLE Arena on September 9, 2018 in Oakland, California. (Photo by Robert Reiners/Getty Images) /

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We continue to break down why each team can or cannot win the League of Legends World Championship, now moving on to Team Liquid.

Team Liquid is the top North American team entering the League of Legends World Championship. As a team with a bit of not-so-great history at Worlds let’s see if they can break through and win the first-ever title for a North American team. Here are three reasons NA fans should get their hopes up and three reasons those hopes may be dashed.

Three reasons why Team Liquid win worlds

1. They’re North America’s best

Say what you want about North America being a for fun region, or not competitive, it doesn’t matter. North America still sends three teams to Worlds and only one of them – Clutch Gaming – is in the play-in round. Team Liquid, on the other hand, are in pool one as the top seed for the region.

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They have been the premier team in North America for two years now. It’s been four consecutive splits of winning the playoff championship.

In 2019 Liquid earned the first seed for the playoffs with a 14-4 record during the Spring Split. They then took down TSM 3-2 to win the Spring Split title.

This earned Liquid a trip to the play-in stage at MSI. The took care of business and advanced to groups, where they finished fourth, capped by an upset over top seed Invictus Gaming to advance to the finals.

Unfortunately, the run ended with a sweep at the hands of G2 and a second-place finish. Not too bad for a team no one expected to get out of groups.

The success continued with another 14-4 record and number one seed in the Summer Split Playoffs. Clutch Gaming and Cloud9 gave Liquid all they could handle with each team taking their series with Liquid to the deciding game five. Yet Liquid would win both of those series and claim their spot as the no-doubter one seed for North America and the LCS.

With a 78 percent winning percentage during the regular splits in 2019, two split titles, and nothing but championships, it’s hard to not say Liquid is the best in the LCS. They beat other LCS Worlds teams Cloud 9 and Clutch in playoff matches. They also beat a solid TSM team in the spring finals.

There’s also the fact that the All-Pro team had four Liquid members on the first team and one on the second team. Two of the three MVP finalists were Liquid members, as was the spring MVP. Oh, and coach of the split was won by Liquid too. Had enough winning in NA yet?

2. Played well against some of the favorites for worlds.

2019 has been a pretty good year so far for Liquid internationally. At MSI play-ins they beat Phong Vu Buffalo as they should have, but they also split two games with G2 in the group stage.

They did drop games to SKT and Invictus in groups, however, they turned the table on Invictus in the semi-finals taking a 3-1 win and giving them a 3-4 overall record against the best teams in the tournament. G2 got them 3-0 in the finals, but the 4-1 lead in head to head would be short-lived.

At Rift Rivals 2019 Liquid performed the best out of any NA team. They collected two of the LCS’s three wins during the round-robin, one of which was against G2. Liquid also defeated G2 in the finals to give them a 3-4 overall record against G2 this year.

That’s a pretty respectable record to sit at against some of the favorites at the World Championship. It shows that Liquid can hang with some of the top teams in the field. Maybe even beat them with a bit of luck.

3. Experienced at worlds

The bright lights of Worlds are nothing Liquid haven’t seen before. This team made it last year as the one seed from the LCS. While they disappointed with a loss in the group stage, their current mid laner Nicolaj “Jensen” Jensen was a semi-finalist with Cloud 9 last year and has been to Worlds many times with them.

Jungler Jake “Xmithie” Puchero and ADC Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng have each been to six worlds combined, while top laner Jung “Impact” Eon-yeong has been to five Worlds and won a World Championship. Their experience might be able to carry them to wins at this tournament.

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