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League of Legends Worlds 2019: stock up/stock down after Day 5 of the group stage

By Josh Tyler

League of Legends. Photo courtesy of Riot Games
League of Legends. Photo courtesy of Riot Games /
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The first group of Worlds is finished, as Group B has finished play today. How did the four League of Legends teams in the group fare?

The day started with 16 professional League of Legends teams in play at Worlds. Now, there are just 14.

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With the elimination of GAM Esports and J-Team, the Worlds pool has been winnowed. Meanwhile, the day ended with Splyce and FunPlus Phoenix battling in a tiebreaker for the first seed out of groups, in which FPX ultimately prevailed. After all that action, who stood out in both a good and bad way?

Stock up

Splyce

From the play-ins all the way to the quarterfinals, there’s no question that Splyce’s 2019 Worlds run should be considered an unqualified success. After starting the group stage 1-2 (their only win over the struggling GAM Esports team), Splyce swept through the second round robin including a massive upset over group favorite FPX.

The games were, across the board, dominant for Splyce as they dismantled J-Team in the first game before handling FunPlus Phoenix in a shocking fashion. Now, they did struggle in their third game, falling behind a GAM team with nothing to play for but pride, but ultimately they took advantage of some late macro mistakes to secure their fourth win in groups and advance to quarters.

Lwx

FPX may have had an uneven day today, but one player who stood out above all the others was their ADC Lin “Lwx” Wei-Xiang. Their star carry went a combined 23/10/25 for a ridiculous KDA of 4.5. Although he was outshone by his mid laner Doinb during the tiebreaker match, Lwx was the rock for his team to lean on during their first three games of the day.

Stock down

Minor regions

Looking at the two teams that did not advance to the quarterfinal round, they share the distinct characteristic of coming from two regions that are vying to be among the big boys club. J-Team, of the soon-to-be-defunct LMS, finished third in Group B. GAM Esports, the number one team from the VCS, finished in last place.

Although it’s not shocking that teams from the lower-level regions weren’t crushing, it certainly doesn’t bode well for these up-and-coming regions to have them underperform this badly in a group that most people thought was up for grabs. For the LMS, this will likely be the fourth consecutive year that they don’t have a team advance out of the group stage. Only AHQ and Hong Kong Attitude remain from the region, both of whom enter the second round robin with 0-3 records.

But this might be even worse for the VCS, whose summer runner-up, Lowkey, was eliminated in play-ins, and whose summer champion, GAM, didn’t win a single game in the group stage. Such struggles for a region that was lauded and had two teams in the group stage last year is concerning.

GAM Esports

Speaking of GAM Esports, there might not be a team that was more disappointing during this Worlds that GAM. Even though they were ranked #12 in my initial rankings (and I did correctly rate Splyce and FPX as the two strongest teams in this group), I didn’t think there was that big a gap between their level of play and that of the teams like J-Team ranked (#13) and Splyce (#11).

Next. Why FPX will (or won't) win Worlds. dark

Instead, GAM laid a massive egg in this tournament, going 0-6 and never really being competitive until their last game against Splyce. There, they started showing some of that aggressiveness and jumped out to an early lead. Unfortunately, late-game macro decisions around Baron lost them the game, but if GAM had played with that level of early aggression, they would have put up a better showing in the rest of those games they got embarrassed in.

The League of Legends World Championship resumes tomorrow with the final games for Group A.

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